Anita practicing her ship boarding technique with Mia critiquing her performance, San Francisco Bar Pilots, December 13th, 2022
By Greg Wong | Examiner staff writer
May 25, 2025
Some of the most important people in San Francisco are a group of elite pilots who have no idea how to fly airplanes.
They’re maritime pilots — mariners specially trained to steer hulking commercial freighters in and out of local waterways laced with nautical challenges.
“I’m used to talking to someone for a few minutes before I realize that they think I fly planes,” said Capt. John Carlier, a maritime pilot in The City for the last 37 years. “It’s usually not something somebody understands when you first tell them what you do.”
Though far less heralded than their airborne counterparts, maritime pilots are critical cogs in the economies of portside cities such as New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. They’re responsible for safely guiding billions of dollars in trade goods each year across dangerous waters, driving only the first and last 1% of voyages thousands of miles long.
“There are all kinds of navigational hazards out there,” former maritime pilot Capt. Anne McIntyre said. “Our job is to protect the environment and the people in the public from the ship.”
Their importance to public safety is evident now more than ever after ships helmed by maritime pilots crashed into two of the largest bridges on the East Coast in the last year.
Last week, a sailing ship belonging to the Mexican navy lost power and struck the Brooklyn Bridge as it was departing New York City. Two people died, and another 19 were injured.
That came 14 months after a pilot lost control of a container ship and plowed through the Francis Scott Key Bridge near Baltimore, killing six crewmembers and causing the span to collapse into the Patapsco River.
Fortunately, the Bay Area has not experienced any accidents comparable to either incident — but there have been a few close calls. The closest came in 2007, when the South Korea-bound container ship Cosco Busan hit the western span of the Bay Bridge and spilled more than 53,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil into the bay.
Nobody was injured, and the bridge was structurally unaffected. The vessel’s pilot, John Cota, was found to be under the influence of prescription painkillers and sentenced to 10 months in federal prison.
In the maritime community, San Francisco Bay and its surrounding waterways are regarded as among the most challenging nautical environments in the world. California law requires pilots to be aboard ships that weigh at least 750 tons throughout a 160-mile stretch of water that extends south to Monterey Bay and north to tributaries in Sacramento and Stockton.
Carlier called the region home to some of the most "treacherous ports in the world.” Scott Humphrey, president of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region, a nonprofit that advocates for marine transportation workers, said the area features every “conceivable type of water way,” from marine sanctuaries, levees, bays, rivers, tributaries and straits.
Humphrey said that makes it all the more impressive that The City has only one group of accredited maritime pilots: the San Francisco Bar Pilots. The organization dates its existence to 1850, making it one of the oldest businesses in The City and — according to its website — the oldest purely maritime organization on the Pacific coast.
The team of 60 pilots guides about 8,000 ships per year and transports more than $40 billion in annual trade, the organization said.
San Francisco's most elite pilots don't fly planes
Greg