A telephone call on the ship’s radio changed my plans. It was rare for a call to come for me, and usually it was bad news from home, but on this occasion, as the ship I was on was proceeding under local pilotage to Antwerp, the call was from my agent.

“When you get alongside, please transfer to ‘Advantage’ , the Captain is particularly requesting you.’”

I had been on this vessel a few times and knew the Captain very well.

“Where is she going?” I asked.

“It’s a hush-hush mission,” the agent replied mysteriously, “the Captain will let you know when you get on board.”

“We are going to Gdansk,” the Captain told me when I boarded his vessel, “but if anyone asks, it is ‘Baltic Sea for orders’”.

That could lead to a few problems, as vessels are asked by different radio stations along the coast for their destination.

However, we sailed and headed towards the Kiel Canal to enter the Baltic Sea towards Gdansk and eventually arrived safely to find, on the dockside, very large wooden crates awaiting our arrival. Loading was only to be conducted during the hours of darkness. More mystery!

I watched as the first of the crates was being loaded. It was a long, wooden box, perhaps twenty metres by three metres but for the final three metres of its length the box increased in size to about five metres square. It was not difficult to visualize what was inside the crate. Could it be a missile with its fins carefully boxed in?

Another crate was large, more or less square except for the top where an array of protuberances was also boxed in. At the time, my daughter was in the Territorial Army and she would occasionally go on exercise to Otterburn to practice with an MLRS (multi-launch rocket system). The crate was the perfect shape to hold one of those.

There were other similar crates waiting on the dockside, as I left the workers carefully loading them into the ship’s holds; I needed to sleep as we were to sail in the morning.

We left Poland and headed for the North Sea through the Great Belt; if we had returned through the Kiel Canal we would have had to declare the cargo and that would never do!

We rounded Skagen, that spur of land on the northern tip of Denmark, and proceeded down the North Sea and thence to the Dover Strait, where we also had to declare the cargo –  although, as this vessel had many times loaded ammunition in Germany, the Coastguard were happy to accept our nomination as ‘Military Cargo.’

The year was 1992, just after the USSR had been dismantled, and I am sure that our cargo was some of the remnants of Soviet armaments that had been left in Poland and was destined to be pulled apart and analysed by the American military.

I left the vessel at Brixham as usual, wondering just how secret our hush-hush mission had really been.

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.

With a cargo of bananas partly discharged in Newport Docks, the sleek white ship waited for the tide to sail to her next destination, Antwerp.

Eventually, and a little later than planned, the moorings were let go and she entered the locks with two tugs assisting. Whilst waiting for the locks to fill and the outer gate to open thick fog came down and visibility was reduced to almost zero.

The local pilot, who would take the vessel outwards from the port and through the Bristol Channel to Ilfracombe, reluctantly decided to continue the voyage. Proceeding cautiously through the fog, the ship entered the very narrow channel, more restricted than usual by the now rapidly falling tide, with a tug attached to both ends.

Coming to a bend in the channel, the pilot asked the lead tug to let him know by VHF radio when the tug had rounded the buoy marking the corner.

The tug eventually responded by saying, “I’m aground” which the pilot heard on the bridge as “I’m around!” and acted accordingly by altering course to navigate the bend.

I felt the ship going aground, then the vibrations of the engines going full astern and I looked out of my window to see, very close, a tug passing by. The engines stopped and everything fell silent.

On arriving on the bridge I found the pilot shaking his head.

“I should have listened to myself,” he told me, “and stayed in the locks.”

The fog suddenly cleared and I could see vast mud flats with a line of seagulls foraging in the tide line; within an hour, they were very close to the ship on one side. A little later, I looked over the other side and found them still foraging in the tide line but on that side of the vessel.

We were high and dry, the channel a muddy looking narrow stream trickling past some fifty yards or so away from the ship. Two ‘V’ shaped indentations in the mud were visible on the opposite side, one large and one small, where both tug and ship had run into the mud.

The ship was going nowhere until the tide rose again in six hours time and the Japanese captain was worrying about his cargo as there was no water to keep the refrigeration plant going for the bananas in the holds.

As the tide rose around us, the ship refloated and we proceeded down the channel and, with sighs of relief all round, we entered the deep waters of the Bristol Channel.

Luckily, at Antwerp, divers who were employed in looking underneath the vessel found no signs of damage and the cargo remained in good condition.

Just before I left the ship at Brixham the Captain said his bosun had a little present for me. It was a full case of bananas.

