THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 3, 1996 TAG: 9601030408
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 125 lines
Hull thudding loudly on the ocean's swells, the pilot launch Old Dominion sped eastward Tuesday into an Atlantic swathed in fog.
Somewhere ahead rose the mammoth black hull of the Tokio Express, a loaded container ship making for Norfolk. Off to starboard lay Cape Henry. Both were invisible, cloaked in a colorless haze that made twilight of midday and shrank the ocean to a lead-gray moat around the launch.
Ashore, the fog had slowed traffic on the region's roads and pinched the tops off of high-rises. It had made ghosts of beach strollers, socked in the airport, swallowed piers.
But off the coast, ships bound for the ports of Hampton Roads had a schedule to keep, fog or no, and that meant groping through this misty blanket to deliver a pilot to guide them.
``The Tokio Express is right over there,'' Capt. E.L. ``Toadie'' Guy said, pointing through the Old Dominion's portholes to where the ship was supposed to be.
His finger, guided by a radar screen that showed the launch right on top of a big green splotch three miles off Cape Henry, pointed to air.
A long moment passed. ``Can't be more than 100 yards away now,'' he said.
Still nothing.
``There it is.'' Don R. Hudgins, the launch's driver, nodded dead ahead. Three white lights shone weakly through the mist from far above the water, and suddenly the fantail of a ship 944 feet long and 10 stories high loomed into view.
Guy, the Virginia Pilot Association's senior man, a 40-year veteran of the state's sea lanes, searched the ship's port side as the launch charged alongside it.
``I see it.'' He pointed out a rope ladder dangling from a hatch in the the hull. A spindly little thing, flapping in spray a few feet over the water. The ladder he'd have to climb to deliver himself to the ship's captain and crew.
As weather goes, fog is low on the worry list for a pilot meeting the big ships headed into Hampton Roads.
Charged with guiding vessels into and out of protected waters, they board incoming ships at the CBJ buoy, a floating beacon that marks the mouth of the shipping lanes into Norfolk, Portsmouth and Newport News.
The buoy is three miles northeast of Cape Henry, in water wide open to nature's whims.
Guy has ridden the service's launches into summer squalls and cold northeasters, in mountainous seas that tossed the 51-foot, 50-ton boats like tub toys.
He's seen green water wash over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel's pilings, which rise to 26 feet above a normal high tide. He's worked older pilot boats that rolled so badly, a penny tossed straight overhead from the port-side deck might land on the starboard.
Regardless of wind, waves and pitching, he and other pilots reach a point in every workday when they must clamber up a rope ladder thrown over the side of a much larger ship, sometimes climbing five stories, with nothing below them but churning water, to reach safety.
``I was on a ship one night in about a 50-knot wind, just within the last year,'' said William Counselman, another pilot, ``and I got up on the ladder and it started swinging like a pendulum.
``I was almost parallel to the water, it was swinging so far.''
Fog produces far less drama. It can be challenging to guide a collier or container ship into port on radar, to weave blindly through bridge openings and small-boat traffic in a vehicle that, from full speed, takes three or four miles to stop.
Getting aboard isn't so white-knuckle, however. If fog's around, the wind's usually down, the water fairly calm. ``Fog,'' said Guy, ``is always flat.''
Tuesday's swaddling was particularly opaque, brought by an east wind that died after dropping off the mist, so that it lingered the entire day. Even so, Guy predicted it would cause no problems for ship traffic. ``It slows everything down, but it won't be bad,'' he said.
He'd been proved right so far. Blind but for their electronic eye, the launch's crewmen had found their target in all this vast ocean - a ship huge to behold from the Old Dominion, but in terms of the water around it, insignificant, puny, a needle in a field of haystacks.
The launch paced the Tokio Express, Hudgins easing the pilot boat ever closer. Finally, with both vessels pounding through the water at 18 knots and the container ship's rust-flecked skin stretching an incomprehensible distance overhead, the launch's rubber bumpers smacked against the big ship's hull 15 feet below the hatch.
Guy, wearing a flotation jacket over his tweed sports coat, strode outside and grabbed the ladder's thick rope, stepped onto the first rubber rung.
On some ships, he'd have had to climb all the way up the ship's side this way. The Tokio Express, a German-owned ship of the Hapag-Lloyd line, was a bit more civilized: The ladder led to an electric hoist that pulled Guy most of the way.
The launch held fast against the container ship's side as the hoist returned for Jim Trimble, an apprentice pilot. Deckhand Bobby Sadler hurriedly knotted a rope lowered from the hatch to Guy's briefcase. As soon as he was finished, Hudgins turned to port and the Old Dominion pulled away.
The transfer had taken two minutes. Before a crewman had time to haul the briefcase aboard, the big ship was already fading into the mist.
Its bow, 500 feet ahead of the hatch, went first, then its yellow funnel, then the white wheelhouse.
In seconds it vanished completely.
Hudgins, eyes locked on the radar screen, swung the launch toward home. MEMO: Staff writer Jon Frank contributed to this report.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
The Tokio Express, a container ship making for Norfolk, is slightly
visible from the pilot launch Old Dominion in the fog-cloaked
Atlantic.
VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot
Facing a seven-hour delay on a flight to California, Kevin Smith
reads to his daughter, Tatinia Smith, Tuesday at Norfolk
International Airport. In background, Luz Smith, tries to rest.
Employees at various airlines that serve Norfolk International said
no flights landed there from 10:30 a.m. to about 5:30 p.m., and only
occasionally was a flight able to leave. Air travelers faced delays
at large airports in the Northeast and Midwest, which in turn
created delays at smaller airports that feed the major hubs. The fog
also slowed traffic on the region's roads, disrupting drivers,
commuters and highway travelers.
by CNB