ITS 2026 – Arie Nygh presentation

SeaWays Advisory was proud to take part in ITS 2026 in Gothenburg, where Managing Director Captain Arie Nygh joined a panel of international experts to tackle one of the most important questions facing the towage industry today: how do we bring pilots and tugs together to deliver safer, more efficient port operations? Held on 20 May, in Gothenburg, Sweden, the panel discussion, Pilot & Tug Integration: Enhancing Operational Readiness and Safety, drew leading voices from across the maritime sector and was moderated by conference chairman Edwin Lampert.
Captain Nygh shared the stage with Patrick Everts (KOTUG International), Capt. Mustafa Sökükçü, Ph.D. (Maritime Pilot and Independent Researcher), Aileen Van Raemdonck (European Maritime Pilots’ Association) and Jos Moens (Trelleborg Navigation & Piloting) — a line-up that reflected the breadth of expertise now focused on closer pilot–tug collaboration.

Captain Nygh used his time on the panel to focus on two themes close to the heart of SeaWays’ work. The first was training. While the industry has evolved and matured significantly, he argued, there is still a long way to go in ensuring tugs are utilised to their full design capabilities — safely, effectively and cost-efficiently. Achieving professional towage outcomes, he noted, demands a holistic approach in which the training of tugmasters and their crews is central.
He pointed to a striking observation from his mentor, Captain Henk Hensen, who is on record that omni-directional tugs are generally utilised to only around 60% of their design capability — largely because of poor training.
Time and again, Captain Nygh said, towage companies invest heavily in the latest and greatest tugs and pour money into technology, only to scrimp on the training their crews need to operate that equipment to its full potential. Just as important, he added, is training pilots in the “Effective Use of Tugs”, so they have the knowledge to draw the best from the tugs under their command.

Captain Nygh’s second theme was best practice in risk mitigation and operational efficiency. Through professional training, he explained, pilots and tugmasters must develop a shared mental model — a common understanding of what a specific towage movement requires, and how, as a team, they will work together to achieve it.

That means recognising the tugmaster as an extension of the pilot’s Bridge Resource Management (BRM) team. The ship’s officers are an integral part of that team, but the tugmaster is a critical member of it. Tugmasters are intimately familiar with what is normal during a towage movement and are often the first to notice when things begin to deviate from plan — putting them in a strong position to alert the pilot and support a safe outcome.

To illustrate the point, Captain Nygh shared a real-world example. In one port where SeaWays had introduced tugmasters as part of the pilot’s BRM team, a pilot was incapacitated, collapsing on the wing of the bridge at a critical moment in the operation. The tugmasters stepped in and:

• turned the ship away from a certain allision;
• calmed the ship’s captain so he could respond and stop the ship’s engine;
• arrested the ship; and
• held it in place until support could be mustered.

Technology, he noted, reinforces this teamwork rather than replacing it. Advances such as SafeTug — which mirrors the pilot’s Portable Pilot Unit (PPU) in the wheelhouse of the tug — give tug crews the same situational picture as the pilot, strengthening the BRM concept still further.

“World-class tugs and technology deliver their full value only when matched by world-class training and genuine teamwork between pilot and tugmaster.” — Captain Arie Nygh, Managing Director, SeaWays Advisory

Across both themes, Captain Nygh’s message was consistent: world-class tugs and advanced technology deliver their full value only when matched by world-class training and genuine teamwork between pilot and tugmaster. It is a philosophy that sits at the core of the SeaWays approach — investing in people, and in the shared systems that connect them, to turn capability into safe, efficient and resilient port operations.

In addition to his panel participation, Captain Nygh also presented a paper to the conference: Beyond bollard pull: a whole-system approach to escort towage