Elite Harbor Pilots Show Political Savvy : Commerce: The men who guide big ships in and out of the Port of Los Angeles usually do their jobs without much public attention. But they got a lot when their brief strike paralyzed the port for two days.

It was a windy night last month when Capt. Douglas Wirch, a Los Angeles Harbor pilot for seven years, was given a routine assignment to guide a Korean container ship through choppy waters to its berth at the Port of Los Angeles.

As usual, Wirch rode aboard a small pilot boat to get to the massive vessel, waiting for him two miles outside the breakwater that protects the harbor. But as he reached for the rope-and-wood ladder that would lead him to the ship’s deck, the pilot boat dropped in the swells, causing his leg to slip off the bottom rung.

Wirch wound up hanging upside down, his head dipping into the cold, dark waters of San Pedro Bay. Then, he lost his grip and plunged in.

“I was afraid I was going to get squashed by the boat or chopped up by the screw (the ship’s propeller),” Wirch recalled. “The pilot boat was rolling and banging into the ship. . . . I just curled up and prayed.”

After struggling more than 10 minutes to stay afloat, pinpointing his position with a flashlight jammed between his teeth, Wirch was rescued by the pilot boat’s two-man crew. “He had two chances of living through that,” said fellow pilot Capt. Carl McCormick, “slim and none.”

Such are the hazards that face the harbor pilots, an unusual corps of municipal employees who work around the clock to keep traffic moving through the nation’s second busiest port. Last year alone, the Los Angeles Harbor pilots guided more than 3,600 vessels to and from their berths.

It is a highly specialized and, as Wirch can attest, sometimes risky job. Yet the pilots’ work has traditionally gone on out of the public eye--until last weekend, when they made news with an action that demonstrated that they have political savvy as well as navigational smarts.

As oil from the wounded tanker American Trader blackened the shores of Huntington Beach, the 11-member pilots union called a strike to draw attention to what its members say are safety problems in the harbor. (Wirch’s accident was not among these problems; the pilots say his fall is an inherent risk of the job.)

The walkout, supported by the 3,500 longshoremen, who load and unload cargo from the huge vessels, paralyzed the port for two days. Harbor Department officials wrung their hands and accused the pilots of capitalizing on the tanker catastrophe.

The pilots don’t deny it.

“Opportunity knocks,” said Capt. Michael Rubino, at 34, the city’s youngest pilot and a member of the pilot union’s safety committee. “We opened the door.”

The pilots’ lawyer, Wallace Knox, is more forthright: “The Huntington Beach oil accident gave the pilots the ability of taking their message to the Los Angeles public in a way they never could previously. They understood that immediately.”

The men--the city has never had a woman pilot--and their two non-union supervisors work in virtual obscurity, out of a plain two-story building in San Pedro, tucked away in a warehouse district at the water’s edge. The only non-mariners they run into on the job are the people who park their cars near the pilots’ station to take in the harbor view.

They are a tightknit group. Knox characterizes the members of Local 68 of the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots as “family.” “They live, literally, together,” he said. “They bunk side by side. They know everything about each other’s personalities, strengths and weaknesses. They’re close friends.”

Two of them share an apartment in San Pedro. A third, who lives with his family in Hemet, camps out there during the week so he doesn’t have to make the long drive home.

They are also immensely proud to be pilots. Despite the rigors of their jobs, they wear dress slacks and coats and ties on duty; they want to make a good impression on arriving foreign crews.

In the maritime industry, piloting is considered the height of the profession. It provides the best of two worlds, affording a seaman the opportunity to command a ship without having to spend months away from home.

Although pilots do not actually take control of ships--they simply give directions to the captain--they must be expert at maneuvering the vessels, which, at their largest, come three football fields long and 12 stories high. And pilots must also be intimately familiar with the hidden dangers of the harbor.

“They have a tremendous amount of local knowledge,” says Lt. Cmdr. John Pendegraft, who runs the Coast Guard office that licenses pilots in Long Beach and Los Angeles.

A minimum requirement is seafaring experience. In Los Angeles, pilots must pass a Coast Guard examination requiring them to fill in a blank navigational chart of the harbor--from memory. Once licensed, pilots may still need up to two years of training--even for the most experienced ship captain--to become familiar enough with the port to man the largest ships on their own.

“It’s the culmination of a person’s maritime career,” said Capt. Ronald Charlesworth, president of the 56-member association of pilots that serves the San Francisco Bay Area. “It has all the aspects of desirability for a maritime person. It has the authority. It has the stature. . . . It’s basically the top of the heap.”

Charlesworth said, however, that among pilots, a job in Los Angeles is not the top of the heap--primarily because the pay--an average of about $70,000 a year--is half what pilots make elsewhere.

Los Angeles is one of the few cities in the country that has a municipal pilot service; San Diego is another. Most of the nation’s 1,200 or so pilots are independent contractors who are licensed and governed by state commissions. San Francisco pilots, for example, are regulated by the state Board of Pilot Commissioners, a seven-member panel appointed by the governor.

Ezunial Burts, executive director of the Los Angeles Harbor Department, maintains that the municipal system has worked for Los Angeles. He said that pilots, who are currently in contract negotiations with the city, receive a “very generous fringe benefit package” that tacks as much as $35,000 a year onto the cost of their salaries. And he said Los Angeles Harbor pilots are paid comparably to those in Long Beach, who are independent contractors.

Burts said the Harbor Department has never had a problem recruiting people for the job. But he acknowledges that because new ships are larger and traffic at the port is booming, the pilots’ work is getting tougher all the time.

According to the Coast Guard, no pilots have sustained injuries and there have been no serious ship accidents in the harbor for at least the last three years. However, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office says that there are occasional minor ship accidents that result in lawsuits against the city. Pilots call them “fender-benders.”

In one case, a pilot struck a wharf, causing $100,000 in damage. In another, a pilot directed a vessel in an area that was too shallow. The ship hit bottom and sustained more than $100,000 in damage to its hull.

With that kind of money riding on each trip in and out of the harbor, the pilots say, there is no room for lack of confidence.

“The action you take now could have potentially catastrophic results and you have to be comfortable with that,” Rubino said. “If you can’t, this job will eat you up.”

No pilot epitomizes that attitude more than Wirch. His fall, which he blandly describes as “an error in judgment,” has not made him think twice about the job. After his rescue, he didn’t even go home.

“I took a hot shower,” he said, “and went back to work.”