On 30 September 2026 the Gothenburg District Court (Göteborgs tingsrätt) convicted both the master and the state pilot of the Norwegian cargo ship Misje Verde. In July their ship ran down a small motorboat on Hakefjorden, north of Gothenburg. Two people died and two were seriously injured.

Both men were found guilty of negligence in maritime traffic, causing death through negligence on two counts, and causing bodily injury on two counts. Each received a conditional sentence. The pilot was also fined.

A large part of the judgment deals with how responsibility is divided between the master and the pilot. A pilot is normally treated as an adviser to the master. Here the court found that by taking over the steering and the navigation, the pilot had also taken on responsibility for keeping a lookout and avoiding other vessels.

Misje Verde is a Norwegian general cargo ship, almost 90 metres long. On the evening of 28 July 2026 she left Uddevalla at around 19:00, bound for a port in Norway. Her route took her south through the archipelago and out to sea via Hakefjorden, a busy fairway between the islands of Katten and Lövön.

Two leisure boats were heading the same way that evening, towards Lycke harbour. Elsa had suffered engine trouble during the day and had at times been towed. Doris, a 7 to 8 metre cabin motorboat, stayed behind Elsa so she could help if needed. On board Doris were a family of four: two parents and two children.

Misje Verde was making about 12 knots, the leisure boats about 7. The cargo ship was therefore slowly catching up with them from behind on almost the same course. At about 21:27 Misje Verde struck Doris. The court established this from the ship's AIS track (the automatic position signal every commercial ship broadcasts), the GPS track in a navigation app on a phone aboard Doris, and paint from the ship's bulbous bow found in the damage on Doris's port side.

Doris sank on the spot. The mother and one child drowned. The father and the other child were rescued in a life-threatening state of hypothermia. They spent six and eight days in hospital, the child partly in intensive care on a ventilator.

The court found that it was still daylight, as the sun had not yet set. There were passing rain showers, but visibility was not reduced to a degree that required special measures. Doris's stern light was switched on and still worked when it was tested afterwards.

Only two people were on the bridge during the passage: the master and a pilot from the Swedish Maritime Administration (Sjöfartsverket). A pilot is a local expert who boards a ship to guide it through waters the crew may not know well.

Both men were experienced. The master, a Russian national, had been at sea for 30 years and in command for 20, mostly on small coastal cargo ships. He had sailed to Uddevalla three or four times. The pilot trained as a master mariner at Chalmers, commanded ocean-going tankers, and had been a pilot since 2020. He had piloted Misje Verde twice before, the last time a day or so earlier on the way into Uddevalla.

The master took the ship off the quay himself. Shortly before the Uddevalla bridge the pilot offered to take over the steering, and the master accepted. The pilot then conned the ship, meaning he gave the steering and speed commands himself, by hand or through the autopilot, until he disembarked near Marstrand. In Swedish waters it is common for a pilot to do this on ships of this size.

A few minutes later the master asked whether he could do some paperwork while the pilot steered. The pilot did not object. For most of the voyage the master sat at the office desk on the starboard side of the bridge. He went out on the bridge wings to smoke now and then and moved around the bridge. He did not look at the radar screens after the ship had left Uddevalla.

The pilot spent most of his time in the middle of the bridge, beside the controls and the radar displays. Besides steering, he had other tasks: planning the route past Dyrön, reporting by radio to the traffic centre VTS Marstrand, making two course changes, correcting for a three-degree compass error, and calling a taxi for himself in Marstrand.

Two details made it harder to see ahead from the bridge. An excavator was mounted on the foredeck, and the ship was trimmed by the stern, sitting deeper in the water aft than forward, which raises the bow. The shipping company's instructions said that with the excavator on board the ship must not sail with a stern trim, because the view would be too restricted. Both men knew about the trim, but according to the court neither knew it was against the company's instructions.

Asked who was keeping the lookout, the two men gave different answers. The master said they both were, and that the pilot was watching the radar in particular. The pilot said the master was the lookout, because he was the only other person on the bridge.

Misje Verde had two radars. The X-band radar gives a sharper picture and is well suited to narrow archipelago waters. The S-band radar copes better with rain and sea clutter. The pilot used the X-band radar, which was next to the autopilot. Nobody used the S-band display.

Both men said they never saw the two leisure boats. The ship's voyage data recorder (VDR), the maritime equivalent of an aircraft's black box, tells a different story. The prosecutor showed the court roughly 15 minutes of saved radar images from before the collision.

The pilot said he adjusted the clutter in two steps and judged it was not set too high, because he could still see a buoy and an anchored ship. He also pointed out that the screen showed a lot of other information over the targets, including course lines, speed vectors, the planned route and rain clutter.

The court noted one limitation. The VDR saves a new radar image only every 15 seconds, while the screens on the bridge update much more often. The recordings therefore do not show exactly what the officers saw. Even so, the court concluded that the boats must have been visible on both radars several times during those 15 minutes.

The charge was negligence in maritime traffic under the Swedish Maritime Code (sjölagen, chapter 20, section 2). Anyone who fails to show good seamanship to prevent an accident at sea is guilty of this offence, unless the negligence is minor. The law does not define good seamanship. Courts look to the detailed rules for navigating ships, above all the international collision regulations known as COLREG. Two of those rules were central.

Rule 5, lookout. Every vessel must at all times keep a proper lookout by sight and hearing, and by every other available means, so the situation and the risk of collision can be fully assessed. The court described this as a core rule. Radar counts as one of those means. Swedish case law has not accepted blind spots caused by the ship's own design or a raised bow as an excuse.

Rule 13, overtaking. A vessel coming up on another from more than 22.5 degrees abaft her beam, in plain terms from behind, is the overtaking vessel and must keep out of the way. Misje Verde was overtaking Doris.

