A day with a New York harbour ship pilot

Piloting in the waters around Manhattan Island

The sun is rising somewhere off the starboard bow, lending the East River the reflective properties of burnished steel. Those of us unaccustomed to morning sea-glare stumble across the wheelhouse clutching handrails and trying to stay out of the way of the captain, crew, and especially the docking pilot. Jeff McAllister, you see, is presently occupied with keeping this 17,000-ton, 565ft former cargo freighter from careening into the Williamsburg Bridge.

After 20 years of docking ships in New York Harbor, ­McAllister is impervious to the elements. He claims you couldn’t ask for a finer day to work. Blinding sun, iridescent blue sky, enough wind to unzip your skull. What’s not to love? Pacing the wheelhouse, he seems equally impervious to the looming bridge.

Harbour pilot Jeff McAllister

Five minutes ago, with the help of three powerful tugboats, McAllister hauled the freighter – called the Empire State – out of a maintenance dock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and swung her north for a three-hour trip to Fort Schuyler in the Bronx. The job is a “dead tow”, meaning the ship’s 17,250hp engine is idle and her rudder locked. Ten storeys below us, unseen off the bow, the tugboat Marjorie B is fastened to the Empire State by hawser line, pulling us along, while another tug, the Ellen J, is tied to our stern for directional control. A third tug, the Charles D, follows behind.

McAllister, a barrel-chested 54-year-old with a frugally exercised smile, directs traffic via a hand-held radio, choreographing a brutish tango between the Empire State and two of the tugs. The 400ft synthetic hawsers tethering the boats together tremble with each shift of direction. Were one to snap, it could cut a crewman in half.

“Marjorie B full stop,” McAllister says, issuing a command that actually means something closer to “slow down”. Caution is king. In the pretzelled exigencies of piloting, what was once starboard is now suddenly to port, and what was once port is now aft, and the entire harbour is shimmering like a strobe light. But never mind that because here comes a 7,000ft suspension bridge carrying a few hundred yawning commuters.

Mark Twain wrote of the ship’s pilot: “He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.” Twain should know. He was a cub steamboat pilot working the Mississippi River; “mark” and “twain” are piloting terms that Samuel Clemens adopted as his pen name.

Ever since men have gone to sea, “pilots” have guided ships in and out of harbours and through rivers, which both pose different challenges to the open ocean. It is pilots, not ships’ captains, who navigate cargo vessels, container ships and oil barges safely through these congested waters (waters often surrounded by densely populated land). In New York, the third-busiest port in the US, piloting is a tag-team operation between two sub-species of pilot: bar pilots, who board a ship 11 miles offshore and guide it into the harbour, and docking pilots, who then bring the ship through the harbour channels and rivers and steer it into a berth.

About 95 per cent of US imports and exports pass through the country’s 260 coastal and inland ports, all of it guided by pilots. In a sense, then, a port such as New York and New Jersey’s, where McAllister works, is a fulcrum of globalisation, the point on which the give and take of international commerce pivots. From his vantage in the wheelhouse, ­McAllister not only has a unique perspective on the global marketplace – his experiences on the East River make him a flesh-and-blood barometer of the recession.

. . .

“Pilots are the canary in the mineshaft,” says John ­Husing, an economist specialising in ports and international trade. “They’re the first ones to see what’s happening, and what they’re seeing tells us a lot about both the American economy and the world economy.”

What McAllister has seen in the past two years hasn’t been pretty. “There are fewer and fewer ships coming in each year,” he says, “particularly oil tankers and container ships, so there’s less work. Our pay has been cut. Tug crews, which are ­normally five guys, went down to three.”

Cargo traffic in the Port of New York and New Jersey began a precipitous decline in 2008 – down 17.4 per cent in the first quarter. That year was the first of flat growth in container ­volume in the harbour since 1993. Last year started ignominiously, with volume down 15.3 per cent in January, 17.2 per cent in February, and 19.5 per cent in March (the most recent figures available). The story was similar throughout the US. With consumer spending in the gutter, imports sagged and, with the rest of the world also in a slump, exports declined.

