Batangas Harbor Pilot on call - From home to work

Video by Capt.Harold Janda

What does it take to become a Harbor Pilot in the Philippines

Impressive pictures from Colombia: MV Malcom arrived on June the 20th carrying the first wind generators for the "Guajira 1" project.

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.

Drydocking or undocking is always a difficult task, particularly with a “dead” vessel (no power/propulsion) and the wind blowing on the ship's side.

To monitor the vessel’s progress, the pilot had set up his portable pilotage unit (PPU). He had connected the rate-of-turn generator to the vessel’s pilot plug and had set a variable range marker on the radar with a radius of 0.5 nm.

Without a shadow of doubt, shipping is a key enabler of our current way of life and the globalized world we live in today. The irony is that the average person is unaware of the significance or contribution of the shipping industry and how much we rely on ships working without disruption

In the video shared, made by the Coast Guard communication department during the training days held at the Decimomannu and Pescara bases, some of the phases of the training, such as take-off-departure and 'winching' the pilot on board, are illustrated in sequence.