The master's defence argued that Hakefjorden is a narrow channel under Rule 9, where small boats must not get in the way of large ships that can only navigate safely within the channel. A Swedish appeal court ruled in an earlier case (“Helga”, 1997) that Hakefjorden is a narrow channel. The district court did not need to decide the point. In its view, keeping watch on what lies straight ahead on your own course matters whether or not the channel is narrow.

Under Swedish law, the master must make sure the ship is navigated and handled in line with good seamanship (sjölagen, chapter 6, section 2). Taking a pilot on board does not change that. If the pilot makes a mistake, the master cannot shift the blame. The master's responsibility for the ship cannot be handed over.

The pilot's role is set out in the Swedish pilotage ordinance. The pilot is responsible for the pilotage itself: he must specify and monitor the navigation and manoeuvring needed to bring the ship through safely. Transport Agency regulations add that the pilot, the master and the bridge team must keep each other informed and work together.

Older case law and legal writing have treated the pilot's criminal liability as limited, because the pilot is formally subordinate to the master. Two earlier rulings illustrate this:

The court also drew on a 1967 article by the maritime law professor Hugo Tiberg. Tiberg argued that a pilot answers for what the law requires of him and also for what he takes on. When a pilot takes over the conduct of the ship, which is normal in practice, he also takes on tasks such as avoiding other vessels. He can avoid this only by saying clearly that he does not accept those tasks. The master keeps his duty to supervise, and that duty grows the more the pilot takes on. If both fail, both can be held criminally liable.

The pilot took on more than pilotage. The court pointed to four facts. The pilot took over the steering and kept it until he left the ship. He raised no objection when the master asked to do paperwork. He stood at the controls and radar while the master sat at a desk to one side. No other crew member was on the bridge to assist. The pilot had informed the master of some of his actions and asked a few questions, which pointed the other way. Weighing it all, the court concluded that the pilot had taken responsibility for conducting the ship, beyond what the pilotage ordinance requires. His duty of good seamanship widened accordingly.

The master's responsibility did not shrink. His overall responsibility follows from the law. Because the pilot took on more than usual, the master's duty to supervise him actually increased.

No one kept a proper lookout. Each man did some lookout work. The master moved around the bridge and went out on the bridge wings, but he did not use the radar. The pilot checked the X-band radar and moved around to see past the excavator, but he was also steering, planning the route, and talking to VTS. Neither of them kept the continuous and careful lookout Rule 5 requires. They never agreed who was the lookout, and nobody else on the bridge could do it. The court noted that Swedish watchkeeping rules, based on the international STCW convention, say a lookout should do nothing else and that the lookout and helmsman roles should be kept separate.

Each man failed in his own way. The master answers for the confusion over the lookout, because as master he had to see that one was kept. The pilot, standing at the centre of the bridge, must have realised the master was not keeping a full lookout from his desk. Given the tasks he had taken on, he should have told the master he could not carry them out safely without a proper lookout. He did not.

The poor view made radar more important. The court accepted that the excavator, the stern trim, the dark blue canopy on Doris, and rain on the water may have made the boat hard to see by eye, though not impossible. Both men knew about the excavator and the trim. As experienced seafarers, they should have understood that this made it even more necessary to use the radar for the lookout.

The collision could have been avoided. The boats were directly on the ship's course and showed on radar as two dots moving together, which made them easier to tell apart from rain clutter. With a proper lookout, Doris would have been seen, and the collision avoided. Because the lookout failed, the overtaking rule could not be followed either. That neither man saw Doris did not stop Rule 13 from applying.

The negligence was not minor. Both men were trained, experienced and familiar with these waters. It was a summer evening in the archipelago, when small boats should be expected in the fairway. Both men were therefore convicted of negligence in maritime traffic. The same negligence caused the two deaths and the two injuries, and they could have foreseen such consequences. They were convicted on those counts as well.

The court set the penalty value for each man at four months' imprisonment. It saw no reason to treat the pilot differently from the master. Neither had a criminal record, and the court found no reason to expect either to reoffend. Both therefore received a conditional sentence (villkorlig dom), a Swedish sentence served without prison as long as the person does not reoffend during a two-year probation period.

Euro and dollar amounts are converted at the European Central Bank reference rates for 30 September 2026, the day of the judgment: €1 = SEK 11.3310 = $1.1355 (ECB). Figures are rounded to the nearest whole euro or dollar.

A conditional sentence is normally combined with a fine. The master received no fine because he had already spent six weeks in custody, from 30 July until the court released him on 11 September. The size of a Swedish day-fine depends on the person's income.

The state paid the defence lawyers and the victims' lawyer a total of about SEK 497,000 (about €43,900 / $49,850). Based on their incomes, the master would normally have repaid 80 percent of his share and the pilot all of his. The court found that full repayment on top of the sentence would be an unreasonably harsh reaction to the offence, and reduced it to SEK 75,000 each.

The judgment is not yet final. Both men and the prosecutor can appeal to the Court of Appeal for Western Sweden (Hovrätten för Västra Sverige) until 21 October 2026. The appeal court first decides whether to hear the case at all.

If it proceeds, the judgment will set a precedent for how Swedish courts divide responsibility on a piloted ship. The court reasoned that a pilot who takes over the conduct of the ship also takes on responsibility for lookout and collision avoidance, and that a master who hands over the conn must supervise all the more closely.

Once again: this is a summary of the district court's judgment, not my own assessment of the incident.

Göteborgs tingsrätt, Avdelning 6, judgment of 30 September 2026, case B 14878-26. Copies can be requested from the court:

goteborgstingsratt.domstol.se