The Professor opened the door to our knock. He was a small, thin man with a sharp pointed nose, twinkling eyes and a humorous mouth.

‘Welcome,’ he said in Russian and English.

There were five Americans, three Russian girls and myself. It was an official trip, the girls there as our guides and interpreters.

The Professor, I put his age at about 65, but he was actually 72, ushered us into his large sitting room. The windows overlooked a small park and gardens, ablaze with flowers, on St Petersburg’s Finland Square. The great edifice of the famous Finland Station, where Lenin had arrived to start the revolution, stood at the end of the street.

We handed over the customary presents, bottles of vodka and a bottle of Scotch, which we had smuggled from the ship under the ever watchful eyes of the guards.

He opened a glass fronted cabinet and produced ten small glasses then opened a bottle of vodka.

‘Everyone drinking?’ he asked.

Three of the Americans refused, an engineer because he was alcoholic, his friend to keep him company and one because he didn’t drink. The Professor nodded slowly and turned to the girls. It is bad manners in Russia not to accept a drink without good reason. He filled my glass to the brim.

‘To international friends and cooperation,’ he said as he raised his glass and drank the vodka in one swallow. I followed suit and flinched as the clear liquid burned its way down my throat

Obviously used to speaking to an audience, he told us that he was a professor of ice. He had spent a year in the Antarctic during International Geophysical Year. Another six months of his life had been spent floating around the North Pole on an ice floe, always studying the formation of ice, its qualities, depth and movement. He spoke of Siberia, where perma-frost never melts more than a foot into the ground, even in mid-summer.

‘But it is rich, this Siberia,’ he said. ‘Underground there is oil, coal, diamonds and in some places, gold. The problem,’ he concluded, ‘is getting it out!’

He had lived in that apartment for 50 years and was there through the great siege.

‘I was sitting here one day when a bomb dropped in the square. It was winter and very cold. The whole building shook and glass cascaded into the room. Then it snowed and remained ten centimetres deep on the floor for a week’

Reluctantly we had to leave this lively old man and I could see the disappointment on his face.

‘Spasebo,’ (Thank you) I said as we shook hands. ‘Da svidanya.’ (Good bye.)

Last to leave, he stopped me at the door. ‘You are learning to speak Russian? Repeat after me.’

‘Ho … cho … wot …ka.’

‘Now quickly.’

‘Hotcho Wotka!’

‘You have just said, ‘Give me Vodka!’ He poured two glasses, gave one to me and toasted. ‘The English!’ He was waving madly at the window, beaming, as our bus carried us away, richer for having met him.

by Terry Took © 2012

Terry Took was born in Yorkshire but has lived in Tynemouth for over 50 years. He spent 45 years in the Merchant Navy which included 27 years as North Sea Pilot. He then spent five years as a lecturer at the Marine Department of South Tyneside College.

He is now an Elder Brother in Trinity House and Marine Director.

If you have any comments or would like to contact Terry then please e-mail him at pilotone@pilotone.plus.com.

At the tender age of 16, I went to sea and my first ship was designated a Super Tanker. She was 32,000 tons deadweight, meaning she could carry that amount of oil. Some forty years later I was sent to join a ship at Rotterdam which could carry 480,000 tons of crude oil. The difference was startling, to say the least.

I had sailed for months on 250,000 ton ships and during my pilotage career had assisted many vessels of this size through the English Channel and Dover Straits. So I was accustomed to these large vessels. These were designated Very Large Crude Carriers or VLCCs, but over the 300,000 ton mark became Ultra Large Crude Carriers or ULCCs – a far cry from the Super Tanker of the late 1950s.

A typical VLCC was about 1,000 feet long with a width of around 150 feet and in fully loaded condition had a draught (the amount under the water) of about 72 feet.

I got out of the taxi near to the ship, the ULCC ‘Esso Caribbean’, at the shipyard in Rotterdam and looked up at the gangway. The length of an ordinary gangway from the dock led to a platform, then there was another full length of gangway and a further platform followed by a third gangway which led to the deck of the ship.

Breathless, I stepped onto the deck and looked around. She was 1,240 feet long with a width of 223 feet. The deck seemed to stretch for miles towards the bow and a little less distance to the stern, where the huge, six storey tower block of bridge structure stretched far above me. I hoped the lift was working!

Like sailing on a huge island, we passed through the Dover Strait dwarfing every ship that came near to us.

Some months later I was assigned to her sister ship, the ‘Esso Pacific’, where I joined the vessel in her full loaded condition. From the pilot boat we noted the ship’s draught as we passed the stern. 86 feet!

