"All Yours Pilot" - A History of Guernsey Pilots 1940-2013

The first-known chart of the Mersey estuary was dated 1689 – to assist sailors approaching the port. The route for ships through to the port of Liverpool, through sand banks and the powerful tides of the Irish Sea and Mersey Estuary, was a challenging business.

Port of Shenzhen added 3 new boats to their fleet.

She was the talk of the town and now she is gone till the next time. The Navios Unite, as she is called, is 1,100' long and 140' wide. That is 8' longer than a Nimitz class aircraft carrier and 6' wider at the waterline. The ship is so wide, it requires two pilots to transit. While in the top 5, it isn't the largest ship of any type to ever transit the river, but it is the largest container ship to do so.

It turns out that supertankers and cruise ships have valets. They're called maritime pilots, and they're among the most elite ship handlers in the world. So where does one go to learn how to park the largest ships in the world? To the Maritime Pilots Institute in Covington, La. There, they use mini-versions of the behemoth boats to teach the basics. All aboard!

Study from 2020: Precise assessment of complex maritime navigation requires reliable and valid assessment frameworks. The purpose of this research was to examine the reliability and validity of the proposed CAPA-tool.

When I was a deck officer back in the early nineties I worked on a ship that used to load grain at different ports along the Mississippi river. The name of the ship was Golden Hope, a 600 feet long dry bulk carrier with a 95 feet in beam. An average size vessel for those days' standards.

Follow Puget Sound Pilot Pat Ninburg as he embarks on a routine job, northbound in the Puget Sound -- from Seattle to Port Angeles, WA.

Pilot boat going back to Amber Cove