Incident on 31 January 2020 : A rope of the pilot ladder breaks. Pilot could still reach the vessel

From that moment on I have been keeping a tally of the non compliant boarding arrangements I see in front of me on a daily base, and off course I participate in the annual safety campaign, conducted by IMPA each october.

A 35-year-old male sea pilot of the Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA) fell into the sea from a crude oil tanker near the N Shed Wharf in the port of Durban. A rope of the pilot ladder is said to have snapped for an undetermined reason when the man disembarked while leaving the crude oil tanker which was leaving the port of Durban.

Before you, you see my third article on pilot boarding arrangements. After my two previous articles ‘1000 ways to secure a pilot ladder’ and ‘1000 ladders around’, I have received a lot of feedback and also questions to get deeper into the matter of combinations and embarkation platforms.

If you wrote an interesting article yourself or made great photos or video recordings that you would like to make permanently accessible to the large Marine Pilots Community here, send it to us!

Safehaven Marine of Ireland will soon deliver a new pilot boat to Williams Shipping based in Southampton, UK.

A handy and simple tool to determine in a minimum time what is really needed as tug assistance, is the Bollard Pull Calculator which calculates in an approximate way the total required tug power for ships in various conditions of wind and current. This tool can be loaded as an app on the smart phone.

On May 11, 2020, in the early morning hours, the news went around the world that two serious marine casualties occurred in sector 8 of Singapore Street within 6 minutes.

Welcome to our next episode of:- Pilot Talks... Pilot ki Baat..
Hosted by Capt. Vijay Sharma, Master Mariner @capt.vijay