Assistant Harbour Master – Relief Pilot. – Wisbech UK

There were some astonishing pictures in the press some weeks ago of a Royal Marine employing a jetpack to launch himself from a RIB to land on the deck of a ship with extraordinary precision. You cannot imagine that it would be a feasible proposition to equip pilots with such a device, but it did cross my mind after reading a horrible catalogue of disgraceful seamanship and poor design exhibited in what ought to be the simple matter of keeping pilots safe as they board and leave ships.

Here’s a nice video of the recent sea trials with ‘South Esk’, a new Interceptor 48 pilot boat for the Montrose Port Authority in Scotland. It was fairly rough during our sea trial days with a fair bit of wind, and although it was touch and go flying the drone, we managed to capture some wonderful video of her and Ederra 7 at the entrance to Cork Harbour in a gale.

Lyttelton Port Company Limited (LPC) are the operators of the largest Port in the South Island of New Zealand, have chosenPFMBlue´s GP16B to be installed.

Grounding container vessel Shahraz and MV Samudra Sakti in Singapore Strait May 10 2020
What happened?
MV "Shahraz" and MV "Samudra Sakti I" had run aground to the shallow Batu Berhanti in the Indonesian territorial waters within 6 minutes, which is surveyed with minimum water depths of 8.3 m in the northern part and up to 0.5 m in the southern part . It is located south of TSS Singapore Strait’s eastbound traffic lane.
A chain of events which must be described as extra ordinary rarity....

Issue no. 332 of "The Pilot by United Kingdom Maritime Pilots´ Association is out now.

A monster wave of 30m was measured at 03:00 am by the Marine Institute M6 buoy located 200nm West of Ireland.

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!

Stainsby is a 16m GRP Pilot Boat designed by Camarc and built by Holyhead Marine.