Navtech is produced by Colibri Northwest. December 1-2, 2026 in Seattle, WA.
2026 SPEAKER BIOS
Captain Paul Amos
Columbia River Pilots
Paul was born and raised in Denton, Texas. In 1974 he permanently relocated to the Pacific Northwest where he was employed continuously in the tug and barge industry for 16 years. From 1980 to 1990 he worked as captain on towing vessels on the Columbia/Willamette/Snake River system. He has a wide range of experience on various types of towing vessels but the majority of those years were spent on grain barge tows between Portland, OR and Lewiston, ID.
For the last 35 years, beginning in 1990, Paul has been a Columbia River Pilot. As a member of the Columbia River Pilots (COLRIP) he served two years as treasurer and was vice president in 1999. He was re-elected as vice president in 2006. Shortly afterwards he became president and served in that position for 9 years. He was also deeply involved in developing COLRIP’s AIS-based navigation system with the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, MA. He is a past president of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, a past chairman of the Lower Columbia Region Harbor Safety Committee and has served on a variety of industry related boards and committees.
George Burkley
Maritime Pilots Institute
Mr. George Burkley serves as the executive director of the Maritime Pilots Institute (MPI) in Covington, Louisiana and is a partner in LOCUS LLC. MPI specializes in training, research and technical projects for maritime pilots. The institute operates both electronic simulation and physical modelling training and research facilities.
George is a 1989 graduate of the California Maritime Academy and completed his master’s work at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He served as an aviator in the US Navy and sailed for Hawaiian Tug and Barge and Masters, Mates and Pilots as a ship’s officer.
Clayton L. (Clay) Diamond
American Pilots’ Association
Clay Diamond is the executive director-general counsel for the American Pilots’ Association (APA). Prior to that, he served 13 years as APA’s deputy director-associate general counsel. A 1989 graduate of the Coast Guard Academy, he also earned a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a juris doctor from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. During law school, he earned the award for “Highest Proficiency in Admiralty Law.” In addition, he was a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. He is admitted to the Ohio and District of Columbia Bars and is a member of the Maritime Law Association of the US.
As general counsel, he represents pilots and the piloting profession before Congress, federal agencies, and state and local legislative and administrative bodies. He also advises pilot groups and pilotage authorities on operations, practices, business structures, and oversight of pilots and pilotage systems. He has served on more than fifty US delegations to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and currently serves as a subject matter expert on US delegations to IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee; Subcommittee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue; and Subcommittee on the Human Element, Training and Watchkeeping. Mr. Diamond is also an instructor at the Maritime Institute of Technology & Graduate Studies, California Maritime Academy, and the Maritime Pilots Institute, where he teaches courses on the legal aspects of pilotage. As executive director, he manages APA’s office operations, membership services, and administrative activities.
Mr. Diamond regularly speaks on pilotage and pilotage law and has been published in professional trade and law journals, including as co-author of “Unique Institutions, Indispensable Cogs, and Hoary Figures: Understanding Pilotage Regulation in the United States,” University of San Francisco Maritime Law Journal, 2010-11. He was also a contributing author for the book “IMPA on Pilotage” (2014 Witherby Publishing Group), and a contributing editor for a chapter in “The American Practical Navigator – Bowditch” (2017 Lighthouse Press).
In 2012, Mr. Diamond was appointed by the secretary of Homeland Security to serve on the Navigation Safety Advisory Council, a federal advisory committee that provides navigational safety recommendations to the commandant of the Coast Guard.
During his 20-year Coast Guard career, Mr. Diamond served aboard several Coast Guard cutters, culminating with command afloat. During these operational assignments, he was on-scene commander during the early hours of the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, participated in the seizure of more than $300 million in illegal drugs, the interdiction of hundreds of illegal migrants in the Caribbean, and the execution of heavy weather search and rescue cases in the North Atlantic and Bering Sea.
In the legal field, Mr. Diamond served as regional counsel for Coast Guard operations in the eight Great Lakes states, Coast Guard liaison to the State Department (where he was legal advisor to US delegations to IMO), and as the Coast Guard’s legislative counsel. In addition, following 9/11 Mr. Diamond was the first Coast Guard lawyer assigned to support the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Military Commissions, where he served as a special advisor to the DoD general counsel and assisted in preparing prosecution cases for some of the most significant terror suspects in US custody. Mr. Diamond also served on the faculty of the Defense Institute for International Legal Studies where he conducted maritime law seminars in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and was also appointed as a special assistant US attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.
In 2002, Mr. Diamond was chosen by the American Bar Association as the “Outstanding Young Military Lawyer.” Other honors include two Coast Guard Meritorious Service Medals, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the State Department Superior Honor Award and the NOAA General Counsel’s Award.
Mr. Diamond and his wife Sharon have two grown children and one grandchild and reside in Burke, Va.
RDML Tim Gallaudet USN (ret), Ph.D.
Ocean STL Consulting, LLC
The Honorable Tim Gallaudet, PhD, Rear Admiral, US Navy (ret) is the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting where he serves as a strategic advisor for a variety of tech startups, research institutions, and philanthropies. Formerly, he served as the acting under secretary and assistant secretary of commerce, acting and deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and oceanographer, hydrographer, and navigator of the Navy in the Pentagon.
