After freezing dead Somali pirates running ports company will be plain sailing

Times

18-07-2025

Clearing a food freezer for the bodies of dead pirates isn't a typical day at work for most people. For Captain Susan Cloggie-Holden, it was a grim necessity while sailing off Somalia, and just one of many 'salty sea tales' from a career that has taken her around the world.
A passion for messing about in small boats on the River Clyde as a teenager morphed into supporting peacekeeping operations in hostile seas, as well as being chased by elephant seals on a remote island in the South Atlantic.
Thankfully the 42-year-old did not inherit the seasickness that made her father feel queasy, even when using the Renfrew ferry.
Cloggie-Holden has just become the first woman to be group harbour master at Peel Ports Group after a decorated career in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA).
In the RFA she was also the first female to become a commanding officer when in 2021 she took charge of Tiderace, a replenishment tanker for Royal Navy warships.
Raised in the Drumchapel area of Glasgow, Cloggie-Holden found her calling when she joined the Sea Cadets in Clydebank.
'Pretty much every summer I used to spend on boats somewhere,' she said. 'I think I gave my parents an easy ride because they didn't see me all summer, I'd come home, get my washing done, pack my bag and go off again.'
A two-week stint on the tall ship Stavros S Niarchos as it sailed from Greenock to Aberdeen cemented her ocean ambitions.
By her fifth year at Bearsden Academy she had decided against university and was set on going to Glasgow College of Nautical Studies to prepare for a life on the waves. The choice between Royal Navy and merchant navy came down to practicalities.
'I'll be honest I don't like sharing toilets and showers, I quite like my own space,' Cloggie-Holden said.
'I spent about three days on HMS Somerset and absolutely hated every minute of it because there was 27 people sharing the same space and I had a locker the size of a kitchen drawer.
'So I thought maybe I don't really want to live like this.'
While the RFA is staffed by civilians it provides support to the navy and its vessels have defensive weapons.
Cloggie-Holden was on ships that supported operations against the Taliban in 2001-02, worked with the Iraqi navy in 2006-07, engaged in counter-piracy off Somalia in 2008-09 and supplied Royal Navy vessels off the coast of Libya in 2011.
In the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen and Somalia, she was tasked with communicating with vessels that were being approached by pirates.
'They used to attack at sunrise and sunset and we found that having a female voice on the other side of the [radio] was actually quite calming for the crew of the merchant vessels,' she said. 'I used to chat to them, tell them what to do, how to evade the pirates.
'One of the warships that was out there, they boarded a vessel and the pirates basically pointed guns at them. The Royal Marines, as you can imagine, don't like having guns pointed at them.
'We ended up taking the pirates on board, we had two dead ones and nine living ones on the ship and took them into Kenya.
'I was telling someone the other day, we just had to clear the freezer and put two pirates in it and then we had to do a burial at sea.'
Cloggie-Holden acknowledges life at sea can be dangerous, but says one trip, from Plymouth to Florida, in December 2011 was her worst.
She said: 'We got absolutely battered. We had a storm from pretty much every direction as we crossed the Atlantic.
'We were taking damage, a wave came over our poop deck and ripped loads of guardrails off, we lost some mooring lines, it flooded a few cabins, we lost our port-side navigation lights one night.
'Nothing got done on that ship on the way across, we just had to protect our people and get across there as quickly as possible.
'It's probably the only time at sea that I thought 'this is a little bit hairy, this is not very comfortable'.'
Travelling the world, Cloggie-Holden often came up-close-and-personal with wild animals in their natural habitat. While sailing around the island of South Georgia, she and her crew saw penguins and were chased by elephant seals.
'I think when you're at sea you see things that you take for granted,' she said.
'More stars than you will ever see when there's any sort of light pollution. Just sitting on a flight deck at midnight you see that sort of stuff — like dolphins, whales, flying fish, plankton blooms.'
The maritime industry is still very male dominated — one report by the International Maritime Organisation suggests women account for just 1 per cent of seafarers. But Cloggie-Holden is working to change that. In 2021 she received the Merchant Navy Medal for her efforts to improve the gender balance in the industry.
Cloggie-Holden says she had to work harder to prove herself in her early days. One incident, when a senior colleague made a lewd comment in a bar suggesting her most recent promotion was because she was a woman, stands out.
'I said 'you can do one',' she recalls and there was an apology to her about the incident the following morning. But the onlookers in the bar who didn't know her might have taken the words as true and 'that's the comment that females at sea don't need'.
Having achieved the dream of becoming a captain of a vessel her more recent RFA work included being captain of port operations. That meant auditing ports around the world where the Ministry of Defence has an interest and the switch opened up the possibility of more time spent on dry land.
There was also a 'huge' change going on in her personal life at that time, as her husband Peter Holden, a retired RFA captain who previously commanded the helicopter training vessel Argus, became seriously ill with cancer.
He died in February and Cloggie-Holden said: 'He knew I was coming here [to Peel Ports].
'He said it's the best decision you've ever made, and actually I had a new adventure ahead of me.'
The Peel Ports role, where she will oversee the operations at Clydeport on the River Clyde, the Port of Liverpool and London Medway, is exactly that, an adventure. As the person in charge of all maritime operations such as vessel traffic, navigation, safety, security, harbour services and pilotage it is not going to be a 'cushy nine to five job'.
'I've got enough working life left in me that this is a second career. I've had my career at sea, this is now my career in ports,' she says.
Outside work she has taken up curling and is soon to try padel.
She added: 'I've decided in life since I started with Peel, since I lost Peter that I'm just not going to say no to anything new.
'So when someone says 'Do you want to go and do that?' Yeah, let's do it.'