Portland pilot, Mark Klopp, points to his album photo of the tanker, Irving Canada, sliding into a thick fog bank off Spring Point. "I'm the pilot," he said. "My wife, Susan, snapped the photo. That's what I faced on Aug. 17, 1998; my first solo assignment. No one was looking over my shoulder on this trip. But it was a challenge that I'd spent over a year getting ready for---I was ready to go."

The year's preparation time was well spent. As a Portland Harbor pilot, Mark's responsibility for safe navigation of an ocean going ship extends out to the Portland sea buoy. The ship's officers have conned it across hundreds of miles of trackless seas. In a ship channel with shoaling waters and limited maneuvering room a different set of skills is demanded.

Pilots must compensate for the sluggish steering that occurs when deeply laden ships enter the relatively shallow water. They learn to finesse the momentum generated by man's largest moving structures. Bringing a loaded tanker to a stop at a precise position in the confines of an anchorage area calls for experience and a good seaman's eye. Despite the ship's reduced maneuverability, the underwater hazards that lurk in every port must be safely skirted.

Mark's year of preparation for that first solo assignment included 250 trips on the bridges of ships navigating Portland Harbor. The final hurdle was a two-day written Coast Guard exam. First, however, the examiners handed him a homework assignment. "Trace the shoreline of the Portland Harbor chart. Within the the coastal outline, plot the latitude and longitude of a single point. Copy the scale of miles. Memorize everything else on the chart."

Homework done, Mark rolled up his tracing and headed for Coast Guard
Headquarters in Boston to fill in the chart's intricate matrix of buoys, lighthouses, wharves, ledges, flats and depth contours.

"It took a full 8 hours in the exam room for me to reproduce the chart---with no bathroom break," Mark recalled. "I studied for three weeks to get ready. One week for the buoys, lighthouses, buildings and everything that stands out as an aid. It took another two weeks drawing it over and over again to memorize the anchorage areas, cable crossings. Your reproduction can't be close. It has to be exactly right."

Day 2 was an examination of local knowledge. How many oil terminals are on the
South Portland side? Identify the wharves on the Portland side. Demonstrate your knowledge of the port's climate, tidal ranges, currents. Mark allows that he had a couple of thing going for him.

"The year's worth of 250 ship movements is where you really pick up on local knowledge" he said. "I also had the advantage of living on Orrs Island since 1975 at age 15. Until I went off to Maine Maritime Academy I owned my own boat and fished 500 traps at Orrs. I still run 100 traps as a hobby. Now it's mostly for the kids (Calvin, 9 and Sarah, 7); we don't make any money. If we still have half of our gear at the end of the season I consider myself lucky.

Since qualifying as a Portland pilot, Mark has honed his mastery of the tricky dynamics of large ships at three bridge team simulator schools. Bridge simulation is the seaman's version of the airline pilot's flight simulator. Virtual seascap and passing ships. viewed throught the windows of a pilot house heaving on hydraulic lifters makes the exercise realistic.

Mark trained on scale models on a 12 acre lake at the Warshash Maritime Training Center in Southhampton, England. Warshash ranks high on Mark's list of training facilities. "At first I was thinking, 'toy', but these models are real," Mark said. "They are scaled to the lake and a 40,000 ton scale model reacts just like a 40,000 ton Irving tanker. Its the most realistic training you can get without using someone else's 23 million dollar ship. We practiced unusual maneuvers like rudder failure in a narrow channel, dredging anchors to maintain steerage, and shallow water maneuvering. It wasn't all emergencies; most of it was things that we don't get to do on a regular basis in this port."

Each Warshash model represents a ship presently at sea. Throttles, propellor revolutions, and timing of engine responses are scaled to the ship represented. Trainees sit low in the model to simulate the obstruction of posed by the ship's bow. "First you have to get over the small boat syndrome," Mark said. "What took the longest was speed. The speed of the model was 1 to 40 so what you see as six knots isn't quite half a knot. It took me all of Monday morning to slow down.

Weather is the only variable that the school can't control. A five knot breeze on the lake is like being in a 60-knot gale. You have to adapt or else you will not be able to do half of the exercises." Mark piloting career follows twelve years of seafaring on Exxon tankers. He is one of a few merchant marine academy graduates to "climb the hawsepipe" to an officers berth. "When I graduated from Maine Maritime Academy there were absolutely no jobs available," Mark said. "Exxon hired 3 engineers as oilers and three mates as able bodied seamen. After about a year I was promoted to third mate."

A promotion to second mate followed. During his last 4 years with Exxon Mark got his masters license and was promoted to chief mate of a chemical tanker. This unusual ship carried products that ranged from pharmaceuticals to paint thinners and industrial waxes on a run from Houston to New York. In 1995 he got a call to come up to Portland, ride a few ships and think about becoming a Portland Pilot.

It was the culmination of a dream that started with a boy lobsterman on Casco Bay. "One afternoon a long time ago I walked into the Portland Pilots office and asked Senior Captain Granville Smith what I needed to do to get to be a pilot," Mark said. " 'Go to Maine Maritime Academy, and get your masters license,' he told me. 'Then come back and see me.' The idea stayed with me. So I went to the academy, came back and laid it on his desk. It was a good decision."