We were to join with a lightering ship, a mere 110,000 tons, in Lyme Bay. She would take her full cargo from us to reduce the draught for a passage across the Channel to the man-made port of Antifer near to Le Havre. We manoeuvred with the lightering vessel until it was made fast alongside then dropped the anchor for the transfer to begin. Our draught decreased to 76 feet.

As our ultimate destination was Rotterdam we could not transit the Dover Straits in this condition so were lightened again at Antifer before proceeding to Rotterdam with a mere 72 feet draught.

At these draughts, we were not too worried about space around us, only what was beneath us. Dover Coastguard monitored our progress throughout the voyage to warn other vessels of our status.

Ships have now been built bigger than these, one of them weighing in at close to 750,000 tons – but the ‘Esso Pacific’ was quite big enough for me.

by Terry Took © 2012

Terry Took was born in Yorkshire but has lived in Tynemouth for over 50 years. He spent 45 years in the Merchant Navy which included 27 years as North Sea Pilot. He then spent five years as a lecturer at the Marine Department of South Tyneside College.

He is now an Elder Brother in Trinity House and Marine Director.

If you have any comments or would like to contact Terry then please e-mail him at pilotone@pilotone.plus.com.

The thermometer on the bridge wing registered -10°F (-22°C) as the ship sailed through the dark waters of the Baltic Sea bound for St Petersburg, Leningrad as it was then, carrying a cargo of oil drilling equipment, including Snow Cats for the USSR.

We had been warned that the sea ice extended from the Russian mainland and crossed the Gulf of Finland to the west of Helsinki and soon, as we rounded the Estonian islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa to enter the Gulf of Finland near Tallinn, we encountered the beginnings of it. Small rounded floes crunched against the bow as the ship sped along at 19 knots (about 23 mph).

Then, on the horizon, we saw the tell tale whiteness of solid sea ice reflecting into the sky. It stretched across the horizon ahead of us, and, although the ship was ice strengthened, the engines were put on stand-by and we slowed down. To hit solid ice at speed was almost suicidal.

At relatively slow speed the ship entered the ice which growled along the ship’s side, a sound that was going to be heard until we left the confines of the Baltic Sea. The growling noise soon became a roaring as the ice cascaded from the bow and fell back onto solid sea to scour the paint and rust from the hull. The temperature dropped another five degrees.

We were instructed to anchor in the vicinity of the long, narrow island of Gogland, Normally, we would proceed south of this island and continue another 40 miles to the pilot station, which itself was 40 miles from the port. But we had to await a convoy sailing, accompanied by an ice breaker from Leningrad. And there we waited for three days until we heard that the convoy had sailed from the port. It was another 24 hours before we saw the icebreaker appear round the southern end of the island, followed by a long line of some twenty ships.

I ventured out to the bridge wing clad in multiple layers of clothing and a fur hat to find the temperature could not be read; the mercury had gone below the minimum graduation which was -25°F!

We followed the icebreaker into the port, needing some 18 hours to traverse the 80 miles through the broken track of the outgoing convoy, a distance which should, in normal conditions, have taken only five hours.

On going ashore through the port I was amazed to see a truck driver stoking a fire under the fuel tank of the truck. The diesel, he told us, had frozen.

‘It’s very cold this time,’ I said when we arrived in the warmth of the Seaman’s Club

‘Not so,’ was the reply, ‘last week was cold. It was -40 degrees.’ This is, incidentally, the only temperature at which the Centigrade and Fahrenheit scales meet!

Two weeks later we sailed. The ice had extended its grip on the Baltic Sea all the way through the Kattegat. We did not reach clear water until we passed into the North Sea.

by Terry Took © 2012

Terry Took was born in Yorkshire but has lived in Tynemouth for over 50 years. He spent 45 years in the Merchant Navy which included 27 years as North Sea Pilot. He then spent five years as a lecturer at the Marine Department of South Tyneside College.

He is now an Elder Brother in Trinity House and Marine Director.

If you have any comments or would like to contact Terry then please e-mail him at pilotone@pilotone.plus.com.

The name of the ship showed great promise but a less splendid vessel I had seldom seen as I leapt from the pilot boat to the ladder on her rusted side. The upper works were no better with rust staining the once white paint The bridge was old fashioned but the Chinese Captain and his officers gave me a warm welcome.

We were bound for Denmark and Norway: Esbjerg, Horton (in the Oslo fjord) and Trondheim, with a cargo of steel from Japan. I liked these trips; they made a nice change from trundling through the Dover Strait to northern Europe.

When dinner time came, I realised the food was going to reflect the state of the vessel when a bowl of egg and tomato soup was presented to me.

The first two ports were trouble free but Trondheim gave the Chief Engineer and his men a headache.

