MARITIME NEWS | US: docking pilot to hang it up after 40 years

He’s been handling some of the biggest machines on the planet for the last 40 years, and they keep getting bigger.

Coleman Summersett, 73, is a docking pilot. He maneuvers those mammoth cargo ships in and out of the Charleston port, a job that requires concentration and a delicate touch. There’s no room for error. Once these behemoths start moving, it takes a while to change direction.

 

The job also requires some physical strength and agility. Summersett hops onto a tugboat to meet a ship coming into harbor, then climbs a ladder three stories above the water onto the deck.

Once on deck, the bridge is another eight stories up in the air. Some ships have elevators to get there. Others require another climb.

Summersett has been working tugboats and ships since he was 15 years old, 58 years ago. He loves it, but he’s starting to feel his age. He is retiring at the end of the month.

“The ships are getting higher and higher,” he said. “I keep telling myself I’m as good as I ever was, but … I know I’m not. You hate to admit defeat, you know. Everybody gets old, I guess.”

It’s hard to tell it from looking at him. He jumps on and off a tugboat like a cat.

There’s no mandatory retirement age for a docking pilot. It was up to Summersett to hang up his hat at McAllister Towing, according to Vice President and General Manager Steve Kicklighter.

“Coleman is an amazing specimen,” Kicklighter said. “To be able to do what he does and go up the sides of the ships like he does on those ladders at (almost) 74 years old is amazing. I mean, you shake his hand, there’s still a lot of strength left there, you know what I mean?”

McAllister is one of two companies that provide tugboats and docking pilots for ships coming in and out of Charleston (Moran is the other one). The docking pilots work with the tugboats to get the ships docked or pointed out to sea.

Ships come into and leave the Charleston ports 24 hours a day. Summersett works 24-hour shifts, a day on and a day off. Eventually, the water becomes your life — the hum of the engines, the smell of the salt air mixed with diesel fuel, the rocking of the waves.

“When you got a job that you like to do, that’s wonderful,” Summersett said. “I’ve always liked being out in the open, out there in the hot sun and the wind and the thunder and the lightning. Every job is different. You have different crews and you have different boats, so there’s always a little challenge there.”

On the other hand, you’ve got to be willing to forgo a normal schedule.

“I tell all the young people that come in looking for a job all the time that it’s not really a job; it’s a lifestyle,” said Kicklighter, who has been working the water for 34 years.

“Honestly, there’s a lot of things you don’t get to do with this job. At 3 in the morning ships are coming and you got to get up and do it,” he said. “You miss a lot of stuff. You miss soccer games. You miss the ballet. Having said that, it gets to the point where that stuff starts to get irrelevant to you. You know you got to go do your job. It’s what you do.”

On the average, 11 ships come into or leave the harbor every day, S.C. Ports Authority spokesman Byron Miller said.

In the 1950s, when Summersett started working on a tugboat, ships would be in port days at a time. Now, a ship can unload, reload and leave in a day.

Ships didn’t start packing their loads into containers for quick transport until the mid-1960s.

Now, a single ship can hold enough containers to keep a fleet of trucks busy hauling them off. For instance, Maersk’s 958-foot-long Missouri, one of the ships that Summerset guided out to sea last week, can carry 4,824 containers.

“These guys have seen so much change, and the technology has changed dramatically,” Miller said. “The ships are getting larger and larger, because we want it cheaper and faster.”

Despite the demands of his job, Summersett has been married to the same woman, Nancy, for 47 years. They have a daughter, Samantha, who lives with them in Awendaw on a farm that includes horses and cows.

He plans to stay outside after he retires.

“I’m going to fish and hunt, a whole lot of it,” he said.

Source: http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/aug/21/harbor-pilot-to-hang-it-up/

YEAR OF THE SEAFARER | Looking forward to a golden age in pilotage

Helen Kelly | LLOYD’S LIST

STEVE Pelecanos jokes that he only became a pilot to enjoy the ‘retirement-like’ lifestyle.

In 1970s Australia, with a young family to support, the shore-based vocation must have seemed halcyon compared with its more capricious ocean-going alternative. But a quiet life was not to be for this outspoken Queenslander with a fire in his belly in an industry in need dire of modernisation. “Our obligation as a pilot is to look forward,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are many people in shipping that gaze in the rear view mirror and look backwards to a ‘golden age’ that is past.”

His most recent campaign is to fix the broken system of pilotage on the Great Barrier Reef. It is a system inherited from a previous federal government, which believed greater competition between pilots would drive costs down at some of Australia’s biggest trading ports.

