Pilots

Having recently conned a vessel over the Columbia River Bar, I am frequently asked if I took on a pilot to assist in the transit. The questioner is often surprised to that I “acted as” pilot, but there is nothing particularly mysterious about being a pilot. “Pilotage” is simply navigation using local knowledge. A person who does this is a “pilot.” On the other hand, when we refer to a pilot in the modern maritime industry, we are probably talking about a professional mariner who specializes in guiding ships through a particular area. It is the difficulty some of these areas present — like the Columbia River Bar or, in a different way, the Panama Canal — that lend a mystique to the job.

The only real qualification you need to be a pilot is local knowledge that a captain from outside the area — called a “stranger” — doesn’t possess. And that knowledge can be very localized indeed. For a time early in the decade, the port at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico required ships to take on a harbor pilot. He came out in a water taxi, shook hands with the captain, and sipped a cup of coffee while he yelled at charter fishermen to get out of the way. The whole trip was a straight line less than half a mile long from the “pilot station” to the dock. Between the short trip and the yelling, he didn’t even have time to finish his cup of coffee. Compare that to the Chesapeake Bay pilots, who have to learn 200 miles of some of the most traveled waterway in the Americas. Pilots who have to deal with large areas may work in teams, with one on the bridge while the other one sleeps.

In the United States, most areas require a pilot to have a Coast Guard license and hold a First Class Pilot certification for the area in which he — or in many instances she — will be sailing. This usually means logging a certain number of trips through the area and then taking a written test, which includes hand drawing relevant landmarks, aids to navigation, danger areas, and so on on a blank chart.

Pilots frequently have several decades of experience at sea — the average age of a Puget Sound pilot is 55 years old. While this experience is valuable, it can also be challenging for middle-aged and older pilots to meet the physical demands of the job, like climbing up a long pilot ladder after jumping onto it from the deck of a pilot boat (like one picture above, stationed in Astoria, Oregon near the mouth of the Columbia River) heaving in the surf. Pilots also face the same medical issues we all do as we get older, including ever more crowded medicine cabinets. In fact, use of medications by the pilot on the Cosco Busan (see my post May 30 post) was taking were cited as a root cause of resulting oil spill.

For Professional Mariner's report on Chesapeake pilot Lynn Diebert's 2007 death in the line of duty, see http://www.professionalmariner.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=420C4D38DC9C4E3A903315CDDC65AD72&nm=Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=3FC8BCC0CD7A4099843C125B2F035226For The journal's report report on the 2006 death of Columbia River Bar pilot Kevin Murray, see http://www.professionalmariner.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=420C4D38DC9C4E3A903315CDDC65AD72&nm=Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=B669C6C389B94734BA193E3BD9EC8DFE

Filed from M/V Spirit of Discovery in Portland, Oregon

Halibut Wars

“Charter fishing is organized crime,” reads a bumper sticker on a car in Sitka, Alaska. Even more to the point is a sign on a door in Pelican: “I’d rather have a daughter in the whorehouse than a son charter fishing.” Strong words, and they are an indication of the stakes over who may fish where and when, and how much they can catch.

At odds are commercial fishermen and sport fishing charter operators. In recent years the commercial fishing industry in Alaska has changed a lot. Where commercial fisherman once they caught as many of a given fish as they could and sold them at the best price possible, concerns about overfishing and abuses by the big seafood companies led to the institution of the IFQ (Individual Fishing Quota) system in 1995. Now, each permit holder is legally able to catch up to a certain limit and sell it at a set price. As a result this system, the number of boats engaged in commercial fishing dropped dramatically and the number of fisherman working at sea has dropped as well.

But are sport fishing charter operators also commercial fishermen covered under this system? They say no, and point out that low limits on the number of fish (especially halibut) they can keep adversely effects their business by keeping customers away, sending them off to parts of the world without such limits. The commercial fisherman protest that the point of the quota system was to help keep the fishery sustainable, that their allowable catch of halibut in particular has dropped 50 percent in the last two years, and that charter fishermen are asking for more than their fair share of a limited resource.

This is not the first time there has been a dustup over fishing rights in or near Alaska. Back in 1997, Canadian fisherman in Price Rupert, British Columbia surrounded the Alaska state ferry Malaspina, keeping it from leaving in protest over what they saw as US and Alaskan incursions onto their fishing grounds. More recent concerns about sustainability have lead to fights between fisherman and farmers, fishermen and loggers, and even a war of resolutions over the breaching of Snake River dams between the city councils of Pasco, Washington and Seattle.

Back from Shore Leave

Reader Seasick Stephanie writes:

"There hasn't been an update to The Misunderstood Mariner since August 
1. What's the deal? Some of us have no lives and boring jobs and look 
forward to interesting reading. Have a little sympathy, jeez!"

Never let it be said that The Misunderstood Mariner is without 
compassion. And I apologize to Seasick Stephanie, Raingear Renee and 
all the other readers who noted my abrupt hiatus.

