Work and careers

Woman: Thanks for having me. When I tell people I'm a harbour pilot, the usual response is a polite nod followed by the question of whether I fly planes. So let me explain. Large ships arriving at a port don't simply sail in. At a certain point out at sea, someone like me climbs aboard and takes charge of guiding the vessel through the channel and up to its berth, because the captain, however experienced, can't be expected to know every sandbank and current in every port in the world. At Port Caddon, where I work, that handover happens about eleven miles out. Woman: I didn't set out to do this. I trained as a marine biologist, and my first job was counting seabirds from a survey vessel. It was on that ship that I first watched a pilot come aboard, and what struck me wasn't her seamanship, impressive as it was; it was her composure. The crew had been bickering for days, and within ten minutes of this woman arriving the whole bridge had gone quiet and purposeful. I remember thinking: that's an authority nobody had to hand her. Woman: Getting there took the best part of nine years. People imagine the hardest part of the training is learning to handle the ship, but the ship handling came surprisingly naturally to me. What nearly defeated me was the chart work. Every trainee has to draw, from memory, the entire pilotage district: every buoy, every depth, every light and the sequence it flashes in. I failed that examination twice before I passed. Woman: The part of the job that frightens outsiders is the boarding. The pilot launch comes alongside the ship, both of them moving, and you climb a rope ladder up the hull, sometimes nine or ten metres, in whatever weather there happens to be. And yes, it's dangerous. But honestly, it's not the thing I lie awake over. What I lie awake over is fatigue. Ships arrive around the clock, so our rosters are unpredictable, and a pilot who's been awake for twenty hours makes far worse decisions than one who's slightly scared of a ladder. Woman: I'm often asked whether technology will make us redundant. Ships now have extraordinarily precise positioning systems, and there are trials elsewhere of guiding vessels remotely from the shore. My own view is that the systems are superb at telling you where the ship is, and hopeless at telling you what the tug skipper is about to do wrong. The job, increasingly, is less about navigation and more about negotiation: with the captain, with the tug crews, with the port authority, often in the captain's second or third language. If I were advising someone entering the profession now, I'd say the most undervalued skill isn't mathematics or even seamanship; it's diplomacy. Woman: One thing that has genuinely changed in my time is who does the job. When I qualified, I was the only woman among sixty-odd pilots in the district. There are now seven of us, which is hardly a revolution, though the station has at last replaced the old sleeping quarters, which had clearly been designed on the assumption that nobody would ever need a second bathroom. Woman: And the moment I love most isn't the arrival at the berth, as people tend to assume. It's the moment, usually just past the breakwater, when the captain stops watching my every move and goes off to get himself a coffee. That's when I know he's decided to trust me, and from then on the ship is, for an hour or so, genuinely mine.