The quay was fairly short for the vessel and ended at the huge, concrete covered, ex-submarine pens left over from the German occupation in the Second World War. With the aid of four small tugs the vessel made the approach under the control of the local pilot. Going a little too fast, the stern tugs were told to act as brakes and pull strongly on their lines. With the assistance of the engines going full astern the vessel slowed visibly but one of the tug’s lines parted, the broken end being picked up by the rapidly turning propeller which swiftly turned the polypropylene rope into an entangled ‘cat’s cradle’ around the blades.

The ship stopped with its bow only a few metres from the solid concrete of the submarine pens and she was gently nudged back to her proper position by the tugs.

Eventually, divers went into the freezing fjord water with an underwater camera to assess the situation round the propeller. They cut away the offending rope from the blades but found that the rope had got into the guard which was supposed to protect the shaft from this happening. It was fascinating watching the operation on a TV screen from the safety of the quayside.

The guard had to be partly cut away to remove the rope where it had melted round the shaft.

A week later, cargo all safely discharged, we sailed, bound for Immingham in the River Humber.

On the long, clear stretch of water, between the Norwegian coast and the coast of England, I was sleeping. Suddenly, I awoke to a silence that can only be felt on a ship when the engines have stopped.

Upon arriving on the bridge with the ship wallowing gently to the swell, with Flamborough Head a smudge on the horizon, I was told that the crew had been dumping old wires from the ship into the sea and one of them had fouled the propeller.

A very irate Chief Engineer said he had been Chief for twenty years and had never had a fouled propeller. “Now,” he said, “there have been two in one voyage!”

by Terry Took © 2012

Terry Took was born in Yorkshire but has lived in Tynemouth for 49 years. He spent 45 years in the Merchant Navy which included 27 years as North Sea Pilot. He then spent five years as a lecturer at the Marine Department of South Tyneside College.

He is now an Elder Brother in Trinity House and Marine Director.

If you have any comments or would like to contact Terry then please e-mail him at pilotone@pilotone.plus.com.

The ship’s ETA meant that I must leave home the evening before. I saw on the weather forecast that a huge depression was in the Atlantic and heading for the English Channel.

Eight hours later, as I entered the pilot office at Brixham I was greeted with a telex message sent from the ship: “Hove to off Bishop Rock. ETA uncertain.”

The storm grew until it reached force ten from the east, the worst possible direction. This meant that the wind and waves were coming straight down the English Channel into Torbay with nothing to stop them. With waves crashing over the breakwater, there was no hope that we could get out, even if the ship arrived at the pilot station.

The ship eventually arrived in Lyme Bay but the Captain went to the eastern end of the bay and found relative shelter in the lee of Portland Bill.

Three days later we decided that, as the wind had decreased, we would try to get out and asked the ship to approach.

The boat lifted as we rounded the breakwater, as if reaching for the sky, then, with a sickening lurch, it topped the huge swell and fell into the trough, only to climb the next one.

“How,” I asked the skipper of the boat, “am I going to get on board the ship in this?”

“Your call, Captain,” he replied, “we can go back in.”

I looked at a swell towering above us.

“We’ll give it a try!” I said foolishly.

The ship came into sight, pitching and rolling only a little less that we were and we asked the Captain to turn his ship to make a lee. As he turned we made our approach to the pilot ladder hanging down the ship’s side.

As we passed the stern of the ship, I went on to the deck of the boat, grimly holding the hand rails. A huge swell rolled down the ship’s side and the boat tilted, head down, on a wall of water. The skipper took his hands from the wheel and made motions to me that he had no control.

As we passed the pilot ladder I grabbed it and jumped off the boat, which continued along the ship’s side without me. The ship rolled towards me and I found myself clinging to the ladder which was now some ten feet away from the solid side of the ship. She rolled the opposite way and the ladder banged onto the hard steel and I managed to climb about five feet up before the ship rolled back to leave me swinging in mid-air again. After three of these hair-raising moments, I managed to get to deck level, waiting until the ship rolled away from me so its impetus would swing me gratefully on to the solid deck.

On arriving at the bridge, the American Captain drawled laconically, “I didn’t reckon you were going to make it, Terry!”

‘Neither did, I Captain, neither did I!”

by Terry Took © 2012

Terry Took was born in Yorkshire but has lived in Tynemouth for 49 years. He spent 45 years in the Merchant Navy which included 27 years as North Sea Pilot. He then spent five years as a lecturer at the Marine Department of South Tyneside College.

He is now an Elder Brother in Trinity House and Marine Director.

If you have any comments or would like to contact Terry then please e-mail him at pilotone@pilotone.plus.com.