Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain and that's my job, except Twain worked on a single boat during the high water season and I work year 'round on different ships."
Cluff, 54, of West Chester, Pa., is a member of the Pilots Association for the Bay & Delaware River, an exclusive club of licensed professionals who sail all foreign ships up the 120-mile Delaware River channel.
International law requires local pilots to board vessels more than 100 feet long at the mouth of Delaware Bay and ensure they get safely to their berths.
Without them the river would be a watery Dodge City: lawless, untenable, an economic and environmental disaster waiting to happen.
River pilots are a powerful piece of the maritime mosaic. In bad weather, they can refuse to board a ship, which in effect shuts the river down. And in keeping with their nickname as "river gods," they are not shy about lobbying public agencies to spend generously to dredge the navigational channel, clear debris and improve bridges in the name of safety.
The pilots group operates like a cooperative. Today, it has 68 members earning about "$150,000 plus a year, after expenses," and 15 apprentices, according to President William Poulterer.
While there is no such thing as a typical week on the water, pilots generally make four one-way trips, the rough equivalent of a 60-hour week, including travel and rest time between runs. One turn from the bay to Philadelphia takes seven to eight hours.
"My job is to know all the mysteries and secrets of the Delaware River, not just the stuff that's in books," says Cluff, 54. "That can mean the subtleties of turns, the impact of ship movement on shore activity and precisely where the channel is...day or night...if the buoys disappear during ice floes."
The final exam for a pilot's license today is the same as it was in Mark Twain's time after he apprenticed with Horace Bixby on the Mississippi River in the 1850s: Begin with a blank piece of paper. Draw the river from Cape May to Trenton to scale from memory, exactly like a commercial chart. Include every lighthouse, buoy, bridge, pipeline, shipwreck, shoreline and depth marker.
As ships get bigger and technology continues to get more sophisticated, the basic job of relying on expert local knowledge to shepherd billions of dollars of cargo and protect shore communities from potential hazards remains the same.
Membership in the association has declined from 96 to 68 in the last 30 years to compensate for fewer ships, though cargo volumes have increased. As ships get larger, fewer sail up river, which means fewer pilots are needed. Though the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' plan to deepen the navigational channel from 40 to 45 feet also will reduce the number of ships in the short run, Cluff is for it. Without a viable shipping channel, he believes, the region could be down about 30,000 jobs that pay more than $1 billion in wages and $150,000 a year in local and state taxes.
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