Piloting on the Tees

October 15th, 2003 by JCB
Posted in Articles, Features | No Comments »

Piloting on the Tees.

As pilots we often find it difficult to describe to outsiders what exactly we do and how we do it. I therefore felt that the following “Viewpoint” article by Michael Grey from Lloyd’s List eloquently describes the day he spent on the Tees with pilot Geoff Taylor.

The article is reproduced by kind permission of Michael Grey. JCB

THE pilot lookout is perched on the lonely promontory of South Gare, which extends northwards into Tees Bay from the grassy dunes cloaking the coast down towards Redcar and beyond, where the lovely Cleveland Hills fall into the grey North Sea.

It is a place of spectacular contrasts. To the north there is a huge rain squall of Turneresque confusion cascading over the rooftops of Hartlepool. To the east there is every shade of grey, with the dark shape of an incoming ship hanging in the refraction which blends sea and sky and makes the horizon indistinguishable.

Half a dozen big deep-laden ships lie quiet in the anchorage, through which bright-painted chemical and gas carriers head towards the fairway, where the survey boat may be seen minutely charting the depths.

At the end of the channel the pilot boat urgently arcs towards its controlled collision with an outbound ship.

With a subdued murmuring of radio and telephone traffic, the duty pilot coordinates the watch, pilots dispersed around half a dozen ships, in and around the river, awaiting jobs, organising transport to ensure that masters are not kept waiting, relating to agents, the foyboatmen, to the port control, to the pilot boat and to the tugs.

A ship is brought forward a couple of hours, another drops back until the following day. A very big ship will need two pilots, another will have an additional pilot under training.

It is a dynamic picture, a puzzle that is constantly changing, with people and ships and berths and equipment and vehicles all requiring positioning at the right place at precisely the right time along both banks of a 16 km river, to the roadstead in Tees Bay and up into the Hartlepool.

Looking up the river, past the steelworks and bulk and ferry terminals and the vast Seal Sands refineries to the chemical complexes of the north bank, the view is oddly reassuring, with its belching chimneys, towering retorts and flare stacks the very antithesis of the post-industrial England in which too many of us believe, with its financial services and pale folk peering into screens or wired up in call centres.

Here on the Tees heavy industry still flourishes. Here we still make things out of ore and petroleum, coal and chemicals. This is an industrial port and proud of it and, although the industrialists dish out pretty brochures listing their considerable environmental achievements and the cleanliness of the river, they haven’t lost sight of the real reason for this great port’s existence.

Here is work and added value, all taking place around the clock, old-fashioned wealth creation that you can see and touch and smell, in a port largely created by the old steelmen whose slag wastes were used by the harbour commissioners to train the river and scour the channel and whose weed-covered relics can still be seen at low water.

Up the river, past the disused

Middlesbrough dock, the iconic

transporter bridge and the extraordinary Victorian lifting bridge, there is serious regeneration taking place.

Ten years ago, when the Tees barrage was being built, there was no shortage of those mocking the very idea of doing anything constructive with the industrial wastelands which stretched to Stockton with their polluted, industrial wreckage and blasted landscape.

Today, as salmon and sea trout leap below the barrage, the Tees has been transformed to high value land where executive homes, hi-tech industry and Durham University departments have been erected amid greenery and above the tideless lake created by the barrage, where a national and possibly even international water sports centre has been developed. I was on this river by courtesy of the Tees Bay pilots to experience, albeit briefly, what modern harbour piloting is all about. Piloting requires special qualities and it is perhaps worth examining these. Why are pilots taken? The traditional answer is for their skill in shiphandling in confined waters and for their knowledge of the local conditions.

These still apply, perhaps the more so as ships have got so much bigger and the safety envelopes around them have reduced with the dimensions and the depth under the keel.

But the demand for dispatch and speed through ports has also created new pressures, while huge reductions in crew size have made the pilot so much more essential, with masters not infrequently keeping watches, dog-tired and submerged with paperwork and procedures.

The pilot has thus become an essential resource on an almost empty bridge at a time when the greatest demands are put upon the thinly spread manpower.

A laden suezmax bound for Le Havre is the first “customer”, a Norwegian, lying bows out in a river berth, with a decent bow thruster helping the two tugs tow the ship off the berth.

The ship is smart and its crew exudes competence, and the manoeuvre to unmoor and haul off into the channel is uncomplicated. The tide is low and there is a brisk breeze whipping across the channel as the ship slowly makes its way down the channel, closed by the VTS to other shipping, while the tanker is proceeding to sea.

These are today’s deepsea creatures, 10-month tours of duty running from Australia to the Tees, ballast to Brazil for a cargo to China. “More days, more dollars,” we used to say, but these people earn theirs.

Variety is the spice of the Tees pilot’s life and, in contrast, the next ship we board is a laden bulk carrier of about 4,300 dwt with a cargo of slag sand bound for the London River.

The ship is moored head up river, with a gas tanker close astern on an adjacent berth and an awkward shoal patch just upriver. But the little ship has a Becker rudder and a good bow thruster, which makes it almost dynamically positioning, and the pilot turns it in little more than its own length, while the ship steers with the precision of a car and little wheel on the passage down river, the master alone on the bridge and doubtless appreciative of some assistance.

Pilots in this river, where the pilotage is relatively short, have to get used to these contrasts. The big ships require a degree of anticipation with a relatively long interval between a helm or engine order and anything actually starting to happen, in contrast to small ships which are markedly more responsive.

The pièce de resistance is a couple of hours later as we clamber aboard a big capesize at the Redcar ore terminal, which has half-discharged its iron ore cargo from Dampier and is making a short passage to Immingham.

The ship is new, all gleaming paint and clearly well-maintained, the crew smart in blue boiler suits, giving every impression that they know their business.

The tide is low, the ship head up and there will be four Svitzer tugs employed to swing it, as there will be little room for the 290 m long ship.

Swinging this gigantic ship is a study in co-ordination. A touch of the engines to keep the ship steady in the tide, the four tugs levering this great lump of steel around while the VTS shuts down other movements.

From the towering bridge of this monster the river and its navigable deep draught channel seem visibly to shrink. There is little water under the keel and the propeller throws up dark mud under the poop. The turn complete, there is a ponderous passage in slow motion to the end of the fairway, where the pilot boat is waiting.

Pilots, for all their independence, don’t work in isolation, and the Tees is an example of how the relationships in a port community can work well.

“If you keep talking about problems they don’t grow,” says the harbourmaster, and it is eminently clear that all those responsible for the movement and handling of ships in the port work well together, with a professional respect for the other person’s point of view, the prosperity of the port as a whole and the over-riding need for safety.

Michael Grey, Lloyd’s List