Because the US is dependent on international trade to fuel its economy, even a small shift in import or export volumes has a ripple effect throughout the economy. “Dock workers and longshoremen get laid off,” says Husing, “as do the railroad workers and truckers who transport ship containers across the country, and people working in warehousing and distribution. All of them have less income, and then people who didn’t even realise they were connected to harbours feel the effect.”

McAllister tugboats photographed in 1954

McAllister represents the fourth generation of McAllister Towing and Transportation, which was founded in 1864 by his great-great-grandfather. The company is run by Jeff’s great uncle, Brian McAllister, a 70-something former sailor given to yarns about his time at sea, when he slung 200-ton tugs over his shoulder and considered diesel oil a beverage. His piloting days go back to the end of the steamboat era, when New York Harbor was an accident-rife cauldron of tugs, transport ships, barges, passenger ferries, ocean liners and all manner of minor vessels, shuttling to and from more than 1,000 piers.

By the time Brian McAllister moved to the front office, the maritime industry was being reshaped. In the early 1960s, massive container ships and dockside crane facilities came into play, with smaller craft all but vanishing from the ­harbour (as did stevedores, waterfront bars and mob-controlled unions). Demand for pilots and tugboat men ebbed, pushing towing companies such as McAllister to the brink. Today, virtually all cargo coming into New York Harbor ends up in one of five container terminals. An annual 15,000 ship arrivals in 1950 is now down to barely 5,000.

Company president Brian McAllister with his sons

But McAllister survived containerisation, as well as the ruinous mid-1980s recession, when it came close to bankruptcy. It is now one of the largest towing companies in the US, with a fleet of 80 tugs operating up and down the eastern seaboard, from Maine to Puerto Rico. And because there aren’t enough men with the right skills to go around, piloting has become a lucrative career. Bar pilots have been known to make as much as $500,000 a year, while docking pilots earn about half that.

Another economic shift has been absorbed by the ­industry, too: America’s move from solid manufacturing base to ­service economy, oriented almost entirely toward consumption. You can see it in the pilots. Like Ahab, McAllister went to sea aged 18, working as a deckhand on oil ships in the Gulf of Mexico before earning his captain’s licence and landing in New York in 1979. But he’s still more Brooks Brothers than Blackbeard. He favours loafers, pleated trousers, has hands instead of hooks. He lives in Connecticut and travels the world in his spare time.

As Paul Bingham at the economic forecasting company IHS Global Insight points out, “The growth in services compared with the manufacturing share of the economy has meant an increase in average household income [in the US] – and it’s certainly correlated with a growth in pilot income.”

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The beauty of this arrangement is that everyone gets richer. Nothing can go wrong. Well, okay, maybe there are a few inconveniences to a service-oriented economy, such as displaced workers, high income inequality and a fairly one-dimensional marketplace that will probably be outpaced by faster-growing economies in the developing world. “Human nature,” John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity.”

Husing, a genial Californian, gets worked up over this state of affairs and echoes what many Britons have been fretting about since the financial sector went south. “The US has been haemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for years,” he reminds me. “We should be making more stuff, but we’re not. We’ll design and install it, sure, but we won’t make it.” Once it’s made, of course, we’ll gladly purchase it. “US consumers never saw anything they didn’t want to buy,” Husing sighs.

Another problem with this arrangement, of course, is that when the US quits shopping – as it has recently edged towards doing – economies in other parts of the globe tend to suffer. Jim Devine, president of the New York Container Terminal, has witnessed this first-hand. There has been a drop in Asian-flagged ­vessels in particular over the past few years, he says. And his explanation sounds like nothing less than a righteous splintering of the American soul: “It’s a simple lack of consumption on the part of the American public,” he says. “If you looked inside these containers a year ago, you’d see household items. But these things just aren’t being resupplied.”

