Marine Pilots - Alaska Traveler - page 254

boat approaches the supertanker's starboard side, the blue wall of the 895-foot hull blocks
out the sky. SWAPA pilot and current president Captain Jeff Pierce climbs the ten-foot pilot
ladder and begins the long climb up the accomodation ladder to a deck big enough to play
the Super Bowl on. He takes an elevator to the bridge, where he exchanges warm greet-
ings with Captain Greg Knowlton, an old friend. They consult together over the control
panel. “There will be a major slowdown today,” Pierce says, due to the opening of a fish-
ing period. The captain agrees, and Pierce takes command of the Polar Discovery at 1320.
In the eighties, Pierce says, the tankers moved 2.1 million barrels of Prudhoe Bay crude
a day, with four SWAPA pilots working as many as twenty-five jobs a week out of all four
berths at the Alyeska Pipeline dock. “In 1993 it started to slow down,” Pierce says. Today,
they've cut down to two pilots on two-week shifts to service a supertanker every day and
a half, along with the smaller tankers, the 70,000-tonners, out of two active berths.
In the summer the cruise ships arrive daily, picking up a SWAPA pilot at Bligh Reef to
take it up College Fjord to look at the glaciers and then into Whittier or Seward to put the
passengers on buses to Anchorage and pick others up. There are also fish processors mov-
ing in and out to load up product from the Prince William Sound salmon fishing fleet.
SWAPA operates under the oversight of state and federal agencies. A pilot screws up a
docking, the ship's captain writes a letter to the State of Alaska's Board of Marine Pilots,
and the board yanks the pilot's license for a year, or depending on how badly the docking
went, maybe for life. If that happened too often, SWAPA itself would come under scrutiny,
which would threaten the livelihood of the owner pilots.
SWAPA has a lively appreciation of this worst-case scenario, which is why its applica-
tion standards are so high and its trainee program is so long and so rigorous. On the job,
SWAPA pilots are the least thrill-seeking men alive, which is why “Our safety record is ex-
cellent,” Pierce says with pride. In its thirty-two years of operation, no action by any
SWAPA pilot has caused either significant damage to a ship or the closing of a dock.
“What limits a pilot's life in this organization,” Pierce says, isn't a deterioration of men-
tal acuity or a lessening of love for the job. “It's the ability to get to the bridge.”
He's not joking. The Polar Discovery 's bridge is five floors up from the deck. The other
ships have perhaps less flights but their stairs are just as steep. SWAPA pilots are very fit