Pilots Give Safe Harbor to Behemoths of Sea

Will Baumann has sailed through Angels Gate straight into hell. During a storm a few years ago, he rode a small boat beyond the breakwater entrance of Los Angeles Harbor to meet an arriving 900-foot container ship.

His job was to climb aboard the larger vessel--up a towering rope ladder--and navigate it safely through Angels Gate to the terminal, where it would unload.

“I watched that ship roll and pitch like a toy,” Baumann recalled. “It was late at night, and it was actually kind of awe-inspiring to watch something that huge roll around like that in the sea lane.”

The rope ladder is a daily tool of the port pilots who work around the clock to direct ships in and out of Angels Gate, the historic harbor entrance created more than 90 years ago. Baumann remembers how difficult it was to time his ascent in such enormous swells. With each upward heave of the 80,000-ton Evergreen ship, the bottom of the ladder became too high to reach. Each downward roll caused the ladder to dip underwater.

“The boat operator looked at me,” said Baumann, who managed to take hold and clamber up anyway, “and his eyes were kind of bugging out.”

Port pilots are mandated for any ship larger than 300 tons--the size of a 100-foot yacht or fishing boat--as it moves inside Angels Gate. The harbor is not to be navigated without special training. Too many dangers exist, particularly for modern freighters that are twice as big as they were in 1980.

Port pilots have to know the depths and dimensions of a harbor as complex as a Cubist painting. The breakwater runs east-west. Angels Gate is a gap in the rocks a third of a mile wide. Like an invisible highway, the main channel runs through Angels Gate at a depth of 83 feet, angling west as it moves toward the cargo terminals.

Veer from it and there are hazards--shoals and shallows preserved for wildlife. The channel is marked at first by buoys and then by fishing docks, container cranes and cruise berths. It angles and branches into small channels and turning basins that reach four miles inland.

Seventeen port pilots are employed by the city of Los Angeles. Each one had to draw a detailed chart of the harbor from memory to pass the test, said Michael Rubino, one of the two chief pilots.

“You have to be in the [shipping] business at least a decade to be a pilot, typically,” Rubino said.

Pilots know to enter Angels Gate at an angle to stay in line with the channel and avoid having to make a hard left turn. They also have to understand the complex physics of steering a massive floating object. They have to consider the draft of the ship--how far it extends below the surface--in relation to the depth of the channel. The keel of some gigantic freighters glides within a few feet of the harbor bottom, a fact that can influence how sharply a ship turns.

Wind can move a ship sideways at 2 or 3 knots. The bow may move one direction while the stern swings the other. The pivot point can be anywhere along the hull. There is high art, pilots say, in keeping an entire vessel in line and controlling its momentum.

At very slow speeds, a rudder becomes nearly useless. Tugboats are often needed to help stop, start or maneuver a ship near the dock.

“Every generation of ship effectively reduces the margin for error,” Baumann said, citing places in the harbor where today’s ships cannot even turn around. They have to be towed backward nearly a mile before the bow can be swung toward Angels Gate.

While leaving the harbor, pilots sometimes must allow room for another freighter coming in. Baumann credits early designers of the harbor for being prescient in making the entrance as large as it is.

Construction of the breakwater began in the early years of the 20th century as Los Angeles grew into a young metropolis. Two cities, San Pedro and Santa Monica, competed to become the official harbor. The selection of San Pedro fundamentally shaped the face of the city, influencing the flow of billions of dollars of goods and capital in all the years that followed.

Breakwater rocks were initially barged in from Catalina Island, but those were too porous in the judgment of the Army Corps of Engineers, which built the harbor, said William Lee, director of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. Later, loads were trucked in from quarries near San Bernardino and Chatsworth. A lighthouse was added in 1911.

After World War II, the breakwater was extended, and a second entrance, now called Queen’s Gate, was created at the neighboring Port of Long Beach. The two gates feed the nation’s busiest harbor complex. Each entry accommodates nearly 3,000 freighters and oil tankers a year, plus a greater number of commercial fishing boats, tugs, ferries, yachts, sloops and other craft.

Traffic is regulated by the Marine Exchange, a private, nonprofit arm of the shipping industry. From a lookout post at Angels Gate Park, high above Los Angeles Harbor, specialists use radar and sophisticated charting equipment to plot the position and course of ships within a 25-mile arc of the two harbors. Information is relayed by radio to captains and dispatchers at each harbor’s port pilot station.

Inbound ships are told where to pick up a port pilot and on which side to drop the ladder.

Departing ships also carry a port pilot. The pilot boards at the dock and disembarks down the ladder once the ship is clear of the harbor.

The ship never stops. Instead, the 52-foot pilot boat presses itself to the hull of the bigger vessel, held fast by the force of its engines and a cushion of old tires. The pilot either gets down the ladder or finds himself in some distant port.

Rubino, a 15-year veteran, nearly took an unplanned voyage to San Francisco during a violent storm in 1987. No one can remember a port pilot being killed in Los Angeles, generally a fair-weather haven, but everyone fears losing his grip on the ladder. It happens with some regularity in rainy northern ports: a man being crushed between the pilot boat and the hull of a cargo ship.

“One slip,” said Rubino, “and you’re a dead man.”