Waitemata's wavemaker

By WAYNE THOMPSON

The ship's wheel was taller than she was and as she grabbed its spokes a passenger yelled through the open wheelhouse door: "By God, are they letting a woman drive?"

It was the 1980s and Sally Fodie was breaking into a man's world - the Auckland waterfront, the domain of tough old salts and superstitions that a woman on board courted calamity.

"Oh, I'm not doing it," she replied, pointing to another steering station aft, "a man back there's doing it."

Sally Fodie was determined to succeed and she did ... as the North Shore Ferry Company's first female deckhand, mate and skipper.

She earned the respect of her shipmates and passengers in a workplace where one's mistakes are witnessed by a big audience, and crashes into a wharf are reported in the papers.

Twenty-one years of safely navigating the perils of the busy harbour and taking responsibility for thousands of lives every week have passed since a nervous former nurse first turned up for work in blue overalls and struggled with the heavy mooring ropes and sceptical attitudes.

"I have loved doing it and enjoyed the people and events on the harbour," Captain Fodie said on Friday, her last day at the job.

She and husband Tony intend opening an antique shop in the north Otago tourist resort of Omarama - a 90-minute drive from the nearest sea breeze.

It is a return to home ground for the couple. She nursed at Oamaru Hospital for 13 years before they came north with their daughter Deana on a working holiday.

The Waitemata Harbour and its ships fascinated her and in 1981 she took a summer job as a hostess on the Te Kotuku which served Pakatoa Island resort.

Her interest in ship-handling compelled her to seek a place as deckhand with several companies, but North Shore Ferries was the only one interested in giving a woman a trial as crew.

Part of the job was learning how to throw a loop of line on to a wharf bollard. When she missed, she endured a grumpy skipper, abuse from passengers and applause from sailors heading back to Devonport Naval Base after a night on the town.

"I knew if I survived the first few months it would be all right," she recalls.

Command of the big, old Devonport ferries, Kestrel and Baroona, came after three years of honing her ship-handling skills in sole charge of the Stanley Bay launch Glen Rosa, and gaining her Master of a River Ship ticket.

"The Kestrel was heavy and hard work and the Baroona was twin- screw but underpowered and you could get her in irons, too."

Berthing the Kestrel at Devonport Wharf was a horrendous task, executed with a little prayer when an ebb tide and a strong westerly wind astern were pushing the 160-tonne vessel at alarming pace.

Completing a tense morning of crossing the harbour in a pea-souper fog, without hitting a freighter or going to the wrong wharf, also gave her a feeling of satisfaction.

Unlike the radar-equipped ferries in service today, the Kestrel's only aid for a skipper was a compass and a foghorn.

Despite the intense concentration and cool judgment required of a skipper, Captain Fodie still kept a kindly nurse's eye on some of the elderly passengers and made many friends.

Harbour events and colourful characters were the source of poems and recollections in a book Waitemata Ferry Tales, produced in 1991 with illustrator Jim Storey.

Further reading
nzherald.co.nz/marine