Cal Maritime Ship simulator brings sailing scenarios to life

Ship simulator brings sailing scenarios to life

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, August 28, 2009
A 360-degree simulator at the California Maritime Academy... A radar display on the bridge gives the position of a lar... California Maritime Academy students monitor a radar scre...

A mariner was at the helm of a powerful, 100-foot-long boat one morning last week, zipping along at 2o knots on a routine trip up San Francisco Bay just past Angel Island, when without warning a huge storm struck.

There was driving rain and the waves must have been 50 feet high.

"Hold on," said Capt. Patrick Moloney, a veteran ship's master, and everybody in the wheelhouse of the boat held on for dear life as the boat seemed to buck and jump and heel over dangerously.

Actually nothing moved at all. The wheelhouse of the boat, the helm, the radar, the fathometer, the radio barking out messages, even the water of the bay and the passing scene were all an illusion, part of a $15 million ship simulator at the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo.

The storm was also an illusion, created to test how men and women who run big ships and harbor craft react in an emergency.
A range of conditions

Bringing on nasty weather is part of a whole bag of dirty tricks - from oil spills, ships in distress, engine failures, storms, fog, collisions and other disasters - that instructors at the maritime academy can serve up at the click of a mouse.

The illusion of movement is so good that even old sailors are fooled. The trick is a three-dimensional screen that surrounds the navigating bridge controls. "The people with the most (sea) experience get seasick first," said Capt. James Buckley, who runs the simulator program for the maritime academy.

"Your eye and your inner ear tell you the ship is moving even if it isn't," said Moloney, the executive director of the state pilot commission.

There are two large simulators at the academy's campus on the Carquinez Strait. The smaller of the two can be used to mimic a tug or any vessel up to 100 feet. The larger one is laid out as the navigating bridge of an 850-foot-long container ship.

The programs are set up so that one simulated vessel can react with the other. The smaller boat can come alongside the simulated container ship in the bay and then follow it up, say, the Oakland Estuary and mimic a tug pushing the larger ship into a dock. That way the operator of a simulated tug can work with a ship pilot docking and undocking a simulated ship.
Many training uses

The simulators have many uses - from a basic tool the academy uses to teach ship handling to students who enroll in the academy's four-year courses to advanced training exercises for tug skippers, apprentice ship pilots and master mariners.

"We can train people in emergency procedures," said Buckley. "Say you are a tug operator and you are working a ship into a dock and you lose one engine. This means you lose some of the maneuvering characteristics."

A mistake can be serious when a tugboat is working to move a ship as long as a high-rise building is tall into a tight space. A mistake can cause a ship to hit the dock, run aground, or collide with another ship. A mistake can result in a wreck, an oil spill or an explosion. On a real ship, mistakes are costly. On a simulator, they are lessons learned.

There can also be the unexpected. On one trip, a submarine suddenly surfaced directly ahead of the simulated vessel.

The simulator can be used to train for emergencies, but it is also used to evaluate mariners training to be ship pilots. Trainees, who have to be experienced ship's officers just to apply for a pilot's job, have to pass a number of tests, including sessions on the simulator.

"It is an opportunity to see how someone reacts under stress," Moloney says.

Ship handling is an art, involving moving steel vessels worth millions of dollars, displacing thousands of tons of water in and out of narrow channels. It involves an understanding of relative motion and judgment. Not everyone can do it.

Moloney says pilot trainees are graded on a pass/fail system. Do mariners ever fail?

"Oh, yes," he said, "Oh, yes."

E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.

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This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle