Pilot McAllister brings the New York to Manhattan

Written by Macklin Reid, Press Staff
Sunday, 08 November 2009 00:00

When the new warship New York — with 7.5 tons of Twin Towers steel in her slanting prow — lowered her flag before the World Trade Center site early Monday morning and fired a 21-gun salute as sailors lined her decks and the families of Sept. 11 victims watched from the shore, Ridgefielder Jeffrey McAllister was at her helm.

Captain McAllister is one of 35 men licensed and working as a Port of New York harbor pilot.

“I come with the tug boats,” he said. “If you need tugboats, then you need to hire me to orchestrate the use of these tugboats.”

He works for McAllister Towing and Transport, a family-owned firm based in lower Manhattan, a block from the World Trade Center, that operates tugs in 10 East Coast ports from Maine to Florida.

“My family is basically in the tugboat business,” he said. “...They’ve been in the business since 1864. I’m a fifth generation ship docking pilot.”

So bringing in a big ship is another day’s work for Capt. McAllister. But the New York — which will officially become the U.S.S. New York at a commissioning ceremony on Saturday — was something more. Like so many in the New York area, he will never forget Sept. 11, 2001.

“I saw those towers go down. I was on the end of a dock,” he said.

McAllister Towing, its people and boats, were already engaged in helping with the emergency when the towers collapsed.

“We had to clear the harbor first, then we had an all-boats call to assist the people stranded at the bottom of Manhattan,” he said.

Capt. McAllister also recalls another day, working in Port Elizabeth, N.J.

“I saw this big pile of steel. You look into it — I peered into it and I could see the crushed fire trucks, ambulances, and I realized this was all the steel from the World Trade Center,” he said.

“...It had been barged over to Port Elizabeth. It was a very eerie feeling, knowing the cost of lives that that steel represented,” he said.

“I don’t want people to forget that horrible, horrific moment in history.”

The ship Capt. McAllister brought in Monday was christened the New York with that goal in mind, and 7.5 tons of that steel was forged into her bow.

Built near New Orleans, the ship is a 25,000-ton amphibious transport dock ship — a troop and cargo carrier. She is 684 feet long, designed to land up to 720 Marines with all their equipment and supplies. She’s armed with two anti-air missile launchers, as well as cannons and machine guns, and carries landing craft, amphibious vehicles and up to four helicopters.

She’ll be commissioned as a U.S. Navy ship on Saturday, Nov. 7, and will be open for public tours at Pier 88, 12th Avenue and West 48th Street, on Sunday, Nov. 8, from 9 to 12, Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 9 and 10, from 9 to 4, and Wednesday, Nov. 11 — Veterans Day — from 9 to 2.

Capt. McAllister’s services as a harbor pilot are leased by big ocean-going ships that want to dock in New York.

“Once I go on the ship, then I’m an employee of the ship, I’m a servant of the ship,” he said. “...What the captain is paying for is the local knowledge, and the tugboats that I bring with me, to get the ship to the dock.”

It’s place specific. Capt. McAllister is licensed to work in the Port of New York. Someone else, one of “the Sandy Hook pilots” — in the case of the New York it was Neil Keating, whose brother was a fireman who died in the towers — brings ocean-going vessels in from the Atlantic. Capt. McAllister takes over after the Verrazano Narrows.

“The ship comes to the Ambrose Channel and the Sandy Hook pilot gets on board there, and they run it up to the upper bay of New York Harbor, and that is when I get aboard,” he said.

“The local knowledge is comprised of the currents, the winds, the actual shape of the bottom of the harbor we’re going to be transiting, the use of tugs to assist in maneuvering the ship to its berth.”

None of it is taken lightly.

“Most of New York Harbor is cut rock ledges — meaning they blasted the rock to create the channels — which we have to get around. They are very, very unforgiving,” Capt. McAllister said. “You could actually brush the rock, not feel it on the ship, and there would be a hole in the ship.”

It’s learned on the job.

“It’s nothing you can learn in school,” he said. “It’s absolutely something you have to learn through the apprentice system. You go through the various stages of working on a tugboat — deckhand, then mate, then captain. Then it’s moving small barges, up to very large barges. Then ship work, which is when you’re finessing your boat-handling skills.”

Capt. McAllister has lived in Ridgefield 22 years. His wife, Stacey, works from Ridgefield as a business administrator for the harbor pilots’ association.

McAllister Towing is one of two tugboat companies — the other is Moran Towing — that work New York Harbor.

“The owner of the company is my uncle, Brian McAllister,” he said. “My father, James P. McAllister, was an owner, and he retired at least 30 years ago.”

His uncle’s two sons and one other cousin also work for the company. “There’s really four of our generation in the business,” he said.

McAllister Towing’s New York harbor facilities are on Staten Island. “It’s an area with three docks and 10 to 15 tugs tied up at any time, all coming and going, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year,” Capt. McAllister said. “We get about seven arrivals a day ... which means we also have seven departures. Moran, they do slightly more.”

A very busy day would be 24 jobs — 12 ships in and 12 out, he said.

“Five thousand ships a year come into the Port of New York, and they all need tugs and pilots to safely escort them into their berth.”

Very few ships — cruise ships, mostly — are maneuverable enough to come in without a pilot and tugs.

“Mostly we dock what they call ‘Panamax’ container ships,” Capt. McAllister said. “Those are the largest vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal. And they’re roughly 1,000 feet long by 105 feet wide.

“Next up would be the oil tankers, and those are all between 600 and 900 feet long, with beams up to 140 feet.”

Most container ships and tankers go to the New Jersey side of New York Harbor and dock in Port Elizabeth.

Usually two tugboats are needed to bring in a big ship. Under adverse conditions — “high winds, full moon currents,” Capt. McAllister said — three tugs might be used.

Tugboats have two engines that generate between 2,000 and 6,000 horsepower. “What they basically are is railroad locomotive engines, and there’s usually two per tugboat,” Capt. McAllister said.

Jeffrey McAllister started as a tug deckhand at 18 years old. He worked his way up through various positions, and ports — the Gulf of Mexico, Bonaire in the Lesser Antilles. He did tugboat delivery, taking a tug built in Louisiana to Saudi Arabia. He spent nine months there, docking oil tankers — “the biggest ships in the world, at the time.”

He came back to New York, then spent two and half years in the Bahamas, and returned again.

Capt. McAllister was 29 and had spent 11 years working on tugboats before “the ship-docking preparation all came together and my career started” as a pilot in the Port of New York. Now he’s 54, and one of 13 men working for McAllister Towing at the harbor pilot level.

“I’m like a fireman, it’s four days on, four days off, and I stay down in New York” he said. “...I live at the facility on Staten Island, which makes me appreciate my little house in Ridgefield all the more.”

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