Ship Report Podcasts: Pilot boats - a special breed

Early morning in the North Sea, three-metre swells, freezing winds, and a burst of hail hammering the deck - perfect conditions for another day with the Port of Tyne pilotage.
In this video we take two pilots out to the Aquamarine Ace onboard the pilot boat Collingwood, pushing through seriously choppy water on a bitter, stormy morning. You’ll see the full run out to sea, the swell hitting the bow, the hailstorm rolling in, and the precision teamwork that gets the pilots safely across in...

Gustavus, AK – Armstrong Marine USA of Port Angeles, WA recently delivered the 45’8” x 16’ semi-displacement catamaran Serac to the National Park Service (NPS) for use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

Here’s a nice little video of the sea trials of ‘Svitzer Oued Martil’ including some cool on-board 360 camera footage of her going through some pretty big breaking seas during rough weather testing, and some nice foggy day drone footage and trials alongside the Brittany Ferry ‘Armorique’.

CMA CGM Columbia container ship arriving from Shekou port, and transiting thru Hong Kong, destination Singapore
a rare capture of TWO harbour pilots boats to carry two pilots leaving off the container ship
Columbia is only a 300m long 48m wide vessel, only 9200 TEU capacity but it has separate bridge tower and chimney. The ship was built in 2015.

How do marine pilots work? Example: Bringing a bulkcarrier alongside to „Hansaport“ in Hamburg. Here the tugboats „Prompt“, „Resolute“ and „Bulldog“ are involved. The master has to rely on the pilot. One reason is, that he can‘t know how to deal with these tugs. A maneuver like this is only safe, when the pilot has a lot of practical experience. A master who is doing a maneuver like this only about once or twice a month and each time with tugs he doesn’t know in areas he hasn’t been to...

The joint House and Senate Commerce committees Monday joined 87 pilots and Board of Louisiana River Pilot Review and Oversight in rejecting the proposed measures on the argument that they would negatively affect minorities trying to break into river piloting.

Understanding the fundamentals of the pivot point is highly required for understanding the alteration of the courses. Pivot point is an imaginary point on the vessel which turns on a circular path on the perimeter of vessel’s turning circle when the vessel makes a turn. The knowledge about the position of the pivot point in a manoeuvring situation provides the ship handler with the information on the geometry of motion of the ship.

iTalk conducted by IME(I) Mumbai Branch. The speaker was Ms Reshma Nilofer, Sector Pilotage Services