Assistant Harbour Master

Delaware River Pilot Boat Cape Henlopen Transfers Pilot to Cargo Ship Al Wathba - Delaware River - Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania - June 6, 2025

A more unique angle regarding freighter departures; I was able to film the routine disembarking of one of our local ship captains and officers after piloting Solina out of the harbor. This is a required procedure, as per US Maritime Laws, all international freighters must be piloted in and out of a US harbor by a US Captain. Here we have out local pilot vessel Sea Bear running up alongside the Solina to allow the two officers to depart the freighter before she heads out across Lake Superior

The individual pilot operates as part of a pilotage organisation. And, as with so many things, the whole is (much) more than the sum of the parts ...

#tugboatwilly #tuglife #tugboat #ship #shipping

Like many seafarers I have long been a keen follower of The Nautical Institute’s MARS programme, and along with many other members I listened to the recent webinar on that topic. One theme which was repeated more than once was that it is better to learn from someone else’s misfortune rather than have it happen to you. Having personally been involved in two near misses resulting from unsafe pilot transfer arrangements in a relatively short space of time, I asked how experiences and knowledge specifically about pilot ladder safety could best be promulgated to avoid repeating common accidents or near misses.

Impressions of the year 2021.

Pilot Boat
Efferent Savior from the album The Great Attractor
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/robert-day/1805196482
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07CKMTKJ1?ccs_id=d7e47f91-4f74-4a77-9696-65fcae95e861

We bid farewell to our Otaru marine pilot just outside Otaru Harbor, Japan. The crew of the pilot tug were particularly fastidious about not marking up the side of the Viking Orion during the operations, spraying the interface with water, even though that might have made the transfer more hazardous for the pilot. From the Viking Orion, October 2024

To monitor the vessel’s progress, the pilot had set up his portable pilotage unit (PPU). He had connected the rate-of-turn generator to the vessel’s pilot plug and had set a variable range marker on the radar with a radius of 0.5 nm.