I have been working on a couple of other projects, traveling for fun, 
and even going to sea a bit. But I haven't been a total malingerer. I 
have several posts nearly in the can, requiring only some fact 
checking and proof reading. I have enough further ideas to last the 
rest of the year. And that's assuming I don't run across something I 
just have to address in the news, on the Internet, or in everyday 
conversation.

If you have any specific questions you'd like answered, leave me a 
Comment below or email me at captrobearle@yahoo.com. I'll address them 
in a near-future post. Otherwise, look for my next regular post on 
September 5th.

Filed from M/Y Safari Explorer in Takatz Bay, Baranof Island, Alaska.

Mariners in Review: Steaming to Bamboola: The World Of A Tramp Freighter

Christopher Buckley, son of National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., is best known in his own right as the author of humorous political novels like Thank You For Smoking. In 1982's Steaming To Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Steamer, Buckley recounts a 1979 trip aboard the tramp steamer Columbianna, where he served as a merchant seaman.

Buckley paints the crew of the Columbianna with spot-on yet hilarious strokes. The captain and chief engineer who hate each other, the deckhands with their minor rebellions, the room steward who gets a little too nosy are all familiar types to merchant mariners. In fact, several reviewers of Steaming to Bamboola claim they knew one or two of these guys. Even if they didn't, they knew someone like them.

A lot of Steaming to Bamboola describes a world now long gone, of tramp steamers and strong maritime unions and ships that could load and unload their own cargoes. Some things never change, though, whether on clipper ships or container vessels: time is money, the weather frequently sucks, your shipmates can be hugely and disproportionately irritating. The book is mainly 200-plus pages of sea stories, some grim, some hilarious, including, I was surprised to find, the origin of an urban legend still passed from deckhand to deckhand:

Jones...could walk a cup of coffee (intended for one of the bridge officers) from the galley up the ladder to the conning tower without spilling a drop. The officers all marveled at this, and said, "Jones, how do you do it?" And Jones would say, "Shucks, I guess I was just born with sea legs, or something," and went on carrying cup of coffee without spilling a drop, and even went on to become a minor hero for it, until one day someone discovered Jones's secret. He would take a big gulp of coffee at the foot of the ladder, hold it while he scrambled up, and just before reaching he top, spit the coffee back into the mug. Jay-sus, said Higgin, was the captain in a mood when he found out about that."

There are similar helpful hints elsewhere in Steaming To Bamboola.

The book is out of print at the moment, but maybe with the success of the film version of Thank You for Smoking and a film version of Boomsday in the works, there may be demand to bring some of Buckley's older works back into print.

Similar first-hand accounts of modern merchant sailors include The Last American Sailors: A Wild Ride in the Modern Merchant Marine by Michael R. Rawlins and writer (but not professional mariner) Richard Pollak's book The Colombo Bay.

Buckley's father was an avid recreational sailor. When he died last year, Christopher wrote a touching and funny essay for the National Review called "My Old Man And The Sea." Find it at http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZGMxYjAzMTFlNDBjZTU2ZjMxY2JiYWI4NzkzMDA2MDE=. The elder Buckley himself wrote three books on sailing, the best being Atlantic High. The others are Airborne and Racing Through Paradise.

Misunderstood Mariners: Amerigo Vespucci

You learned it in high school history class: although Christopher Columbus discovered America, the continents were named for his contemporary and rival Amerigo Vespucci. Well, Columbus and Vespucci were contemporaries but pretty much everything else about that statement is wrong.

Vespucci, a Florentine by birth (although not residence), was already middle aged when he first sailed to the Americas for the King of Spain in 1499. Over the next few years he sailed on three (some sources say four) expeditions to the New World for either Spain or Portugal. He found little that hadn't been already charted and frequently had trouble finding work. Columbus was hardly threatened by Vespucci: he found him an honorable man and seems to have felt a little sorry for him. After his voyages, though, he came into his, own, being made chief of navigation for Spain. He died there in 1522.

Vespucci was not without his contributions. He charted many navigational stars that had been forgotten since the time of the Greeks. He developed a method of finding longitude that was more accurate than any other until the invention of the chronometer more than two centuries later. He is also credited with being the first to demonstrate that the Americas were not part of Asia, but an entirely different continent.

The idea that the Americas were named for Vespucci derives from the use of the word America on a world map drawn by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller in 1507. Not everyone agrees that Vespucci was the source of the word, however. Pointing out that new lands were either named for religious figures or the sponsors of the expedition doing the discovering, many point to Welshman Richard Amerike, sponsor of John Cabot's second (and only successful) voyage to America as a more likely source. This latter claim is weakened by the lack of any documents directly supporting it; on the other hand Vespucci has been accused of embellishing and even outright fictionalizing many of his exploits.