GROUNDING ON THE REEF | Reef safety in perspective

From Lloyd’s List

THE grounding of the Shen Neng 1 has become a metaphor for many things, including: the developing world and its hunger for commodities; the new dominance of China in world trade; our global disregard for natural resources in the face of economic development; and the new global capitalism versus the need to preserve our world.

The common thread running through all of this is China and the implicit demands it is placing on nations that benefit from trading with it. But while these broad-brush ideas are satisfying, sometimes we neglect the details, where the Devil resides.

Take the name Cosco, which has appeared in almost all the dispatches about the Shen Neng 1 since it was grounded 10 days ago. The ship is owned by Shenzhen Energy Transport. Cosco’s only affiliation is part ownership in the company that manages the vessel — that is, not an owner at all.

But the symbolic neatness of having Cosco be the erring party was too sweet. Cosco, a state-owned giant, is a corollary for Chinese shipping power. Journalists had time to sort out the details, but why bother with inconvenient fact when hamfisted metaphor will do?

A little perspective is needed, too, on the charges of recklessness in navigation, which are still under investigation. Whatever the outcome, it was one vessel in one particular circumstance, not a symbol of universal disregard or imperilment by China — which has since apologised — of a natural wonder.

Australia, laudably, understands the value and beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, and its citizens treasure this resource. But the reef itself has long been vulnerable to problems hampering pilotage. The piloting system was described by Australasian Marine Pilots Institute president Peter Liley as a flawed model.

The model was introduced in 1993 during a time, according to Capt Liley, “when economic rationalism was in its heyday and competition was thought to be a panacea to all our ills”. But the competitive structure that evolved does not lend itself to transparency, supervision or control, nor does it promote a culture of safety.

Truly protecting the reef will involve a considered look at all the problems, and less reliance on easy finger pointing.

Remarks

I could not agree more. It was time someone came forward and said, “do not feed the hype, please.”

PILOTAGE | Sao Paulo State Pilots (Brazil)

This video is about Sao Paulo State Pilots, the association which gathers the pilots who work at Santos, the largest port in Brazil, and it gives a fairly good idea of their work.

SAFETY | Pilotage in question(s)

What we needn't have here is failure to communicate...

Some years ago, I came across a publication of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) named “A Safety Study of the Operational Relationship between Ship Masters/Watchkeeping Officers and Marine Pilots.” 

One of the parts of the study I considered the most interesting was the questionnaire that helped the TSB develop a more accurate understanding of the interaction among bridge personnel in pilotage waters. Its 20 questions turn out to be, in my opinion, very good and direct guidelines for those who are willing to improve safety of navigation and to evaluate pilots and pilotage services.

More recently, I realized that many of the questions could be rephrased and presented as parts of a checklist that could help pilots, masters and officers focus on what is essential for the success of the transit. As a result, I developed a basis for an after-the-pilotage checklist, to help assess the quality of the job just performed; however, I feel many of questions are also adequate for use during pilotage passages, in that they may give a head startand a guidance to the essential dialogue between the ‘ship’ and the pilot.

This is in no way a finished work. Comments are welcome!

Here are the questions:

1. Did the master or officer of the watch inform the pilot of the manoeuvring characteristics of the vessel for its present condition?
2. Did the pilot inform the master of local conditions which might affect the pilotage passage?
3. Did the pilot inform the master of his manoeuvring plan for the vessel?
4. Did the master ensure that the pilot’s passage plan and local conditions were suitable for the vessel?
5. Did the officer of the watch monitor the vessel’s movement while the pilot had the conduct of the vessel?
6. Did the officer of the watch plot the vessel’s position regularly while the pilot had the conduct of the vessel?
7. Did the pilot assist the officer of the watch in the monitoring of the vessel’s movements?
8. Did the pilot made sure his orders were understood and acknowledged by the officer of the watch?
9. If the officer of the watch became unsure of the pilot’s intentions, does he ask for clarification?
10. Were informative hand-over briefings, master to pilot, pilot to pilot, and pilot to master carried out?
11. Were communications between the pilot and bridge personnel effective?
12. Did the pilot, the master and the officer of the watch work as a team in the conduct of the vessel?
13. Did language barriers make it difficult to establish an effective exchange of information between with the pilot and the master and officer of the watch?
14. Did the pilot offer all necessary information regarding pilotage and manoeuvring plans for the vessel?
15. Did the pilot ensure that relevant communications with traffic control centres or other vessels were conveyed to the master?
16. Was the master apprised by the pilot of all safety communications regarding the navigation of the vessel in pilotage waters?