As Harbor Pilot, He’s the Master of Ships’ Fate

It’s 5:45 a.m. Ward Pearce Jr. is at work on the bridge of the Norwegian tanker Brali, snapping quiet orders that guide the huge ship through the predawn mist in Los Angeles Harbor.

“There’s a fishing skiff,” he notes, nodding toward a white light. “There’s a buoy,” he adds, but the untrained eye sees nothing in the night.

Ward Pearce Jr. is a port pilot. It’s his job to berth the Brali--and other ships--without running aground, leaving a trail of wreckage or crushing the dock.

All those misfortunes might easily occur, given that the Brali towers seven stories above the harbor, draws 34 feet of water, stretches the length of two football fields, and beneath Pearce’s feet she hauls more than 400,000 gallons of gasoline from China and Korea.

Pearce’s Destiny

Since childhood, Pearce has been destined for the sea. Now, in his own words, he’s at the top.

He grew up in Newport Beach. His parents called him Skip, and they still do. At the California Maritime Academy, his ambition was to be a pilot: “It’s as high as you can go in our industry. I feel I am higher than a captain.”

In fact, Pearce is a captain. Every workday, he climbs the single flight of stairs in the pilot station beside Los Angeles Harbor’s Main Channel and passes the posted licenses of the city’s 16 harbor pilots. Pearce’s “ticket” attests to his right to command any U.S. steam or motor ship.

Pearce is a meticulous man who adheres to schedules and pays attention to details.

He’s up at 4:15 a.m. thanks to two alarm clocks and a clock radio, out of his Rancho Palos Verdes house by 5 o’clock without breakfast (“My sack time’s worth more than my breakfast”), into his butterscotch-colored ’73 Chevy station wagon to reach work by 5:15, a quarter of an hour early.

First things first: a cup of coffee sipped from a white mug plastered with “Captain W. Pearce Jr.” on one side and the City of Los Angeles seal skewered by an anchor on the other.

His Name on the Line

He checks the board where dispatcher Laurie Adley has chalked Brali in neat, block letters. His name is on the same line.

At 5:30, Pearce climbs aboard the 43-foot pilot’s launch, Bahia de Angeles. Boat operator Ned Zittel heads into the harbor, trailing wake from bow and stern, a couple of 350 horsepower V-8 diesels shoving his chunky, 14-ton craft along toward the Brali at 13 miles an hour.

Zittel, 49, cuts through the black water and mist with the confidence of 19 years on the job. “Three to go,” he says, meaning three more years before retirement.

Moonlight is good as daylight to Zittel, who says he could paint the windows of his launch and do just fine. “Sometimes we can’t see 10 feet off the bow,” he declares. Then his radar becomes his eyes. “I can spot sea gulls and pelicans on radar.”

A dark wall rises from the water. Zittel snaps on a searchlight, swings it right, then left, and picks out a ladder hugging the side of the wall. It’s the Brali.

Pearce thanks Zittel, and scampers up the ladder to the ship’s deck.

Inside the vessel, he quickly climbs five more decks on red vinyl stairs as clean as an executive’s desk.

On the bridge, the ship’s captain waits. Kjell Vagtberg, a whaler’s son, is a portly man with unruly, prematurely gray hair and an attitude that transcends words. That attitude telegraphs a message more clearly than the four gold stripes on his epaulets: “I am master of this ship.”

Mutual Respect

Respect is immediate and obvious between Vagtberg and Pearce, both of whom are 47, both married, both parents and--above all--both professional seamen. Pearce is Pilot. Vagtberg is Captain. The captain commands if he wants, but he knows his fate--and the Brali’s--is in the pilot’s hands.

Pearce gives the orders. But not until Vagtberg repeats them are they carried out by Frank Kvalheim, the 23-year-old helmsman who looks more like the king of the high school prom than a man controlling a $35-million ship with a wheel the size of the tire from a child’s little red wagon. In the dawn light, the Vincent Thomas Bridge appears gossamer, a delicate web of steel traversed by bug-like vehicles. Smooth as a fish, the Brali glides under the bridge.

