NZMPA article Maintaining High Professional Standards in Maritime Pilotage

NZMPA Pilot Dec 17

Maintaining High Professional Standards

Unfortunately, despite the title, this is not an article about West Ham United Football Club as we seem destined for another dire season in the relegation zone. Likewise, if we are not careful, professionalism in NZ pilotage.

Most readers will be aware that our Marine Manager, posing a simple question stemming from purely altruistic reasons, asked the powers that be whether or not a Foreign-going Masters certificate was required in order to start training as a pilot in a New Zealand port. He was apparently informed that it was not a requirement, which turned out to be news to the rest of the New Zealand pilotage and indeed marine community as a whole, almost all of whom reading Rule 90 concluded that it was indeed a requirement. The simple question has now been raised to a legal one and since the wording of Rule 90 is seemingly a lawyers’ delight of ambiguity, it is only right that it should be questioned.

Certainly, in many parts of the world it is not a requirement to hold a Foreign-going Masters ticket before embarking upon pilot training and even in New Zealand, once qualified as a pilot, rather oddly there is no need to maintain the licence for the purposes of doing the job. This Foreign-going master level entry requirement indicates, but certainly does not guarantee, a high base-level of maritime competence prior to a candidate embarking upon such a training regime as port pilotage. The training regime can then be pitched accordingly to reflect this apparent higher base-level.

Where no specific entry requirement is made, many foreign ports with a high professional training ethic reflect this with training regimes that are consequently far more onerous than those requiring a Master Foreign-going entry. Most often they have a bolt-on academic qualification, the acquisition of which acts as a safety net in cases where candidates fail to meet the required practical standards.

Older pilots seem rarely to have considered pilotage until late in their careers, maybe because life at sea a couple of decades ago was more rewarding socially and financially; it wasn’t where I was but who knows? Nowadays, anecdotally at least, it seems that young New Zealand seafarers aspire to the pilotage profession from very early on or at the start of their careers and by this latest interpretation of Rule 90 are at once disenfranchised, which may well have repercussions for the recruitment of New Zealand Merchant Navy officers in the future.

By way of a spanner in the works of the professional argument for maintaining the apparent Master Foreign-going ticket status quo, it seems that some New Zealand port pilots accept that a Foreign-going Masters certificate is not a requirement, highlighting the fact that the profession is not united in its view …not that has it ever been and why indeed should it be? It can be easy to divide and rule diverse and free-thinking groups of which maritime pilots are but one, however maybe this issue can serve as a catalyst to unite professionalism within New Zealand pilotage in a way that the Hammers never seem to have achieved in the East End of London.

                                                                                                   CH.