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But to record most of the programme, Geoff took us to the Tees, and the windswept pilot house. Until then my focus had been on the bridge work, the delicate relationship of pilot and captain. What I had forgotten, until I got into one of their small boats, was the physical peril. Pilots are proud of their service to the ships and try never to cause an expensive delay, but it is a fine judgment. A ship in ballast has high sides, presenting more surface to the tearing wind than the biggest square-rigger.

“We judge,” says Pilot Colin Pratt, “on the size of the ship and the conditions. But also, can we actually get on board?” This is the crunch. Literally. “You come alongside in a controlled collision,” says Colin. The great ship is rolling and pitching: one minute the pilot door is on a level with you, so you could step across – then it is 20ft above or below your little boat’s rail. “Some ships, you have to climb 9m up the ladder, the height of a house, and it’s rolling,” says Geoff. “Once, we were down the pilot station at 3am and there was this NE gale – not gusts, a solid blast – and unbeknown to us a light iron-ore ship downriver was breaking her moorings, lying athwart the river close to two loaded tankers. We dashed for the cutter. As I say the ship was light, unloaded, and all there was was a 23.5m Jacob’s ladder, a rope ladder, blowing around in the wind. That’s the most scared I’ve ever been.” They got aboard. Usually, pilots do. And IMPA, British-based but reaching the world, presses for ever safer basic conditions. Yet worldwide, one pilot a month loses his life. Brendan Richardson, Tees pilot, reflects on the moment of reluctance. “Three in the morning, the phone goes, and the windows are being battered by wind and rain, your wife says ‘Oh no, not again’ . . .” But up he gets, and into his vast warm pilot coat with its safety inflation and his warmest woolly hat, and heads five miles downriver to the dark bay and the waiting strangers.

It’s an ancient trade. “The first mention of pilots is in Hammurabi’s Laws,” says Geoff. “The first British pilot named is a Roman of the Sixth Legion, plying between York and the Trent. Then there’s St Godric, who then became a hermit.” A memory nagged in my mind, something Mark Twain wrote about his years on the Mississippi, about a pilot being the very essence of trustworthiness. His accounts still grip: “Fully to realise the marvellous precision required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm’s reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of steamboat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain.”

Geoff lives on such traditions. From Tilbury to Tokyo, Narvik to New Orleans, the Congo to the Clyde, he is proud that “the status and role of a pilot remains what it was. You bring the strangers safe to port, then do it in reverse, taking them safe out to sea. Then get back into your little boat and go home to your supper. Sometimes you wish you were going to foreign parts too, but no . . . on to the next ship and the next.”

Sometimes, of course, you leave a souvenir. Most of the pilots admit to having accidentally left their hats on more than one overheated bridge as they make for the perils of the pilot ladder and the safety of home. So, all round the world at this moment, the woolly hats of British pilots are circling the globe on the heads of grateful seamen. I feel oddly proud to know that.

How shipping shapes up

— Ninety per cent of world trade and 95 per cent of British trade (£336 billion in 2005) is carried out by the shipping industry.

— In the UK, 28 per cent of national income is traded. Three quarters of that business occurs at British ports.

— There are about 120 commercial ports in the UK. The British ports industry is the largest in Europe. Total tonnage is about 570 million tonnes a year.

— International passenger traffic is about 30 million a year.

— Total traffic is growing at roughly 2 per cent.

— British ports directly employ around 73,500 people.

— The UK owns 2,057 vessels (that weigh more than 100 gross tonnes) – 709 of these are trading vessels.

— In 1994, 106 sailors died in bulk-ship accidents. By 2004 it had fallen to 30.

— One of the largest recent disasters was in 2006, when about 1,300 tonnes of fuel oil were leaked near the Black Sea after a Russian oil tanker split in half in a storm. All of its crew were rescued.

— In January 2007, the MSC Napoli ran aground off the coast of Devon. The public were banned from the beach after scavengers carried away hundreds of items such as motorbikes, face cream, wine and nappies.

Source: United Kingdom Major Ports Group, Department for Transport, Times database

Pilot is on Radio 4 on Mon 7 Jan, 2008 at 11am

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