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- Ships are magnificent creatures of the sea,
built, designed for the deep waters of the ocean.
But once you bring these magnificent creatures
to inland waters around the world,
they get fairly clumsy.
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- A ship at sea may travel 3,000 miles in a straight line.
But the difficulty happens when you get to port,
and that's when the ship pilot takes over.
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He's essentially like a valet who parks your car.
The pilot comes out usually on a small pilot boat,
and then they climb up the side of the ship
on a small ladder, up to the wheelhouse,
to get the ship into the port.
- If it floats, we are capable of moving it.
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- Here at MPI, we train ship pilots
to guide the largest moving objects on the planet.
We have traditional classroom training.
We have a state-of-the-art ship simulator,
and then we have manned model.
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Although these models may look like toy boats,
they’re actually precise tools
used to mimic the behavior of vessels.
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If you took a full-size vessel
and shrunk it down 25 times,
you could get very reliable results.
- A human being on our models would be
like an inch and three-quarters tall.
- The manned models are between
24,000 and 30,000 pounds of weight,
and they have 0.4 horsepower.
They behave exactly like a ship.
- This is real.
This is how it's done onboard all the ships
around the world.
Starboard 10 degrees.
- Starboard 10.
- We surely would not want to practice
with a perfectly good ship,
and say, "Captain, we have to drop anchors,"
and simulate broke down engines and steering.
So we do that with these vessels.
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It's a profession that, I think, for me,
at the top of the maritime field.
It's an awesome responsibility, and very challenging.
When I finish the walk down a dock,
look back at the ship and say,
"Yes, that was a good challenge."
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