“Port 20,” Pearce orders. Then, “Port 10.” Pause. “Midships.” Pause. “Port 10.” Pause. “Port 20.” Pause. “Hard aport.” Pause. “Midships.” Pause. “Starboard 10.”

For all the urgency in his tone, Pearce might as well be commanding, “Pass the butter.” Vagtberg repeats each order, Kvalheim executes it, and just beyond the bridge the ship sweeps around in a full left turn.

Far below, single lines secure two sturdy, 105-foot tugboats to the Brali’s bows. The tugs, dwarfed by the huge tanker, look remarkably like bathtub toys. They churn the black harbor water to light green, obeying Pearce’s radio-transmitted orders as they make delicate adjustments that the ship’s powerful, four-cylinder engine can’t handle.

As Pearce backs the tanker toward Berth 118-119, sliding within 100 feet of a U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser, the port tug chugs around to the Brali’s starboard quarter.

Together, the tugs push the Brali sideways until it snugs up against the dock without so much as a clunk to be felt or a creak to be heard from the bridge.

Six polypropylene lines, each less than 2 inches in diameter, bind the tanker to land.

Pearce and Vagtberg exchange friendly, formal farewells: “Goodby, Captain, and thank you.” “Goodby, Pilot. Thank you.”

The pilot descends to the dock, where Donna Smith, whom Pearce previously summoned on his radio, waits in a gray Chevrolet Citation with city seals adorning both front doors. In six minutes, she has Pearce back at his government-green pilot station, where he joins two colleagues waiting for the next of about 20 ships that daily require piloting through Los Angeles Harbor.

Twelve-Hour Shifts

Pearce works 12-hour shifts starting at 5:30 a.m. or 5:30 p.m., depending on his schedule. He works four days, then gets four off. He gets called in for extra work about twice a week. With overtime, his base salary of $63,371 swells to about $70,000 a year.

City pilots’ salaries start at $56,773. Pearce’s stands at the top of the scale because he is a “lead pilot” in charge of his shift, and because of his experience: 11 years as a pilot on the Panama Canal before signing on in Los Angeles eight years ago.

Pearce focuses just as keenly on his family, home and hobbies as he does on work.

He and his wife of 18 years, Ester, live with their daughter, Cynthia, 17, a senior at San Pedro High School, and Ester’s mother, Flora, in a tan and white, wood and stucco house that is one of the most orderly on its cul-de-sac.

To create his driveway and front steps, Pearce personally rescued 5,000 used bricks from the patio of a Redondo Beach house that was being razed. He loves gardening, and has planted sweet allysum, juniper bushes, camellia and black pine behind the brick border of his front yard.

In his back yard, Pearce “just got my pick and shovel and started working,” terracing a steep hill to accommodate fruit trees and vegetables: tomatoes, peppers, tangerines, peaches, nectarines, avocados, plums, apricots, oranges and lemons.

Near the swimming pool below his mini orchard, an elaborate barbecue area caters to his love of barbecued fish. The complex includes a gas barbecue, its charcoal-fired twin, an oven for smoking fish, and a sink with a disposal, all of which Pearce designed, and some of which he built himself.

A hobby-turned-business is evident inside the house. Clocks are everywhere, ticking like metronomes, keeping perfect time.

Upstairs, clocks in various states of disrepair blanket tables and the floor of a small room devoted to “Captain Pearce’s Clock Restoration and Repair.”

‘Time on My Hands’

Pearce learned clock repair while in the Canal Zone. “I had time on my hands,” he says.

He also took courses in locksmithing, air conditioning, appliance repair and real estate.

He uses the first three to keep his house in order. Pearce talks reluctantly about the last: a five-acre horse ranch in Fontana, 40 acres of undeveloped land in Nevada and his parents’ former home in Newport Beach, all of which he owns as investments.

Clocks and real estate, locks and appliances, air conditioning, gardening, barbecuing all provide focal points for Ward Pearce, who gives careful attention to everything that crosses his path, particularly since he’s put most of those objects and activities there himself.

But there is one thing that transcends all others.

“I’m just a pilot,” he declares. “And I’m happy with that.”