Bar pilots look for new home

By TOM BENNETT

The Daily Astorian

 

They have a new helicopter and a new boat.

Now the Columbia River bar pilots are looking for a new home.

The Bar Pilots Association hopes to develop a new facility on the Port of Astoria's Pier 3 that will provide it with more space and consolidate its operations in one location.

The association recently sought the Clatsop County commissioners' support for a rate increase the group plans to bring before the Oregon Board of Maritime Pilots. The request, which would make permanent a temporary rate hike, is designed to pay for both the new pilot boat and helicopter service the association recently acquired, as well as fund the new consolidated facility.

The project, according to the association's Thron Riggs, is designed to pull together facilities now scattered at three different locations and add some badly needed amenities for the hard-working pilots and the helicopter and boat crews who ferry them back and forth.

The association's office is currently located at the foot of 14th Street in Astoria. Its three boats are moored at the Hammond Basin, while the helicopter operates from the Astoria Airport in Warrenton.

"The ability to get the whole operation in one spot is very attractive to us," Riggs said. "Everything we have will be right under our nose there."

The new facility would house the association's administrative offices, dispatch center, pilot staging area, radar room and other amenities. A hangar and landing pad for the helicopter and docks for the pilot boats would also be included.

The association has been looking for a new site for years, Riggs said.

"I've been a pilot here for eight years, and people have been talking about where we could and should move to since I've been here," he said.

The offices at 14th Street are cramped, and the association is unsure whether the leased space will always be available as the waterfront evolves toward more commercial-oriented uses and land becomes more expensive, Riggs said.

Along with more space for offices and operational activities, the new facility would allow for small, but important, amenities like changing rooms and showers for pilots. Putting on all the required gear "is like getting suited up for a hockey game," he said. The association also wants better accommodations, such as sleeping rooms, for the boat and helicopter crews who ferry the pilots to and from the vessels. The crews of the bar pilot boats Chinook, Columbia and Peacock now sleep on board the boats at the Hammond moorage, and the helicopter pilots have no place to rest between flights.

The association's staff includes 20 pilots, 10 helicopter pilots and support crew, 10 boat operators and crew, three office staff, two dispatchers and one chief engineer.

The association is in negotiations with the port over two acres of land on the northeast corner of Pier 3, the western-most pier on the port's waterfront area. Along with offering a central location for the boats and helicopter, it also would provide a direct line-of-site connection to the pilots' new radar installation at Cape Disappointment, which tracks vessels as far as 50 miles out at sea.

The site meets the pilots' needs despite the fact that otherwise it is "not good for much," Riggs said.

"All it is now is a headache to (the port)," he said. "It's a win-win situation for the port, for us, and for the city too."

The port is in the process of removing the 1,200-foot-long abandoned warehouse that's sat on the site for decades, a job it hopes to complete by this summer, according to Port Director Peter Gearin.

The bar pilots' facility, he said, is the type of marine-oriented use the port hopes to see on the waterfront, which was the subject of an ambitious long-range planning project that envisions a mix of new development in the area, including a conference center.

The association wants the port to take a large role in the facility's design, to make sure it is compatible with the future development planned for the waterfront area, Riggs said. The group envisions a building reminiscent of the canneries that once lined the waterfront, or the old red-shuttered Coast Guard offices in coastal communities. No blueprints have been drawn up for the building, which at this point Riggs only knows will be several thousand square feet in size.

The port has no concerns about having a helicopter take off and land regularly on the waterfront, Gearin said. The landing pad will be located on the tip of the property and the aircraft will take off and land over the water. Informal tests have even been conducted in which the helicopter parked at the pier and revved its engine to top volume while people listened from points on the hillside to the south. They could "hardly hear" the aircraft, which is not as noisy as the choppers used by the Coast Guard, he said.

The Columbia River association became the first bar pilots in the United States to use aircraft when it secured the services of the helicopter through a contract with Evergreen Aviation of McMinnville in August 1999, and has become a crucial part of their operation, Riggs said. The helicopter now handles roughly two-thirds of the transports to and from vessels for bar crossings, and has made the traditionally treacherous job much safer.

Last fall, the association added a new high-speed pilot boat, christened Chinook, to its inventory. The boat is intended to replace the 34-year-old Peacock.