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A review by mburnamfink
Crossing the Bar: The Adventures of a San Francisco Bay Bar Pilot by Paul Lobo
3.0
What's the difference between God and a maritime pilot?
Well, God doesn't think he's a maritime pilot.
Crossing the Bar is a collection of stories from Lobo's three decade plus career, piloting 6400 ships in and around San Francisco bay. Pilots are the people who bring a ship in from the open ocean to port, handling the delicate maneuvers of docking. San Francisco is more complex than both, with complex tides, bridges, shoals, the famous fog and quite a bit of channels extending far inland towards Sacramento. And it's not exactly like big ships can stop on a dime. One of the big container ships might be over 1000 feet long and weigh in at 100,000 tons, meaning that every maneuver must be planned out miles in advance, while the wind, currents, and other sailors do their best to interrupt your plans and slam your ship into something hard. The job is also wet and dangerous, requiring climbing between pilot boats and immense ships in harsh gales.
The problem with this book is that while Lobo is one hell of a seaman, he's only okay as a writer. While these stories might work pretty well over a pint at the bar, they're told without much sense of grandeur, and with plenty of 'ok boomer' type grumblings about the decline of shipping as a esteemed professional brotherhood into an international neoliberal race to the bottom, as discussed at length in George's Ninety Percent of Everything. Since I live in San Francisco, it's interesting hearing about what happens in the water all around us, but I can't recommend this book beyond that.
Well, God doesn't think he's a maritime pilot.
Crossing the Bar is a collection of stories from Lobo's three decade plus career, piloting 6400 ships in and around San Francisco bay. Pilots are the people who bring a ship in from the open ocean to port, handling the delicate maneuvers of docking. San Francisco is more complex than both, with complex tides, bridges, shoals, the famous fog and quite a bit of channels extending far inland towards Sacramento. And it's not exactly like big ships can stop on a dime. One of the big container ships might be over 1000 feet long and weigh in at 100,000 tons, meaning that every maneuver must be planned out miles in advance, while the wind, currents, and other sailors do their best to interrupt your plans and slam your ship into something hard. The job is also wet and dangerous, requiring climbing between pilot boats and immense ships in harsh gales.
The problem with this book is that while Lobo is one hell of a seaman, he's only okay as a writer. While these stories might work pretty well over a pint at the bar, they're told without much sense of grandeur, and with plenty of 'ok boomer' type grumblings about the decline of shipping as a esteemed professional brotherhood into an international neoliberal race to the bottom, as discussed at length in George's Ninety Percent of Everything. Since I live in San Francisco, it's interesting hearing about what happens in the water all around us, but I can't recommend this book beyond that.