Dream job: Pilot
Thousands of ships pass through the Kiel Canal every year, making pilots indispensable guides for safe passages. Gerald Immens is one of them. He is living his dream job, which is somewhat different from many other jobs. Why? He reveals it here.
Kiel-Marketing: What does the day-to-day work of a pilot look like?
Gerald Immens: The job of a pilot brings with it one of the biggest challenges right from the start, namely the lack of a fixed working day. This can be compared to the principle of a taxi rank at a railway station. Our pilots are actually always on standby. When there are a lot of ships, we are on duty around the clock; when it's quieter, we spend longer periods at home. This means that the deployment times per pilot can vary greatly. If we have hundreds of ships to look after, it can mean that I'm only on duty once a day. If there are only 50 ships, we experience a summer slump and I have one day on duty and then one day off. So it can happen that I come home and say to my wife: "I'm going to lie down quickly because I'll be needed again soon." The problem in our profession is that the lead time for deployment can be extremely short.
So you need to be very flexible.
Pilotage work requires extraordinary flexibility. Patience and calmness are essential, but they reward you with a very fulfilling job. What I particularly like about my job is that I don't sit at a desk from eight to four every day and that I never know in advance what to expect on the phone or when I'll be called on duty. Every day is a moment of surprise. I meet different people from different countries, and that's exactly what I like about my work: the constantly changing situations and the variety of encounters.
What was the largest ship you have ever accompanied?
My grandma, who was over 100, always had a special way of looking at things. When she heard about a cruise ship, she would ask curiously: "Have you been on it? Was it hard?" She never realised that size doesn't matter. The oldest, most dilapidated freighters are sweaty, the cruisers usually less so.