It was here in these offshore waters outside the mouth of the Chesapeake that Dave Van Metre began his career. He came up the old way, without a degree, working with deckhands on the old pilot boat, a kind of floating hotel for off-duty pilots and a training ground for apprentices. In 1965, off-duty pilots had no red-bricked waterside station with dorm rooms, spacious lounge and well-stocked kitchen. They spent their layovers crammed onto a 200-foot yacht that held 15 crew and 15 pilots in semi-comfort. Pilots waiting to work a ship back to Baltimore would spend their time resting, reading, eating, talking. Apprentices would scrape the decks, paint the decks, man the helm, and drive the small launches that ferried pilots to and from their ships.

Like a lot of older pilots, Van Metre had a family connection to the business. His father was not a pilot, but his great uncle was, and that bond would alter his life. He was a freshman lacrosse player at the University of Maryland when an opening came up with the Association of Maryland Pilots. With his great uncle as sponsor he won admission. At age 19, he was working the decks of the pilot boat and riding large ships up and down the Bay.

That career path is now largely closed for would-be pilots. Current applicants usually have to graduate from one of the country's merchant marine academies, then go to sea and work their way up the ladder from third mate to second mate to first mate to master. That's a tough climb to complete even by age 30, especially in an age of scarce jobs in a shrinking U.S. merchant marine fleet. With a master's license finally in hand, a would-be pilot applies for a five-year training program with the Maryland pilots: two years as an Apprentice Pilot, three years as a Junior Pilot. Family connections don't count.

Working in the old system, Van Metre spent three years as an apprentice, riding more than 500 ships up and down the Bay — observing, learning, preparing, memorizing buoys, taking exams, climbing the ladder. Twenty-four hours between trips, a progress review every six months, a week off every year — and not much of a social life. At year three, he spent two weeks taking the Coast Guard exam for his first-class pilot's license.

They handed him a blank sheet of paper, told him a starting point and a destination and asked him to draw all the charts for the entire route. Pencil, paper, parallel rulers, dividers. No visual aids to work with. No books, no maps, only memory. You start with the first buoy, its color, its flashing pattern, its location. Then the distance to the next one. Include lighthouses, their flash pattern, their luminous range. Don't forget water depths, old wrecks and other odd obstructions.

Then he did it again: different starting point, different destination. Then again. And again. Until he had drawn all the major charts for the entire Chesapeake Bay. Part way up the Potomac, all the way up to Chesapeake City and the C&D canal. He spent an entire day on each chart. All the charts from memory, and forty years later, this is his memory: "It was quite tedious. And it still is tedious today for anybody doing it. Everybody dreads it."

It's a big step up the ladder. Passing his chart test made him a Junior Pilot at age 22. He could pilot ships now, but only alongside a Senior Pilot. Then came his state piloting licenses: at year four he could pilot boats drawing 24 feet, then 27 feet, then 30. Climbing the ladder. At year six, another Coast Guard exam, his Inland Unlimited Master's license and promotion to Senior Pilot. The top of the ladder at 25. He could step on board any ship of any size and pilot it anywhere in the Bay. And he could do it alone.

By the time the Taiko reaches the Bay Bridge Tunnel, we are up to 17 knots, and the Bay pilot and the sea captain are talking books. Both are fans, it turns out, of John Grisham's legal thrillers.

Captain Torbjørn Pedersen, appropriately enough, is working his way through Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian's adventure novel about the British Navy of the early 19th century. The book, however, has proved slow going with all its terminology about long-gone sailing ships. "It is really hard to read for a Norwegian," Pedersen tells his pilot. "So many technical words."

The book talk is more than a way of passing time on a long night watch. It is a kind of feeling-out process for pilot and captain. Think of it as a quiet negotiation. Who is the real master and commander on the Taiko as it transits the Chesapeake Bay? The pilot is clearly giving all the orders, while the ship's master is only watching.

Captain Pedersen does his watching from a tall swivel chair on the right side of the bridge. When I ask him how he feels about turning control of his ship over to a pilot, he's suddenly the commander. "The pilot is only the adviser," he says. "The pilot is never in command. That is very important to state." To maritime courts, however, the issue of command — and liability — is less clear than it is to Pedersen. He props his feet on the ledge of the front window and stares out past the distant bow of his vessel. "I can put him aside whenever I want to."

Like the pilot he is watching, Captain Pedersen is old school — but old school Norwegian style. Norway, he tells me, is the third busiest seafaring nation in the world, and Wilhelmsen, the company he works for, is one of the oldest shipping lines in the world. Pedersen's father and grandfather went to sea, so he went to sea also, starting out at 16, working three years on deck and becoming an able bodied seaman before he ever started maritime classes. Climbing the ladder from bosun to second mate and first mate, he made ship's master at 30 years old. That system of training is gone now, he says, replaced with a maritime cadet system that has no prerequisites about on-the-deck training.

