Dropping the pilot

We travelled North from Vancouver after departing there the day before yesterday, making our way through Seymour Narrows and Johnston Strait – both known as a tricky-to-navigate waterways. When navigating a ship through busy waters, such as ports, or tricky waters, such as narrow or shallow bodies of water, international law often requires taking a pilot on board. A pilot is an experienced mariner with great knowledge of their respective area who helps the captain of a ship get safely through such a tricky stretch.

We had taken a pilot on board in Vancouver to get us safely out of the harbour and through the Canadian part of the Inside Passage, but our Canadian pilot disembarked before we crossed the US border, and our US pilot joined us briefly after. The border runs right through the sea, so we were out on the ocean somewhere when our pilots came on board or left the ship. But how, you may wonder, did they get on and off while our ship was moving? After all, we can’t just pull over to the hard shoulder, like you would in a car to give someone a lift!

Well, I was today years old when I found out.

There’s two ways of getting a pilot on board and both are equally exciting. Either they are flown in by helicopter – yes, we have a heli pad on our top deck for that purpose – or they are ferried to the side of the ship in a small boat, which is then tied up to the ship and the pilot simply hops on over the open sea. We got to watch the process of onboarding a pilot from a pilot boat today, and the picture shows the exact moment in which the pilot steps onto the tiny platform of the pilot boat from which he hops onto our much bigger vessel.

Fun fact: The title of this post, ‚Dropping the Pilot‘, is borrowed from a cartoon published in the satirical Punch magazine in 1890. It shows Chancellor Otto van Bismarck stepping off a ship, dressed as a mariner. Bismarck had resigned as a Chancellor just a few days before the now-famous cartoon was published, by no means of his own volition: He had been ‚politely asked‘ by his Emperor, Wilhelm II, to step down. Depicting Bismarck as a pilot leaving the ship could be interpreted in two different ways: Either it could mean to say that the difficult waters had been left behind and a pilot was no longer needed for safe sailing. Or it could mean that the ship would be left without someone to keep it safe in the difficult waters ahead. Meanwhile, dropping the pilot has become a turn of phrase meaning ‚to abandon a trustworthy advisor‘ (Oxford English Dictionary) or ‚to dismiss a political leader‘ (Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms), so regardless of what artist John Tenniel was thinking when he made the drawing: This is what it means today.