Back in 1919, after a career spent captaining cargo vessels up and down the West Coast and guiding whaling expeditions in the icy waters off Alaska, Norwegian seaman Jacob Jacobsen was ready to build a new life on land.

He began hustling odd jobs on the Long Beach waterfront. One of those jobs was piloting ships into the city’s fledgling seaport.

It was uneven work at best. Most of the West Coast’s trading activity was centered up north, in San Francisco. Long Beach was a tiny backwater, and Jacobsen received just one or two piloting jobs a month.

Nonetheless, port officials were impressed with the veteran seaman’s maritime savvy. As the port grew, so did Jacobsen’s business.

More than seven decades later, much has changed on the city’s waterfront. The Port of Long Beach is the nation’s busiest seaport. Massive container ships stream in from all over the world, at a rate of more than 400 a month.

But at least one thing remains constant it is still a Jacobsen who controls the port’s piloting business.

Jacobsen Pilot Service Inc. founded by Jacobsen in 1924 and now headed by his son, Dick, who is in the process handing the tiller to his son, Thomas has held the exclusive contract to bring ships to their berths at the Port of Long Beach almost since the port’s inception.

The arrangement couldn’t be more unlike that at the neighboring Port of Los Angeles, where a bitter strike by harbor pilots shut down port activities for three and a half days last week, costing shipping companies as well as the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A temporary restraining order issued by a Long Beach Superior Court judge last Tuesday blocked the pilots from picketing the port’s marine terminals, enabling longshoremen to return to their jobs loading and unloading ships that had been sitting idle at the docks.

By the end of the week, with two management level pilots doing the work of the 14 strikers, activity at the port was almost back to normal, according to spokeswoman Barbara Yamamoto.

The Port of L.A. is the only U.S. port where pilots are civil service employees on the government payroll rather than working as private contractors.

The L.A. pilots members of the International Warehouse and Longshore Union, Local 68 have been without a contract since June 30. They earn a base salary of $113,712 a year, although the city’s generous benefits package puts the value of their annual take to about $170,000, according to Yamamoto.

The pilots are asking for a 72 percent pay hike over the next two years, which would raise their annual salary to $195,000. The city has offered a 17 percent increase over the next four years.

In Long Beach, on the other hand, Jacobsen’s 15 pilots make about $120,000 a year, including benefits. Despite the lower salaries, their shop appears to be free from unrest plaguing their counterparts in Los Angeles.

“It’s a well-run organization,” said Lyle Trottier, a 58-year-old Navy veteran who has been a pilot with Jacobsen for 18 years. “We have a representative on the board at all times. I’ve never discussed anything (with management) that they weren’t open to discussing with me.”

Although the Jacobsen family continues to hold a majority stake in the privately owned firm, the firm’s pilots are each given a small stake upon completing their three-year training period giving them a voice in company affairs as well as a share of any profits at the end of the year.

“Everybody works as a team,” said Dick Jacobsen, 66, who instituted the profit-sharing policy in 1955. “If one of us does well, we all do well. If one of us does badly, we all do badly.”

It’s a policy that has earned Jacobsen the respect of the shipping community, whose captains rely on the pilots to guide them through the narrow channels and often congested waters of San Pedro Bay.

“It runs very efficiently,” said Karsten Lemke, vice president of West Coast operations for Zim American Israeli Shipping Co. Inc., whose ships call at Long Beach. “On the West Coast, they are second to none.”

Under its contract with the port, Jacobsen collects pilotage fees which are set by the port and range from between $1,500 and $3,000 per journey, depending on the length of the ship. The company pays 13 percent of those fees to the port, and the rest goes for operating expenses, including salaries, benefits, and equipment.

Last year, Jacobsen paid about $750,000 to the port.

In Los Angeles, pilot fees are collected directly by the port, which uses the funds to pay for its pilotage program. In its last fiscal year, the port collected $5.1 million in pilot fees from shipping lines, and after paying all of its expenses reported a profit of $468,399, according to Yamamoto.

Next year, the port projects profits of $196,534, under the city’s offer to the pilots of a 17 percent raise over the next four years. The following year, the number would fall to $16,181.

The differences in the two ports’ pilotage programs can be traced to the harbors’ extremely different histories, said Stephen Erie, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, who is writing a history of the city’s proprietary departments.

“L.A. has a history of using municipal employees going back to the turn of the century,” said Erie. “Ports like Long Beach came into their own much later, with a very different set of attitudes.”

Those attitudes persist today, he added.

“Long Beach is a leaner, meaner, much more entrepreneurial port,” Erie said. “But Long Beach does not have the kind of political oversight that the port of L.A. has. In Long Beach, the port is much more autonomous. It’s easier for them to maneuver.”

L.A. Harbor Commission President Leland Wong denied that the Los Angeles was any less efficient than its neighbor to the south, pointing to the port’s recent completion of its Pier 300 complex a $270 million, state-of-the-art shipping terminal as evidence of the port’s ability to get the job done.

Besides, Wong added, “I don’t think you can compare a city like Long Beach to the second largest city in the U.S. The Port of Long Beach is the livelihood of the city of Long Beach. The city of Los Angeles does not totally rely on the Port of Los Angeles.”

Despite the uproar surrounding the pilots strike, most people can agree on at least one thing the pilot’s job is as important as it is dangerous.

Every time a ship comes into harbor, a pilot must travel out in the open sea via speedboat to meet it.

Upon reaching the vessel, the ship’s crew drops a 60-foot rope ladder down the side of hull. Timing his jump carefully, the pilot leaps to the ladder from the bow of his boat, then scurries up onto the ship. Once aboard, the pilot goes to the bridge to guide the ship to dock.

The vessels are often as long as three football fields and freighted with as many as 6,000 cargo containers. Each ship is different, and the pilot must have the skill to bring it through the maze of narrow and often crowded channels in San Pedro Bay.

Jacobsen’s pilots receive at least three years of training which usually follows years at sea in the Navy or merchant marine.

And the company receives a steady stream of resumes, said Thomas Jacobsen, the company’s 33-year-old vice president and grandson of its founder.

“It’s the best job in the world,” said Jacobsen, a former merchant seaman who estimates he’s guided more than 1,500 ships to and from the harbor but now spends most of his time behind a desk. “You’re out on the water, handling different ships. You get to work on ships, and still have a home life.”