To take a case of bananas on the train was impossible but I did manage to carry three or four full plastic bags home and ate bananas for the next three weeks!

by Terry Took © 2011

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 river Scheldte, from Flushing to Antwerp, has always been a dangerous river with tight bends and many sandbanks.

I was on a large Japanese car carrier, the ’Meiyo Maru’, which was loaded with some 3,000 cars for the European market from Japan.

I had finished my duty and turned in for a well deserved sleep as the local pilot came on board to take the ship up the river.

I was woken at about 5am by a terrific grinding, crashing noise and felt the ship heeling over alarmingly. Very quickly I dressed and raced to the bridge to see what was going on, just in time to see two ships, close together, going aground at the side of the river. One of the ships was a large bulk carrier and the other a general purpose vessel with containers on deck. I could see one of the latter’s lifeboats hanging over the side attached by only one wire. One of our anchors was rattling out, the other having been lost in the collision.

The local pilot told me the story.

Our vessel had to anchor in the river to await the bulk carrier clearing the locks outward through which we had to pass. Two tugs were attached to our vessel to keep her pointing up the river.

The bulk carrier cleared the locks and entered the channel, whereupon the pilot on another vessel coming at speed down the river called to say he would overtake the bulk carrier. The large vessel’s pilot told him not to overtake as they were proceeding very slowly, hence the steering was not so good – a common problem with large vessels.

The other vessel ignored this advice and attempted to pass between the bulk carrier and our vessel lying at anchor. The bulk carrier’s generators failed and she sheered across the river in our direction. With the smaller vessel between us she was hit by the bulk carrier on one side, careered across the river, and scraped down our side – causing extensive damage to the ship’s side plates, luckily above the waterline. About twenty metres of plating peeled back like a large tin can to leave two decks and the cars they contained exposed to the elements.

After long hours in which each Captain sent messages to the other ships blaming them for the damage and delay, we proceeded and entered the port where the cargo of cars was discharged, after which the repair yard welded new plates to cover the gash in our vessel’s side.

That evening I was asked if I liked baked jacket potatoes.

“Of course,” I said, “where did they come from?” (Normally on a Japanese ship they only eat rice.)

“Salvage.” the cook replied. “From the other ship.”

The other vessel had containers on deck and some had been ripped open in the collision, cascading potatoes in amongst the cars.

Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining.

by Terry Took © 2011

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.

An airline pilot once told me that his job was 95% boredom and 5% sheer terror. A Deep Sea Pilot’s job is much the same. A Deep Sea Pilot assists vessels in navigating the busy waters of the English Channel, Dover Straits and beyond and as such is sometimes involved in events beyond his control.

We had sailed from Leningrad (St Petersburg as it is now called) for a straight run down the Gulf of Finland through the Baltic Sea to the Kiel Canal from where this American cargo ship would eventually arrive in New Orleans.

Some three hours later, after a large alteration of course we felt the ship shudder. The Captain raced to the bridge from where he had been entertaining the company’s vice president, thinking that we had hit something. I thought it was only a large wave that had hit the bow. There was nothing else to be seen.

Then the helmsman drawled laconically, “Hey, Cap! She ain’t steering worth a damn!” With about 30,000 tons doing 19 knots (about 25 mph) this was not a good thing to happen!

The wheel was hard over to starboard but the ship was swinging violently to port. After trying various manoeuvres, we realised that although everything within the ship was working as it should, the rudder was missing. In the meantime the ship had drifted perilously close to a reef that projected from a nearby island so the anchor was dropped.

In the morning we tried using the wind to blow us clear of the reef and get a little more clearance from the shallow water, but found that we were reversing directly toward a small shallow shoal. Anchor down again, right in the centre of the main channel leading from Leningrad.

Then, a large heavily armed torpedo boat, under the red flag of the USSR, made fast to our stern and a man with a megaphone shouted something in Russian. We hoped he was offering a tow into safer waters, but he sped away to leave us to our fate once we told him how many people were on board. We discovered later that the torpedo boat was actually the Coastguard!

In the meantime, the harbour tugs from the port had been dispatched to tow us to a safe anchorage, but when we saw them looming over the horizon we saw that one was towing the other. This gave us great confidence as can be imagined, until we learned that the tug being towed was a very old coal burning steamship and was just saving fuel!

We were towed back to the anchorage and there the vessel waited until a salvage tug was sent from Rostock in East Germany. As Deep Sea pilot, there was to be nothing for me to do when the vessel was under tow so the Vice President and I went ashore on the coal burning tug, aptly named ‘Leningrad.’ The emergency Visa we were issued, under ’Reason for visit’ stated: ‘To finish the job!’

by Terry Took © 2011

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.