Move Over, Captain
Our Town downtown
December 4, 2006
Docking super container ships is a job for an expert
In your daydreams you may have imagined that the man at the helm of the massive container ship hulking up the Hudson was a salty mariner from Alaska, hell, Siberia, with a long white beard and a permanent squint from the sun reflecting off the sea. And you wouldn’t be completely wrong: the ship’s captain is standing on the ship’s deck, but he’s no longer the one giving orders. The man now in charge is a specialist, a harbor pilot, who climbed aboard the ship just north of the Verrazano Bridge, and will direct it through the channel to its final destination in about an hour.
It takes a certain personality type to be able to take control of a ship away from its captain. “You have to have a little ego,” says Bob Flannery, a 27-year veteran of the industry whose family has been in the shipping business for “four or five generations, depending on who you speak to.”
“You’re taking charge of a man’s ship; the captain is always in charge of his ship. You’re coming in, making the decisions… The inflection of your voice, the way you present yourself [are very important].”
“Either one of us could be technically responsible for between 500 million and a billion dollars’ worth of stuff in a given week,” says Rich Wieners, a veteran pilot relaxing in a reclining chair between jobs.
Do they ever get nervous?
“We don’t have time!” Flannery asserts, in captain mode.
“Pick me?” Wieners chimes in from across the room. “Yes! Yes I do.”
“But you can’t show it,” Flannery laughs, acknowledging that even he is not immune to the jitters. “You try not to show it because if you show you’re nervous, the captain might override a decision you make, and that’s when things happen. You might have to go change your underwear after the shift, but as long as you don’t see it, it’s okay.”
When the captain’s really starting to sweat, Flannery resorts to a tactic not just anyone could pull off in a situation that could literally be life or death: humor. “This is the first time I’ve done this, Captain,” he might say, looking stricken with fear, “and it’s pretty windy today, so I’m going to take my time if you don’t mind.” That always lightens the mood, Flannery chuckles.
“But you know what?” he adds. “The guy that doesn’t get nervous is the guy that should retire.”
“He’s the guy that’s ripe for an accident,” Wieners nods.
And in this business, which involves orchestrating up to four tugboats to push and pull a 960-foot super cargo ship around a 130 degree curve, there is no room for error.
“These days, you get a little oil in the water and you’re out of a job,” says Flannery.
To make matters trickier, the channel is undergoing a decades-long dredging project that makes it accessible to ever-larger ships, while causing the current to get stronger and stronger. As Flannery puts it: “You’re letting all this extra water in, it’s got to go back out again.”
Flannery was elected president of Metro Pilots, a company of 15 harbor pilots, because he keeps abreast of what’s going on and he’s “got a pretty decent personality to talk to people,” he acknowledges. But the additional responsibility, which includes meetings with the coastguard, is a labor of love. “That and two dollars gets me on a bus,” Flannery laughs.
Still, Flannery’s not complaining. He and his fellow pilots, who work exclusively for Moran Shipyard, make good money, he says. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that ship captains, mates, and marine pilots in New York State earned an average salary of $62,330 in 2005. The Bureau also ranked support activities for water transportation, which includes harbor piloting, among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country.)
That these guys love their job is obvious just from the maritime trivia Wieners likes to throw at Flannery. They talk about which dock is the oldest in Brooklyn like some men talk about poker hands or baseball stats.
If they didn’t, they’d never have made it through more than two decades on a schedule as harrowing as a fireman’s or an emergency room doctor’s. It’s 48 hours on, 48 off. When they’re on duty, the pilots sleep in snatches in a trailer at the shipyard in Staten Island, away from their homes and families.
Wieners, for instance, had gone on duty at 2 a.m. the night before I spoke to him. “I’m off duty now, I’ll go back on duty at midnight. So I could drive back to Connecticut, fight traffic back and forth, or I can go in there [a room in the trailer] and lay down for a few hours and be bright eyed and bushy tailed at midnight again.”
All 15 partners in the company are equal, which means seniority status does not result in more palatable shifts. If your shift falls on December 25, you’re working Christmas. The one day they’ve all had off, ever, was September 12, 2001.
Ironically, because they work all hours, these guys can give off the appearance that they’ve got nothing to do but watch “Law & Order” in the middle of the afternoon.
“My kids will sometimes say, ‘Dad, don’t you ever work?’” Flannery laughs. “I could have done two jobs before they got up to go to school and then been back home again!”
