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CHAPTER 8 Troubled Waters At daybreak on Sunday, August 17, 1969, some thirty freighters and tankers were already queued up outside the offshore sandbars, waiting their turns to enter the Mississippi River’s two deep-water passes. Dozens of additional ships would arrive throughout the day as their masters sped full ahead to gain haven before the sea grew treacherous . Although the entrances to the passes were always bottlenecks to shipping, today those waters would be especially crowded and confused . It is near the edge of the continental shelf, just outside the shifting bars and mudlumps, that a pilot is taxied out to a waiting vessel, boards the ship via a rope ladder slung over its side (a so-called Jacob’s ladder), and guides the ship north to the Pilot Town anchorage , where he disembarks and is replaced by another pilot. It should be noted that no pilot ever puts his hands on a ship’s wheel, nor does he issue any direct orders to anyone. His job is to stand on the bridge beside the of‹cer on duty and advise him where he should or should not point the vessel. According to many pilots, the hardest part of the job is climbing that swaying ladder, which is typically around thirty feet in length. Pilots have been known to lose their grip, particularly in brisk winds and choppy seas, and more than a few have not lived to tell that tale. Louisiana pilots are not government employees but rather belong to one of four guilds that hold state-endorsed monopolies on piloting —organizations whose ‹nancial operations, like so many things that merge politics with money in Louisiana, remain cloudy today and were even murkier in 1969. In 1969, a river pilot earned about $50,000 per year, or roughly ‹ve times the national median family 101 income; in 2004, their reported earnings were $342,000 per year, while the Calcescieu canal pilots in the guild at the western end of the state earned an average of about $500,000. Given the pay, it is hardly surprising that pilots cling to their jobs as long as possible. In fact, several of the pilots who drowned in the river or the Gulf were in their seventies. Although the of‹cial dogma in 1969 was that a pilot entered the guild only after a long and grueling period of apprenticeship, more than one well-connected tyro bragged over a beer that he’d shown such a natural talent that the whole training process had taken him only a few months. Meanwhile, an obstacle course of hazy requirements —some written, some unwritten—has always confronted any outsider aspiring to join the pilot guilds. Back in the 1960s, the chance of an interloper getting into this line of work was about as good as that of an armadillo sprouting wings, and until 1990 no apprenticeship ever went to anyone other than a white male with the right family ties. It was not until the spring of 2004 that the Louisiana State Legislature enacted a statute providing for substantive regulation and oversight of the activities of the state’s four pilots’ associations. To visit the Head of Passes, you need to charter a boat near the end of the road at Tidewater, a dozen miles upstream. After navigating three miles of canals and waterways lined with tank yards, workboats, and drilling equipment, you enter the river through an inlet known as “the jump.” The Mississippi River is about three-quarters of a mile wide here, turbulent and choppy, with swirling eddies and erratic currents blanketed with ›otsam. Occasionally, a waterlogged tree or chunk of building timber surfaces, swirls around for a few seconds, and then disappears into the depths. Freighters and tankers churn past, both northbound and southbound, their superimposing wakes adding to the confusion and creating a bumpy ride for any small vessel . There are virtually no pleasure craft on this section of river; pilots can’t easily see them from the bridges of the big ships, and there are many safer routes for small boats to use to get to the Gulf. The Main Pass, which hasn’t been navigable for centuries, veers off to the northeast. Next comes a sprawling marine fuel depot. A short distance farther south, the Pilot Town docks appear. Several white workboats are typically moored here, the word PILOT emblazoned in bold red lettering on their superstructures. CATEGORY 5 102 [3.144.33.41] Project MUSE (2024...

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