For an entertaining biography of Vespucci, see historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America. Fernandez-Armesto portrays Vespucci as a self-promoter of the highest ambition and debunks many of the myths perpetuated by Vespucci himself.

Geologist Jules Marcou first advanced the theory that America was named for the Amerrique region of Nicaragua, a gold-bearing area known to both Columbus and Vespucci. George C. Hurlbut, longtime librarian of the American Geographical Society of New York, published the definitive article on this perspective in that society's Journal in 1888. Find the complete article (for $12 fee) at http://www.jstor.org/pss/196759.

As for who "discovered" America, it is a pointless question since humans have been living in the western hemisphere for at least 12,000 years. Despite inconoclastic claims for Egyptians, Chinese, Polynesians, and others, the first modern people to colonize the Americas were the Inuits, who arrived about 1000 AD. Archaeological evidence shows Viking settlements in Newfoundland about the same time, but the Vikings pulled out relatively soon thereafter. Modern European settlement of the Americas really began with Columbus, just like you learned in high school. For a humorous and informative look at that early exploration and settlement, see Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: On The Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America.

Married At Sea, Buried At Sea

Time was, if a couple in love wanted to be married at sea, the captain of their ship enjoyed the happy privilege of performing the ceremony. That's still possible in today's increasingly regulated world, but the restrictions are much tighter than they used to be.

For a shipboard marriage to be recognized in most jurisdictions, it has to meet the requirements any land-based marriage would in that jurisdiction. For instance, if a wedding is performed in the territorial waters of a state requiring that an ordained minister perform the ceremony, the captain must be ordained in order for the marriage to be legal. Many American captains, including yours truly, are ordained for this very purpose. If the couple wants to be married on the high seas -- outside the territorial limit of any state or nation -- they must often have a civil service performed in port if they want the marriage to be recognized as legal. Some large cruise lines have worked around this. Princess Cruise Lines used to be the best bet for a high seas wedding, but other cruise lines are starting to offer the service as well.

Ironically, it may be simpler to be buried at sea than married at sea. In the United States, a captain may scatter ashes as long as the vessel is at least three nautical miles from shore or "bury" a body at sea if in at least 600 feet of water. California forbids full-body burials at sea and most other states require some preparation to ensure the body sinks quickly. Local jurisdictions tend to be more forgiving of cremated remains, allowing ashes to be scattered as long as they don't blow back on shore (Alaska), or even right off the dock (New York).

Burial at sea is so popular that some outfits offer it for a fee. The Neptune Society is the most well-known of these companies, although it has had some legal troubles. Last October its Colorado franchise was cited by that state's Division of Insurance; other franchises have been in court facing charges of illegal dumping and emotional distress caused by co-mingling of ashes.

The Cruise Critic website has a good article about getting married on a large cruise ship at http://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=4. It's undated, so I'm not sure how current the pricing and availability information is.

For more on the Neptune Society's controversy, see the Funeral Consumers Alliance website at http://www.funerals.org/component/content/article/64-comments/399-neptune-society

Rules of the Road

I was astonished to read recently in a sailing magazine that sailboats in particular and regattas in general have the right of way on the water over any other vessel. To give the writer credit, at least he knew that there are "rules of the road," even if he didn't really understand what they are. Some motorboat and personal watercraft operators seems to thinks it's a free-for-all out there. It's not, or at least it's not supposed to be.

Rules of the road have several levels, starting with the COLREGS (Collision Regulations) that were agreed to by international treaty. Many nations, including the United States, have their own variations on these in domestic waters. The US, in fact, has slightly different sets of rules for the Great Lakes, the "western rivers" (Mississippi, Missouri, and their tributaries), and "inland" waters in general.

I could blog several times a week on the Rules of the Road alone, but some general principles do apply. In terms of right of way, a less maneuverable vessel generally has the right of way over a more maneuverable one and a slower vessel over a faster one. Every vessel is required to keep a proper lookout and every vessel is obligated to take action to avoid a collision if possible.

That sailboater does indeed have the right of way in a lot of situations, but not every time. If he's using his engine, in a narrow channel or designated traffic lane, or encountering a vessel that can't maneuver due to it's work (dredging or recovering divers, for instance), he may have to give way. And that regatta? Unless the Coast Guard or local law enforcement declares the area off limits, it's nothing but a bunch of folks out sailing.

Any vessel more than 12 meters in length is required to have a copy of the rules onboard. The current edition is Navigation Rules (International-Inland), COMDTINST M16672.2D, the so-called "D" Edition. Find the latest updates in the Notices to Mariners, or on the Coast Guard web site at http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/mwv/navrules/navrules.htm.

To find the complete Rules online, try Handbook of the Nautical Rules of the Road (Third On-line Edition) by Chris Llana and George Wisneskey at http://navruleshandbook.com/index.html

Filed from M/Y Safari Explorer at Baranof, Warm Spring Bay, Southeast Alaska.