A Day in the life of a Port Pilot

Impressive pictures from Colombia: MV Malcom arrived on June the 20th carrying the first wind generators for the "Guajira 1" project.

• The Dutch pilots offer a contribution to the safe and quick pilotage of ships to and from the Dutch ports and the Flemish ports on the Scheldt River. Each year, they assist about 100,000 ships. • Loodswezen aims to play a leading role by excelling in terms of service provision, training and education, efficiency, technology and customer satisfaction. • The highly-trained maritime pilots and other staff members work closely together to ensure safe and efficient operations in all...

Malta Maritime Pilots

Time Lapse Video: An inbound LNG carrier arrives at the Port of Rotterdam. At sea, in the Eurogeul channel, two maritime pilots have joined the vessel. Between the breakwaters four harbour tugs (Smit Harbour Towage) make fast to assist her manoeuvre. In the Beerkanaal channel the LNG carrier is stopped and swung before entering the Nijlhaven harbour. While approaching LNG Jetty 1 the ship's mooring lines are taken ashore by mooringboats (Koninklijke Roeiers Vereeniging Eendracht).
Pilot...

Experiences from Australia: No two days are the same for a marine pilot in a busy port such as Esperance, but Mr MacAdie wouldn’t have it any other way.

Unberthing NBCT ,Penang, Malaysia.
#marinepilot #shiphandling #manoeuvre #port #seaman #tug #ship #marine

On a windy morning, the incoming bulker HEIDE OLDENDORFF transited the Eurochannel underway to the EECV jetty west side, at 18 meters draft. With the assistance of FairPlay Towage, KRVE linesmen, and the excellent crew of the ship, we had. Very pleasant voyage.

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.

The “DangerousLadder” page on facebook is nowadays a very well known community in the maritime world. It is steadily growing towards 3000 members, which will be the next milestone membership-wise.

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.