At least 300,000 ships have transited Miami Harbor since 1911, and the safe navigation of almost every one has been the responsibility of a member of the Biscayne Bay Pilots Association. Formerly known as the Miami Bar Pilots, these 44 men have been the sole providers of pilot service to ships calling in Miami for over a century. Today the Association is one of the most venerable enterprises in the area, and its history is an integral part of the story of Miami itself.
COMPULSORY PILOTAGE AND LICENSURE OF STATE PILOTS
Prior to 1896, the year which saw the arrival of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway and the incorporation of the City of Miami, commercial maritime activity on Biscayne Bay--and hence the need for ship pilots--was essentially nil. However, as Flagler developed port facilities just north of the mouth of the Miami River at the turn of the 20th century, and with the simultaneous dredging of the Cape Florida Channel to 12 feet deep, ship traffic quickly increased.
The risk of maritime casualties—loss of life, personal injury, environmental damage, property loss, channel blockage and traffic stoppage--increased at the same time, and a movement within the local maritime community to require ships to take an officially qualified pilot gradually gained momentum. This scenario was nothing new; it had already transpired in virtually every other seaport in the world, including Jacksonville and Tampa, the two older ports in Florida.
A consensus was finally reached among Miami’s waterfront stakeholders that pilotage should be compulsory in 1911. The same parties also favored the precedent which had been set in most American seaports in the latter part of the 19th century: that is, limiting the licensure of local pilots to a single associated group. At the urging of shipowners, pilots around the country had begun to pool their resources and associate themselves into local groups with a single pilot station, in order to ensure both the availability of a pilot and the uniformity of procedures and locations for pilot embarkation. Pilot fees were then arbitrated by the pilot licensing authority.
Because the First Continental Congress in 1789 delegated piloting jurisdiction to the several states, pilots for the new port of Miami would have to be licensed by the state of Florida. Local Port Wardens in Miami had been appointed by the state in 1893, but it was not until 1911 that this body constituted a Board of Pilot Commissioners.
EARLY PILOTS AND THE OLD PORT
The first state-licensed harbor pilot for the port of Miami was Captain William McIntyre, who was appointed on February 6, 1911. Captain McIntyre’s appointment was followed by those of Captain John Sands and Captain Henry Warren. These three men comprised the Miami Bar Pilots Association, and they established a floating pilot station on the sloop Jupiter. They lived with their families in cottages on the “government reservation,” the strip of land at the southern tip of Miami Beach, today’s South Pointe Park.
Captains McIntyre, Sands, and Warren had been active in the towing and dredging businesses on Biscayne Bay since the early 1900s. Captain Sands owned and operated the tugboat Silver Star, and all three men had done their share of unlicensed piloting in the Cape Florida Channel. It was also in 1911, however, that a new channel (today’s Main Channel) and a new entrance (today’s Government Cut) had been dredged deep enough to become usable. Access to the port was available to oceangoing ships with drafts approaching 20 feet, and the stage was set for rapid growth of both Miami and its port.
Between 1910 and 1920, Miami was the fastest growing city in the nation. Astoundingly, between 1920 and 1925, owing primarily to a speculative real estate boom, Miami grew twice as fast as it had grown during the previous decade. The downtown seaport--expanded after the City of Miami bought Henry Flagler’s port upon his death in 1913--was thriving. The channels were dredged to 25 feet deep, and the Miami Bar Pilots had all the business they could handle.
A fourth pilot, Captain Dell Spiva, joined the group in 1921. Captain Spiva had been master of the coastal steamers Maple, Van, and Thames, which traded between Jacksonville and Miami. In 1925, Captain Fenwick LeCain and Captain Charles Swanson became Miami Bar Pilots when Captains McIntyre and Sands retired. Captains LeCain and Swanson were shipmasters for the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Corporation, a tanker operator in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1928, Captain Raymond Dillon, who had been master of the SS Miami, became Miami Bar Pilot number seven. The SS Miami was a passenger vessel built in 1898 to operate specifically on the Miami-Nassau run, which it did for 27 years.
