Stuart Noble has been a pilot at the Port of Newcastle guiding coal ships from sea, through the channel and into their berth to be filled with coal since 1999. There’s a team of 25 marine pilots at the Port who know the harbour like the back of their hand, guiding every ship in and out safely.
Stuart’s path to becoming a marine pilot wasn’t one he expected to be taking while he was at school.
“The very straight and honest answer is that I had no idea where I was going to end up, I didn’t know what my path was going to be. They had one of those career evenings at school and gave us a book of all the employers in Australia,” Stuart said.
“I was about 16 at the time so I took it home and dumped it on the desk. My father happened to pick it up and he found a listing for BHP. He suggested I write to them, so I did, and the rest is history. I spent two weeks with BHP doing work experience and here I am!”
Stuart spent time at Maritime College in Tasmania learning his trade, and from there he spent many years on ships, starting as an apprentice deck officer before working his way up through the three deck officer positions responsible for cargo, navigation and safety.
He spent 15 years doing that on board ships carrying everything from coal and iron ore to gas and chemical tankers, and for his last four years on cargo ships he was the captain of his own vessel.
“We made it through a few typhoons in the Northern Hemisphere, I wouldn’t say they were fun. The voyage that sticks with me is when we got stuck in Typhoon Caroline.
“We were on a big gas tanker sailing parallel to an iron ore ship that had come out of Western Australia. We heard their distress call, but she was never heard from again after that and nor were the people on board. They were so close to us when they went down, it was confronting,” Stuart reflected.
Stuart’s move to Newcastle coincided with the closure of the BHP steelworks in 1999. He applied for some other places, but from a marine pilot’s perspective Newcastle had grabbed his attention.
So what does being a marine pilot at the Port of Newcastle mean?
“All the ports in NSW have compulsory pilotage for vessels over 35 metres in length. I’ll give you an analogy. You wake up in the morning with a terrible pain in your tummy so you go to your GP and they say they might have to take your gall bladder out. Would you let your GP do it or would you go and see a specialist?
“So we see the captain of the ship as the GP and we are the specialists. We have all been a ship master at some stage, but this is about specialisation. If I was asked to go and captain a ship somewhere, I could do it but there would be a lot I didn’t know about the area or the ship, same goes for marine pilots – we use our detailed local knowledge to guide ships into the channel safely. It takes years to become a pilot for each specific local port,” he explained.
The marine pilots in Newcastle are helicoptered out to the ships around 72 per cent of the time, and the remainder via boat.
“It’s often safer and quicker to go by helicopter off Newcastle. The helicopter is about a 15 minute journey, whereas the boat can take half an hour to reach the ship,” Stuart said.
“I remember on day six of my time in Newcastle the helicopter went up and promptly came back down! That was maybe my third helicopter flight in my life and I had no idea a helicopter could maneuver in the sky so quickly,” laughed Stuart.
“It’s a highly trained job we do. This includes Helicopter Underwater Escape Training every three years. There’s a facility at Bankstown Airport and they have a mockup helicopter, a bit bigger than ours but the premise is the same.
“You get strapped in the helicopter which then gets submerged in the water, and you have to get out. As the day goes on it gets harder and it’s incredibly realistic; there’s lightning, wind blowing, huge waves, it’s not enjoyable but it has to be done!
“It’s all about being ready for every situation – having the right skills, knowledge and motor memory to handle any situation that we might be confronted with, safely.”
During his 27 years at the Port of Newcastle, Stuart has seen a lot of change, particularly when it comes to technology.
“When I started GPS existed, but it was a lot simpler and the electronic equipment on board the ships had limited capability. The vast amount of what we did was purely visual, but these days there are so many electronic charts and we carry our own tablets that all feed into the systems too, so we have the best available data at our finger tips – it has made it safer and more efficient than ever before.”
“The ships themselves haven’t really changed!”
Despite some of the challenges, Stuart said being a marine pilot is incredibly rewarding and he doesn’t have any plans to stop yet.
“It is obviously such a crucial part of the supply chain, and I love the work that we do. Even at 3am when it’s raining and the wind is blowing!”
