Berthing behemoths

For 23 years, master mariner Joanne Farmer was the only female port pilot in New Zealand.

- ALEX STONE

Imagine being put in charge of a vehicle weighing more than 100,000 tonnes, possibly carrying dangerous cargo, valued in the many millions of dollars. Among other things, you're tasked with parking it neatly, without damage, in almost all weather conditions, including the notorious Lyttelton Harbour southerly gales.

Doing this involves an intricate foxtrot (one-two-three, one-two-three) between you and two tugs via shared VHF radio, pushing and tugging at a behemoth with inertia or momentum of a scale bigger than most people can wrap their heads around.

That's the every-working-day life of Joanne Farmer, one of five port pilots at Lyttelton and, for 23 years, the only woman in the country to hold this role. Recently, Holly Clayton, in Auckland, has joined her in one of the last male bastions.

How is this so? Surely a woman's touch can be just as delicate, and accurate perhaps more so - as a man's on a ship's wheel? Farmer has no ready answer to this conundrum. But looking at her career so far - her extraordinary dedication to it, and all the sacrifices it has entailed - perhaps explains it.

To become a port pilot, you first need to be a vastly experienced master mariner.

Farmer spent 17 years at sea, working her way up from a sea cadet apprenticeship to achieving a foreign-going master's ticket. She worked as a ship's captain for five years. Her first command was a freighter servicing the Colombian Coffee Growers' Federation, carrying thousands of bags of coffee. Then she helmed freighters carrying packaged timber from British Columbia, Canada, across the Pacific to Japan.

This was when she decided it was about time to come ashore. "I had been spending eight months away every year." But what job gives you both shore and ships? The latter is one of Farmer's primary loves. The former is Lyttelton, where she was born and still lives in the same street, across the road from her parents' home.