After that long climb up the old ladder, Pedersen is not going to give up his bridge until he's comfortable with his pilot. "If something wrong happens, then the pilot will step aside right away and say she's all yours captain. And then I have to decide what to do and so on," he says. "That's what I am mainly doing up here. I am sitting in."

On a long run like this, ship speed can become an issue between adviser and commander, a matter for quiet negotiation. It's already costing $50,000 a day to operate the Taiko, according to Captain Pedersen, or better than $2,000 an hour. At those rates a ship's captain generally wants to move as fast as he can. For a pilot, however, high speeds have a problem: it takes a long time to slow down.

Van Metre decides to keep the Taiko at 17 knots, at least down here in the lower Bay with its larger shoals and longer channels. The captain goes along without complaint, but he hangs around well past the end of his watch, keeping his eye on the pilot as he lines us up with the next channel.

Just past the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, Van Metre makes a small starboard swing into the York Spit Channel. It is here in the shipping channels of the Chesapeake that ship captains get nervous and Bay pilots earn their hefty fees.

Think of Van Metre as a jockey riding a ponderous, slow-turning beast. Then think of the Bay as an obstacle course — but with barriers and blockages hidden out of sight below the water.

The pilot as jockey has his cut-throughs and workarounds, all underwater. These are the shipping channels cut into the bottom of the Bay at great expense, all in hopes of keeping the port of Baltimore open to ocean-going ships. I can see the channels on charts or outlined- on the black water by red and green buoys. Van Metre can see them in his head. He can see them when the buoys are under the ice, when the visibility- is zero, when the radar is down.

As Van Metre prods the Taiko through the starting gate of the York Spit channel, he's beginning a 16-mile run that shoots between two large shoals: the Tail of the Horseshoe and the Middle Ground, a wide shallows once famous for grounding ships and breaking them apart.

Running past a shoals is a challenge because a dredged channel changes the hydrodynamics of ship handling (see "Big Boats, Narrow Channels"). A ship will "squat" lower in a channel, it will twist its bow towards the middle, it will shift its stern towards the side bank. Van Metre has techniques for handling "squat" and "bank suction" and the niceties of passing a ship in the night in a narrow channel, tricks and technologies that Bay pilots have evolved and passed down over the last century and a half.

He'll need them all. The long passage to Baltimore is littered with deeps and shallows that evolved over thousands of centuries. According to classic geology, the Bay is a drowned river valley created by the retreat of the last ice age. During the last big freeze, 18,000 years ago, this Bay was a river we now call the Susquehanna. It carved a deep valley down through Maryland and Virginia, then flowed across the continental shelf and emptied into an ocean that was 50 miles offshore of the current Virginia Beach. As the ice melted and the glaciers shrank, the sea rose and flooded back up the river valley, turning it into an estuary and shoving the Susquehanna back up to Havre de Grace. According to Jerry Schubel, a long-time marine geologist, there have been many ice ages and Chesapeake Bays and Susquehanna Rivers — and they all left obstacles behind.

The Middle Ground shoals we're moving past was part of the main channel of an older Susquehanna and an older Chesapeake that ran east of the current estuary. As all estuaries do over time, that Chesapeake filled its main channel with sediment, leaving a blockage that Van Metre has to work his way around.

There will be other legacies later in the passage. The archipelago of islands that now line the Eastern Shore includes Hooper, Taylors, Poplar and Kent — islands that once lined the bottom of earlier Susquehanna rivers. According to Jeff Halka of the Maryland Geological Survey, those old channels filled up with sediment over the centuries, heaping up islands that now hold villages, condos and marinas.

So Dave Van Metre — like Mark Twain — is also a river pilot, picking his way through deeps and shoals that were dug out and shifted around by ancient rivers in their millennial wanderings. Like all of us, he's afloat in the river of time, but he's going in the opposite direction. As he winds his way up the current Chesapeake, he's working his way up through time — from an older estuary to a younger one. The last great flooding took thousands of years, making the Bay mouth and southern Bay the oldest parts of the estuary, first invaded some 10,000 years ago, according to Schubel. Where Van Metre passes the Potomac, the estuary is about 8,000 years old. Where he passes Annapolis, it's about 5,000 years old. When he docks at Baltimore at the end of his long passage, he'll be an older man in a younger estuary-.

This page was last modified August 05, 2005

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