On the bridge of the ship, Van Metre starts with basics. He shakes hands with the ship's master, Captain Torbjørn Pedersen, and starts running through his questions: Who is on board, what's the ship's draft (depth below waterline), what speed does the master want to make, what's the stopping time, where's the whistle, the rudder angle indicator, the radar? Van Metre has been on this ship before and knows most of the answers. It's a brief, laconic conversation, part of his ritual for taking control of the ship. Pilots call it "taking the conn.''

The Taiko, he learns, has 5 officers from Norway, 3 from India and 22 crew from the Philippines. She draws 30.5 feet, she can make a top speed of 20 knots, the captain wants to reach Baltimore by dawn.

Van Metre has his sailing orders. He walks over to the radar console on the left side of the bridge and stares down at the green-on-black screen, checking for the ship's position. The wheelhouse is 60 feet wide, larger than the control room of the Starship Enterprise, but darker and nearly deserted with only three men visible- in the shadows. The captain and a mate talk quietly in Norwegian, and a Filipino helmsman stands rock still in the center of the bridge, staring at the compass-.

The ship he's piloting is stuffed with vehicles. The Taiko is called a Ro/Ro ship for the huge roll on/roll off ramp it carries on its backside. It can hold up to 4,400 automobiles, enough to fill most of the new car lots in Baltimore. On this trip it's also carrying trucks, bulldozers, excavators, helicopters, airplanes. One of its sister ships once hauled a Russian space shuttle to a museum in Australia. "You name it, we got it," Captain Pedersen tells me.

Van Metre gives his first command — Full ahead. The Taiko had slowed for the pilot launch and Van Metre needs at least 12 knots for good maneuvering in the face of winds and tide. He asks for 10-degree turn to starboard, then walks forward to the huge wheelhouse windows.

Zigzagging from one shore to the other, a big ship heading to Baltimore must take a crooked route (left) through dredged channels and ancient trenches left behind by previous ice ages to safely navigate the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay (adapted from a map by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimore District). Dave Van Metre (above), on the bridge of the Taiko, has steered ships through these passages for 40 years.

The view from the bridge of the Taiko looks a lot like the view from the cockpit of a Boeing 757 heading in for a nighttime landing. From his high-altitude perch, Van Metre looks out past the distant bow to two parallel lines of lit buoys. Red on the right, green on the left, they are laid out on the black sea like landing lights on an airport runway.

Van Metre asks the captain to switch on a tiny bow light, a small bright reference point that gives him a stronger feel for the size of his ship. Like the rifle sight at the end of a gun barrel, it helps him aim 66,000 tons of ship straight down the channel.

His first target for the Taiko is the TH channel, named after the Tail of the Horseshoe, one of the offshore shoals fronting the entrance to the Bay. With four 10-degree course changes, he gradually swings the ship into a 332-degree compass heading, keeping it north of the shoals, getting a feel for the ship's handling. He's moving through an ebb tide that began flowing out of the Bay half an hour before.

With the ship steadied up in the channel, Van Metre walks outside onto the portside bridge wing and clamps a small antenna to a metal strut. The Maryland pilots all carry a Differ-ential Global Position-ing System that takes bearings from up to 14 satellites and one land-based transmitter. All these data streams help each pilot nail his or her position to within three feet. It's a moonless night, but I can't see any satellites overhead, just a backdrop of a million stars. I stare upwards, searching for the Big Dipper and the North Star, wondering how the first ships ever made it up the Bay.

Back in the wheelhouse, Van Metre hooks up his laptop to the antenna wire, plugs in the computer and boots up. There on the black screen, a glowing green outline of the Chesapeake channel, each buoy pinpointed, and there in the middle of the channel a tiny boat-shaped blip, the Taiko, plods forward. About 10 miles ahead of us, another boat blip, the Patriot, also inches its way up the screen towards Baltimore.

With a glance at his high-tech visual aid, Van Metre focuses on his next target: the lights of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, a chain of causeways, small bridges and underwater tunnels that range across the mouth of the Bay. As the Taiko picks up more speed, he goes back to his ritual call-and-response with the helmsman.

Port 10, this, quietly, from Van Metre, asking for a right rudder.

Port 10, this, quickly, from the helmsman, letting the pilot know what he has heard.

Three twenty-five, this from Van Metre again, giving the compass heading he wants the ship to center on.

Three twenty-five, the helmsman, staring intently at the compass, letting the pilot know they are now on his course.

"Very well, thank you," says Van Metre. He projects a polite, almost courtly manner, but he keeps a close eye on the rudder angle indicator. Helmsmen have been known to turn the wrong way.

This ping-pong patter will continue all night. Keeping an 870-foot leviathan in its channel takes constant, tiny 10-degree adjustments. The pilot and helmsman seem to be tinkering with the ship, rather than turning it. What they're tinkering with is the implacable physics that underlies ship handling. A thing at rest tends to stay at rest, a thing in motion tends to stay in motion. If the thing in motion is 66,000 tons driving through the water towards a large bridge, you can't let it go very long in the wrong direction.

This page was last modified December 21, 2005

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