As Miami’s real estate bonanza of the early 1920s began its spectacular collapse in 1925, the tide of Miami’s expansion turned. Compounding the decline was the sinking of a large sailing ship in Miami Harbor, the Prinz Valdemar, which blocked the Main Channel for six weeks in early 1926, effectively strangling the seaport and the city. To make matters even worse, a monstrous hurricane made a direct hit on Miami in September of the same year. The Great Depression ensured that a full economic recovery did not occur for almost 15 years.
PILOT APPRENTICES AND SLOW GROWTH
Despite the nation's economic woes, Miami Beach burgeoned as a tourist destination in the 1930s, and winter cruises from the seaport remained popular. The port’s channels were dredged to 30 feet deep in 1935, the same year the Overseas Railroad was destroyed by a hurricane, an event which crippled the port of Key West and permanently diverted much of its ship traffic to Miami.
In 1936 Captain Warren’s son Luther joined the Association, which increased the active membership to five pilots. Luther Warren was the first state-licensed pilot in Miami who did not have extensive seagoing experience prior to becoming a pilot. The practice of apprenticing new pilots from within the families of existing pilots was common in those days—in many ports outside Florida it still is. When Captain Spiva retired in 1938 he was replaced by his son Dell Spiva, Jr., and when Captain Dillon retired in 1945, he was replaced by his nephew John “JB” Tompkins.
Photo and caption from Miami Daily News story "Steady As She Goes," April 1948. (Left to right: Captain Spiva, Jr., Secretary Gretchen Kincaid, Chief Pilot Captain F. LeCain, Captain Tompkins, Captain H. Warren, Captain Swanson.)
During World War Two all harbor pilots in Florida were commissioned in the U.S. Coast Guard. Captain LeCain, who had served as a naval officer in World War One, and who was currently serving as the Association’s “chief pilot,” was awarded the rank of Commander. Ship movements were strictly controlled by the US Navy, and commercial traffic in the port slowed to a virtual standstill. Nor did it come back quickly after the war. The downtown seaport’s infrastructure was crumbling, and German U-boats had sunk many of the passenger liners that used to call in Miami before the war. One that survived was the P&O Steamship Company’s SS Florida, whose master, Captain Earl Jackson, left P&O in 1950 to join the Miami Bar Pilots following the sudden death of Captain LeCain.
Captain Julian Fernandez became the twelfth pilot in the history of the Association in 1954 when Captain Swanson retired. Captain Fernandez was a shipmaster with Waterman Lines, one of the largest fleets of American carriers. Captain Fernandez believed that pilots should already be experienced ship’s officers, like himself, before they began training to become pilots, and he made it his mission to end the nepotism with which some Miami Bar Pilots had been recruited. Two more apprentice pilots did join the group after Captain Fernandez: Henry “Dick” LeCain (the son of Captain Fenwick LeCain) in 1958, and John “Jack” Zapf (the nephew of JB Tompkins) in 1963. However, every pilot who has joined the Association since then has already spent a decade or more at sea.
THE NEW PORT
While the Port of Miami languished through much of the 1950s, various plans for port expansion were debated. Eventually Metro-Dade County bought the old port from the City of Miami in 1960 and undertook the construction of Dodge Island, a huge new port in the middle of Biscayne Bay. While Dodge Island was being built, the Miami Bar Pilots changed their name to the Biscayne Bay Pilots to reflect the wider scope of piloting in which they might potentially be involved.
By the time Dodge Island opened for business in 1966, a modern cruise industry was emerging, and Miami’s new seaport became the epicenter of this phenomenon. Cruise industry giants Norwegian Cruise Line, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, and Carnival Cruise Line all got their start in Miami in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Miami has been the cruise capital of the world ever since.
The cargo side of port operations began to take off as well. Miami’s location made it the closest US port to destinations in the Caribbean Basin and South America, and these trade routes grew steadily. The channels were dredged to 35 feet deep, and bigger ships kept coming. The pilots had to expand their membership to keep pace. Between 1967 and 1974, six more pilots joined the group, all of them shipmasters with cruise or cargo companies that called in Miami: Captain Justus Pasternack, Captain Carl Brown, Captain Dario Pedrajo, Captain Paul Francouer, Captain Asmundur Asmundsson, and Captain Helge Krarup. With the retirement of several senior members of the Association, there were now nine active pilots.