Gallaudet serves on several boards in the ocean, weather, space, and technology sectors, and he is a member of the White House Ocean Research Advisory Panel, recipient of the 2019 Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute’s Champion of the Ocean Award, a fellow at The Explorer’s Club, a distinguished graduate of the University of California, San Diego, and recipient of the U.S. Coast Guard Distinguished Public Service Award. He has a bachelor’s degree from the US Naval Academy and master and doctoral degrees from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, all in oceanography.
Gallaudet’s book about leading NOAA during President Trump’s first term is titled Holding Fast in Heavy Seas: Leadership for Turbulent Times and will be published by Koehler Books in the Fall of 2025.
Jon Kjaerulff
MITAGS
Jon obtained his first license (as a Danish yacht master) at the age of 17, and subsequently attended the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York. After graduating in 1983, he sailed in positions from deckhand to master aboard ships and workboats all over the world. After running a support vessel during the Exxon Valdez cleanup effort in Prince William Sound, Jon came ashore and founded Fremont Maritime Services in Seattle, Washington. Over the next 27 years, Jon established a reputation as a pioneer in the field of maritime safety, survival and firefighting training.
His company was one of the very first organizations in the US to obtain Coast Guard approval for STCW Basic Safety Courses, and from 2003 to 2015 Fremont Maritime was the only private company utilized by the US Navy to provide marine firefighting training to its military sailors. Over the years Jon and his team worked with tens of thousands of inland and offshore mariners, providing training not only at Fremont’s school in Seattle, but at customer locations in Alaska, Oregon, California, Florida, Europe, Australia and the Caribbean.
When MITAGS established the Pacific Maritime Institute in Seattle, Jon worked to forge a strong working relationship between the two schools.
In 2017, Fremont Maritime was purchased by MITAGS, and Jon came aboard as a marine safety training and business development specialist. At the beginning of 2021, he took over as director of business development.
Captain Wesley Moore
Sabine Pilots Association
Wesley Moore is the current presiding officer of the Sabine Pilots Association, with more than a decade of service maneuvering all manner of oceangoing vessels upon the Sabine-Neches Waterway. Wesley is also the chairman of the American Pilots’ Association’s Navigation Technology subcommittee.
Before joining the Sabine Pilots in 2011, Wesley enjoyed a successful career at sea following his 1993 graduation from Texas A&M University in Galveston. Most of his time at sea was aboard tankers trading along the Gulf Coast, East Coast, Caribbean, and through the Panama Canal to the West Coast. During this time, he worked for various companies, rising to the level of master mariner and captain within Chevron’s fleet, where he also completed special assignments for the company ashore.
In conjunction with his professional pursuits, Wesley has a keen interest in technology and all things computer related. His background in coding and logic systems fuels his passion for both hardware and software, prompting his wife to jokingly refer to this affinity for adopting new technology as ‘Early Adopter’s Disease.’ This passion for technology and innovation has enabled him to assist in advancing the use of portable pilot units and other real-time navigational tools within the piloting community, both locally in his branch and nationally for other pilot groups.
Born and raised in the shipping town of Port Arthur, Texas, Wesley grew up immersed in the maritime industry, its history, and its progress.
Peter Philips
Colibri Northwest
Peter and his team work with transit agencies, municipal administrators, elected officials and associations to develop policy, communicate policy to stakeholders and successfully implement public policy in the field. Areas of particular expertise include marine transit policy, industrial and urban land use, print communications and public relations. Peter has more than 40 years of experience in maritime publishing, conference production, industrial and marine lands policy, and advocacy for the maritime and commercial fishing industries. From 1999-2020 Peter was president of Philips Publishing Group and publisher of Fishermen’s News, Foghorn and Pacific Maritime Magazine, monthly magazines for the commercial fishing, marine transit, and maritime transportation industries.
Brian Tetreault
Woolpert, Inc.
Brian Tetreault is navigation program manager for Woolpert, Inc. Previously he was the marine transportation system program manager for the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). In that role he acted as senior USACE advisor to the US Committee on the Marine Transportation System (CMTS) and USACE liaison to the US Coast Guard.
In his nearly four decades of work in the maritime world he has sailed on various Coast Guard ships on all the Great Lakes, as well as the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. He has been a vessel traffic services (VTS) officer and managed the USCG national VTS program. He has worked on projects to develop and implement navigation information systems, including the establishment of both the USCG and USACE automatic identification system (AIS) networks, and innovative use of AIS to communicate navigation safety information.
As the author or co-author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers, he’s given numerous presentations on his navigation services work; served as US representative to several international navigation-related technical standards bodies.
A graduate of the United States Coast Guard Academy, he also studied at the US Naval War College and the University of Washington.
He was once a country music DJ for a radio station in Alaska, writes a weekly blog about a Canadian crossword puzzle, and can recite the alphabet backward. He lives in Baltimore, MD with his wife Nina and two cats, who are also Orioles fans.