"All stop! Rudder amidships!" The command from the pilot to the helmsman was loud, almost harsh, betraying the pilot's anxiety. The M/V Marina Star, a 400-foot freighter, was in the narrowest part of the New York Harbor ship channel, heading south toward the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the Atlantic Ocean beyond.
But a 40-foot sailboat was passing directly in front of the freighter's bow, perhaps 100 meters ahead of the big steel ship. Both the pilot, Capt. Rick Schoenlank of the Sandy Hook Pilots Association, and the vessel's master, Dunceal Constantin, were on edge, their anxiety about a near collision blossoming into restrained anger. The ship's horn blasted five times in the international signal for immediate danger.
TOM TRIPPNew York Harbor is a busy place and the shipping channels are narrow.
This is why I was onboard: to sample life from the other side. With the blessing of the pilot's association, I had followed Schoenlank onto the Greek-built freighter to observe first-hand the challenges of safely conning some of the world's largest ships in and out of one of the world's busiest harbors.
Schoenlank looked over at me, his afternoon ride-along, and said, "Well, you wanted to understand our concerns about how the recreational boaters sometimes get in trouble out here with these big ships. Here you go."
The sailboat had been observed for the last several minutes through the binoculars by the pilot, the master and the navigator, and her course had not varied. She was on track to collide with the freighter. With her bearing unchanged and range decreasing, something had to be done.
It was then that the pilot ordered the big ship to stop – a move not without risk in the relatively narrow ship lane leading out of New York Harbor to the Ambrose Channel and the Atlantic. There were vessels astern of us who would have to adjust their speeds, and if the tide or winds had been stronger the ship could have drifted out of the channel and quickly run aground or into an adjacent anchorage crowded with other vessels.
There was considerable discussion – I'll spare the details – between the pilot and the vessel's master about what the sailor might have been thinking.
Ultimately, the freighter came nearly to a dead stop, and the sailboat passed safely in front of her at what must have seemed a comfortable distance to the sailboat's helmsman. But without or the freighter's drastic maneuver, the sailboat would very likely have been run down.
A PILOT'S LIFE
The amount of large commercial traffic in and out of New York Harbor is staggering: more than 12,500 commercial transits a year. That means the Sandy Hook pilots, with their fleet of 12 pilot boats based on Staten Island, handle more than 35 ship movements a day. These ships range from small coastal freighters to the biggest ships in the world – supertankers and container ships more than 1,000 feet long.
Schoenlank and I boarded the Marina Star shortly before noon at her pier in the Port of Newark, where she had just finished loading a cargo of steel pipe bound for Houston. Schoenlank went through a formal routine of introducing himself to the vessel's master, asking permission to enter the bridge, and then setting up his own equipment and preparing to depart. Sandy Hook pilots use a specially-configured laptop equipped with dedicated software – Wheelhouse II, in this case – and a portable DGPS receiver that the pilot mounts out on the bridge wing. The laptop is then connected to the ship's AIS system through a special port that is required by international maritime law to be installed on all commercial ships that require pilots.
TOM TRIPPA sailboat forces the freighter Marina Star to stop dead in the water in order to avoid a collision.
The laptop and its software allow Schoenlank and his fellow pilots to have their own reliable navigation system, customized for local conditions. Schoenlank also had a wireless broadband Internet connection that allowed him to double-check detailed tide and current information online.
Some of the chaos of harbors like New York is minimized by the Vessel Traffic System, a monitoring and advisory service run by the U.S. Coast Guard. The VTS takes advantage of fixed cameras, radar and AIS systems aboard commercial vessels to monitor the flow of ships into and out of piers and anchorages throughout the greater New York City area. Harbor pilots talk to the VTS, who can give them notice of traffic in their area and assist with conflict resolution.
But when it comes to recreational boat traffic, they are all but blind. The VTS – and consequently the harbor pilots – have no reliable means of monitoring the recreational traffic in the harbor. On a nice summer weekend, that can mean literally hundreds of small boats of all kinds moving in every direction, into and out of shipping lanes and often, in the case of recreational fishermen, sitting or even anchoring directly in the Ambrose channel.
'OPTICAL ILLUSION'
Schoenlank said many recreational captains don't understand how restricted large vessels really are.
"They look at this harbor and see a big open area, not realizing that this ship I'm guiding has only a 150-foot wide channel to maneuver in," Schoenlank says. "They also have a hard time judging the speed of an approaching ship. They'll sit here fishing in the middle of the channel until the last possible second, not realizing that the ship approaching is actually doing 12 or 13 knots. There's a kind of optical illusion that makes these big ships appear to be going more slowly than they really are."