In 1975, Captain Fernandez finally convinced the governor and state legislature to codify the pilot recruitment policy he had instituted in Miami throughout the state of Florida. The local Boards of Pilot Commissioners were abolished in favor of a statewide board, and Fernandez became its first chairman. Prospective pilots now have to compete for the job against a field of dozens of equally qualified and experienced applicants in a rigorous written examination administered by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. As a result, harbor pilots in Florida come almost exclusively from a background that includes a formal maritime education. After graduating from a four-year maritime college, future pilots typically go to sea for decade, often raising their licenses in the merchant marine to unlimited master. If he is fortunate enough to outscore his peers on the state exam, the new pilot then begins a two-and-a-half year training program during which he progressively handles larger and larger ships.
The first four pilots to join the association under the new system were Captain John Fernandez, Captain John Gonzales, Captain Joseph Bunicci, and Captain Richard Thornal, all of whom arrived in 1976. Four more pilots came in 1980: Captain William Breese, Captain William Arata, Captain Stephen Nadeau, and Captain Robert Brownell. In 1981, Captain David Leech and Captain Andres Cancela joined the group. Captains Gonzales, Bunicci, Breese, and Cancela were not only shipmasters before they came to Miami; they were already pilots elsewhere.
THE MODERN ERA
In only ten years, the working membership of the group had doubled to 18 pilots. The primary reason for the increased need for pilot manpower was the further expansion of the Port of Miami in the mid-1980s, when the development of a modern container port was undertaken on another man-made island in the bay (Lummus Island). The entrance channels and another new channel were dredged to 42 feet deep to accommodate the largest container ships in the world. A dedicated container wharf eventually stretched for over a mile and was fitted with a dozen gantry cranes to load and unload these mammoth ships.
During this period, as five of the senior pilots retired, five new pilots arrived: Captain Michael Wiegert, Captain Michael Jaccoma, Captain Stephen Robbins, Captain Jonathan Nitkin, and Captain George Laven. All held unlimited master’s licenses in the merchant marine; Captain Laven already had extensive experience piloting his own ship under a federal pilot’s license.
The container port also became the new home for the pilots. After 75 years on south Miami Beach, the pilots leased the easternmost portion of Lummus Island from the seaport, where they built a new station complete with their own boat docks. This site is now recognized as both the geographic and operational heart of the harbor.
As Miami joined the ranks of major U.S. container ports, the cruise industry also continued to expand. Starting with the arrival of the largest passenger ship in the world, the newly retrofitted SS Norway, cruise ships approaching—and eventually surpassing--100,000 gross tons came to Miami every year through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Annual throughput at the Port of Miami today exceeds four million passengers. The pilots who came on board during this latest phase of Miami’s growth were Captain Stephen McDonald, Captain William Reyelt, Captain Stuart Lilly, Captain Michael McDonnell, Captain John Jacobsen, Captain Andrew Melick, Captain Charles Hand, Captain James Harhart, and Captain Mark Schmitt.
The working membership of the group is now 16 pilots, a decrease owing to the fact that the port’s growth in terms of cargo tonnage and cruise passengers is reflected not in the number of ships calling at the port, but rather in the average size of the ships. The Biscayne Bay Pilots may be handling fewer ships than they did twenty years ago, but their shiphandling skills are more vital than ever on the leviathans that now come to Miami every day of the year.
HOW TO OBTAIN OUR BOOK
A comprehensive maritime history of Miami is recorded in the book A Century of Service: A History of the Biscayne Bay Pilots. This fully illustrated, hardcover, coffee table book was published in 2011 in celebration of the centennial anniversary of the Biscayne Bay Pilot Association.
It is also available at the following online resources:
All proceeds from book sales go to a scholarship fund for local minority students attending maritime colleges.