The pilot boat Pointe de Caux leaves the inner basin at 03:48. The water is flat and the air smells of bunker fuel and wet rope.

Pascal Lemaitre is fifty-one. He has been a Le Havre harbour pilot for nineteen years. Before that, six years as second officer on chemical tankers out of Antwerp.

"You sleep when the tide tells you," he says, zipping a yellow Mustang float coat over a wool sweater. "Not when you want to."

The ship tonight is the CMA CGM Marco Polo, 366 meters, inbound from Tanger Med, drawing 14.8 meters. She is waiting six nautical miles off the breakwater.

At 04:12 the pilot boat noses up under her port-side pilot ladder. The ladder is rope and wood, seventeen meters of it, swaying. Pascal grabs it with two hands and steps off the gunwale without looking down.

He has climbed this ladder, or one like it, somewhere between four and five thousand times. Two Le Havre pilots have died on ladders in his career. He does not talk about that on the way up.

On the bridge he shakes hands with the Filipino master and the Russian chief mate. Coffee appears. He pulls a small Samsung tablet from his coat. It runs a Portable Pilot Unit, fed by the ship's GPS and his own DGPS puck clamped to the bridge wing rail.

“On the bridge he shakes hands with the Filipino master and the Russian chief mate.”

"Slow ahead. Port ten." The helmsman repeats it back in English. The ship begins her turn toward the Digue Nord.

Le Havre pilots are a brotherhood, technically a syndicat, sixty-two of them. They own the boats. They own the station. They pay themselves out of what the ships pay in. A senior pilot clears something north of 180,000 euros a year, Pascal says, but the schedule is the schedule: six days on, three off, called any hour.

The breakwater lights pass close to starboard. He watches the rate-of-turn indicator and the echo sounder. Under-keel clearance is 1.4 meters. The bottom here is soft mud, dredged to minus sixteen, but mud will still stop a ship that touches it.

He talks to the tugs in French on a handheld VHF. Abeille 5 takes the bow. VB Lehavre takes the stern. Their lines come up at 05:01.

"The hardest part is not the big ship," he says. "The hardest part is the small fishing boat that comes out of nowhere at four in the morning with one tired man at the wheel."

He has a daughter in Rouen studying veterinary medicine. His wife teaches at a primary school in Sainte-Adresse. He sees them on the three-day rotations and on Sundays when the tide is wrong for inbound traffic.

The Marco Polo lands at Terminal de France at 05:47. Pascal signs the pilot card, shakes hands again, and goes down a gangway this time, not the ladder. The pilot boat is already waiting.

There is another ship at 07:30, a car carrier from Bremerhaven. He will sleep two hours on the cot at the pilot station between them.

He says the job has changed in his nineteen years. The ships are bigger. The margins of error are smaller. The weather windows close faster.

"A ship this size, you cannot stop it," he says. "You can only guide what is already moving."

He drinks the coffee. He watches the eastern sky go gray over Honfleur. He waits for the next ladder.