Tugboat captain Joe O’Toole

China has been hurt less by this than the rest of Asia, mostly because it exports things that Americans can’t seem to live without. “Go to Wal-Mart and look around,” Husing says. “Pretty much every consumer good imaginable – household items, electronics, virtually every shoe in the world – is made in China.” Nonetheless, China isn’t recession-proof. And its shipping industry has been hit especially hard. Stock in China Cosco – the nation’s largest shipping conglomerate – fell by 76 per cent in 2008. According to Husing, this reflects a general retrenchment in global shipping during the recession. Bulk carriers around the world have reduced operations in line with the reduction in demand, which has in turn resulted in “lay-ups”, or idle ships, in harbours from Hong Kong to ­Bergen. Most striking is an armada of freighters anchored 50 miles east of Singapore, a “ghost fleet” larger than the British and US navies combined, lacking cargo and crew, and with nowhere to go.

While there is no ghost fleet in New York, the recession hasn’t been a cakewalk for McAllister. Since 2007, the company has lost about 20 per cent of its business, laid off 650 employees and – in an echo of the situation 25 years ago – has had to sell assets to avoid bankruptcy. The principal decline has been in oil cargos, which McAllister tugboats tow to ­refineries in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

But Brian McAllister has been here before. And he’d like you to know that it could be worse. During the 1980s ­recession, striking maritime workers tried to place bombs on tugboats – which puts the present downturn in a cozier light, he thinks.

And as luck would have it, thanks to a rebound in emerging markets, an upturn may already be under way. Of course, McAllister could have told you this four months ago, when he first started seeing signs of modest growth in shipping.

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It might seem easy enough, piloting a ship like the Empire State across a body of water 20 times as wide. Go straight. Don’t hit anything. Wake me when we get there.

But a 17,000-ton seagoing vessel does not possess anti-lock brakes. Nor, I’m told, is it equipped with airbags. Were ­anything to abruptly appear in our path – say, a rogue kayaker – Jeff McAllister could not just slam on the brakes and dive under the nearest lifeboat. A ship the size of the Empire State requires up to a third-of-a-mile to stop, and other river traffic makes swerving out of the question. McAllister’s strategy, were such a circumstance to arise, goes: “You blow the horn and hope they get the f*** out of the way.”

Among the items occupying McAllister’s mind as we approach the Williamsburg Bridge are, principally, the clearance between the bridge and the Empire State’s topmost radar mast (19ft), the tide level (4.3ft), flood current (1-2 knots), ship speed (6.4 knots), as well as the precise location of every shoal, sandbar, buoy and rock ledge, not to mention the constantly shifting position of other ships, barges, fishing boats, floating debris, marine life (McAllister has twice seen a dead whale draped over the bow of a ship). And of course kayakers, who, if you are to take a certain docking pilot at his word, love nothing more than to engage a cargo freighter on the East River in a game of chicken, which is a game, a certain docking pilot likes to point out, the kayaker will lose.

We slip under the bridge. There is no sound except the languorous creaking of the ship, a distant whine of traffic. ­Crewmen in khaki jumpsuits pause to watch the bridge’s shadow slice across the deck. “Smooth as silk,” McAllister whispers into the handheld.

If anything were to go wrong, McAllister would get the blame. “There are five or six federal agencies that will crawl up your ass when you f*** up, and gladly do it,” he tells me. Under tightened environmental regulations, moving oil is a particularly fraught enterprise. In 2007, the container ship Cosco Busan collided with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, breaching the vessel’s fuel tanks and dumping more than 53,000 gallons of fuel into the bay. The spill contaminated 26 miles of shoreline, killed more than 2,500 birds, and required a $70m clean-up. Bar pilot John Cota, who was found to be under the influence of prescription drugs while at the helm, was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison. The sentence signalled to pilots that times had changed: the ­captain of the Exxon Valdez – a far more notorious and devastating environmental disaster that took place in 1989 – was fined and ordered to do community service. “It used to be that everything went over the side: sewage, garbage, bilge water, everything,” McAllister notes. “But now there’s zero tolerance for pollution. Which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. I guarantee you that every company shipping oil would be dumping some of it in the water if they weren’t being watched.”

Shrugging towards the murky East River, he adds, “This was a virtually dead body of water a few years ago. But you can literally see it getting clearer. In the summertime, I go swimming not far from here.”

. . .

Tugboat Marjorie B in port

For the record, this journalist does not endorse swimming anywhere near the East River. He does, however, recommend seeing New York from the wheelhouse of a cargo ship.

Just past the Williamsburg Bridge, the Marjorie B swings left and barrels straight for the Chrysler Building, yanking the Empire State behind her. Midtown rises before us, shining darkly in the wintry light. A quick right and the United Nations hovers suddenly to port, the ghostly expanse of Roosevelt Island to starboard. On deck, crewmen gaze in silence.

Today’s job hinges on Hell Gate, a narrow and rocky bend that has occasioned shame and despair among countless pilots. “It’s one of the spiciest waterways you’ll ever go through,” McAllister says. “If you’re not careful, it’ll spin you around. But our biggest problem will be not running over the Marjorie B.”

Hell Gate has a “hydraulic tide”, meaning that the tide level is not determined by the moon but by the currents of two converging bodies of water – one rushing in from Long Island Sound and the other from the Atlantic. At its maximum ­current, the water looks like it is boiling.

The key is to hit Hell Gate precisely at slack tide, when the currents are ebbing, which today is at 12:48pm. We’re 20 minutes early, but McAllister is undaunted. He roams the wheelhouse, scanning the horizon, joking with the crew and rapping out orders to the tug captains. The approach to Hell Gate prompts a brief homily on the touchy subject of pilot salaries: “If your wife has cancer, do you take her to a GP?” he asks. “No, you take her to someone with specialised ­knowledge. How much would you pay to move a $1.5bn ship through here? We’re specialists who know these waters. When you think about it, we’re cheap insurance.”

Before I know it, we’re through Hell Gate and into calmer waters. It’s smooth sailing from here, though the sights turn increasingly grim: North Brother Island, where Typhoid Mary was confined for 26 years; then the prison barge at Rikers Island, the runways at LaGuardia, and out of sight but not out of smell, the sewage treatment plant at Bowery Bay.

Suddenly, Fort Schuyler glimmers in the distance. Crewmen scramble about, donning hardhats and tossing lines. The Charles D swings into action, joined by the Ellen J and ­Marjorie B. As the ship moans and thrums, McAllister cautions his crews to mind the Empire’s new paint job. The wind, now on our starboard quarter, seems to give us an extra nudge, and the Empire State comes safely to rest against the dock.

With dusk gathering, McAllister emerges on to the poop, grinning. “It’s like notes in a song,” he says. “You put it all together so it fits beautifully.”

. . .

The ride downriver is far quicker. Ploughing through Hell Gate at 13 knots – twice our speed towing the Empire State – the Charles D acquires the pounce and sway of a subway car.

McAllister grows nostalgic. He’s doing exactly what his great-great-grandfather did 150 years ago. Back then, tugboats raced to the mouth of the harbour to compete for ­business, waging a bidding war through megaphones while deckhands tossed shovels and frying pans at one another. These days, you fight to keep the water clean and pray there’s no dirty bomb aboard that Macao-flagged supertanker.

As the East River hurls us forward, the Charles D lets out a sleepy bellow. McAllister and I stroll on deck, watching a splendid day pass into oblivion, our wake bubbling and flashing behind, the Manhattan skyline sparking under a blood-red sky. It’s hard to imagine, but there are still dangers all around, I know, that only the pilot can see.

John O’Connor is a regular contributor to the FT Weekend Magazine. His last piece was about a ‘recession vacation’ in The Bahamas. Read it at www.ft.com/bahamas