Associated Branch Pilots

For 170 years, the San Francisco Bar Pilots have been navigating the world’s largest ships through some of North America’s most difficult waterways. These state and federally-licensed master mariners are highly-specialized ship captains who rely on navigational experience, ship-handling skills, and local knowledge to transport more than $1.2 billion in goods to and from 200 Bay Area ports, docks, and berths every day. This critical service protects more than 1,000 miles of fragile coastline...

Welcome to another exciting episode of A Spotlight to Panama! This week, we dive into the intricate operations of the Panama Canal with Carlos Mata, a Tugboat Captain with the Panama Canal Authority. The Panama Canal is a marvel of global engineering, requiring precise and coordinated efforts to ensure smooth transit for ships from around the world. Tugboats play a critical role in this process, and today, Captain Mata gives us an inside look at what it takes to keep this maritime artery...

By the end of this year, our sea pilots are set to have undertaken a record number of pilotage acts. The total number is set to exceed 10,700, with almost 99% of the acts completed without delay.

Article by Seyed Behbood Issa-Zadeh & Claudia Lizette Garay-Rondero

For 174 years, the San Francisco Bar Pilots have been safely navigating the world’s largest ships through some of North America’s most challenging waterways.

Between 2005 and 2018, the TSB received reports of 26 girding situations resulting in 21 capsizings. Girding occurs when a vessel is pulled broadside by a towline force and is unable to manoeuver out of this position. The TSB created this video to illustrate the factors leading to girding and the recovery methods.
The TSB would like to thank Ledcor Resources and Transportation Inc. for use of simulator training images in the girding video. We would also like to acknowledge the U.S....

Here’s some cool video footage we captured of the Cork Pilots in their Interceptor 48 pilot boat ‘Failte’ undertaking pilot transfers off Cork Harbour during the recent days of strong SE gales. Roches Point lighthouse recorded 50kts of wind on the 13th as the Cosco bulk carrier passed and the Cork wave buoy 2nm off the harbour entrance recorded waves to 6.7m at the time. The pilot boat coxwain managed to get alongside and safely disembark the pilot despite the challenging sea state....

The purpose of this quantitative, ex post facto study was to assess P-J fit theory by examining the relationship between personality traits, as measured by Jackson’s (1984) PRF-E, and selection for a maritime pilot job.

Case Study: An investigation into whether Port of Melbourne and major port user, ExxonMobil, could bring deeper drafted vessels into the channel.

With the increasing accuracy and reliability of navigational receivers, this part of the video module will try to establish a better understanding of the mathematical definition of the Earth’s surface and mapping of this curved shape onto a plane surface. Chart Projections and Chart Accuracy https://youtu.be/kOaWimnAN-U Principle Used For Creating Electronic Charts https://youtu.be/xY_MBubhUFs Display of Electronic Charts https://youtu.be/qnoFO0T-cLo Route Planning With ECDIS https://...