Delta force

A westerly wind ushers in the cold Pacific air, prompting Eric Klapperich to zip up his dark-blue Helly Hansen jacket. He’s warding off the early evening chill at Port Angeles Pilot Station, a maritime hub northwest of Seattle and home of the Puget Sound Pilots, an association of 56 professional piloting experts. Here, he works as a maritime pilot, boarding cargo ships, oil tankers and cruise liners to captain them through the final stretches of their journey, negotiating the labyrinthine waterways of Puget Sound to make it to the major US ports of Seattle and Tacoma.

The Puget Sound pilots’ many years in the profession provide them with knowledge of winds, tides, currents and other navigational hazards to help steer ships that are essential to maritime commerce. To pass their licensing exam, they must memorise 25 marine charts, down to the buoy, covering more than 2,000 sq km of water. “It’s the pinnacle of a maritime career,” says Klapperich, a former tugboat operator. “It comes with responsibility and a mission to protect the state [Washington], people and the environment.”

monocle dons a life jacket and joins Klapperich and another pilot, Michael Anthony, as they prepare to steer Liberty Pride, acar carrier,to safe passage. It’s a 10-minute ride out to the ship in a smaller boat, which whips over swells before eventually manoeuvring alongside the hulking vessel. A ladder is dangled off the side and we grip the rope without looking down until we’re safely on board. Captain Rio Gordon welcomes the pilots aboard his vessel, which has just ferried 4,500 cars from South Korea. Anthony posts himself in the captain’s chair with a cup of tea. He uses a tablet to study the shipping lanes, which are marked on a digital map but are invisible when staring out at the water. During the five-hour inbound journey to Tacoma, he monitors boat traffic, makes radio calls to other ships and vessel control, and requests course changes at regular intervals.

While Anthony has digital navigation tools at his disposal, the pilot relies on his decades of experience in the Puget Sound to make decisions. It’s a knowledge that has been passed down through the cohorts of pilots who have overseen this vast stretch of water since 1935. “Above all, you need an eye for movement,” says Anthony. That visual acumen applies as much to overtaking a barge in open water as it does to finessing the final few metres to bring the ship into port, an excruciating and high-stakes process. Failure to calculate correctly can be disastrous: in December 2019, liquid-gas tanker Levant crashed into a dock near Ferndale, resulting in €7.6m worth of damage due to a Puget Sound pilot error.

Luckily tonight’s journey is smooth. But during high winds, pilots insist on hiring additional tugs or stopping at an anchorage to wait out bad weather. Such requests eat into a vessel operator’s profits but the pilot’s mandate is safety, not money. Arriving into the waters near Seattle, Liberty Pride ties up without incident. “It’s the greatest job in the world,” says Anthony. “You get to valet park huge ships.” — L