McPetrie rules Auckland's harbours

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The harbourmaster is marching up and down the St Mary's Bay foreshore, his polka-dotted tie waving in the sea breeze. "Left. Right. Quick march," he chants, laughing at himself.

James McPetrie is fond of parodying his former self. Long before he became the harbourmaster, he was a captain in the Royal Navy. From the bridge of his frigate, Arrow, he saw a lot of sea. He wears tinted glasses, all the time, because he's "blind as a bat from all those years squinting at the horizon".

Now he sits at his desk in a corner of the police launch base at Westhaven and squints at what might be the best view from any office in the city.

It is a glorious day - the sort of day that makes the harbourmaster glad to be the harbourmaster.

From his office window he can see the Harbour Bridge, the lines of bright white big boats at their mooring and, beyond, the Hauraki Gulf - his watery domain.

On the wall of his office is a laminated Herald poster, a souvenir of the day Mayor John Banks was pulled over by the harbourmaster's vessel for speeding on a jetski.

"Ssh," says McPetrie. "I meant to take that down."

At the time, when asked to comment, McPetrie said, "I couldn't possibly comment". You can take the captain out of the Navy but the "loose lips sink ships" mantra is ingrained.

Partly because it is such a glorious day and partly, I suspect, to stop me doing any more noseying around, he suggests we find a park bench. He likes being outside. He can't think of anything, except perhaps signing timesheets, that he doesn't like about being the harbourmaster.

It must be a very fine job. How much nicer it must be to be able to say to people at parties, "I'm the harbourmaster," than, say, "I work in IT."

Nobody knows what anyone who works in IT does.

Now, what the harbourmaster does ... I admit, I haven't got a clue what the harbourmaster does.

What he does most mornings through the five months of the America's Cup season is prepare briefings for the racers, telling them what the conditions are and whether any special circumstances are likely to turn the harbour into a traffic jam. Yesterday, 250 boats sailing the Coastal Classic were due to leave Devonport Wharf at 10am; the Louis Vuitton racers would be out in the harbour; a northeasterly of 30 knots was forecast.

McPetrie enforced a speed restriction of 10 knots in the harbour from nine until noon.

He's the guy who can slow all boating movement in the harbour, just like that. The harbourmaster is a very powerful man, but he can't control the weather. By Friday morning, that weather has packed it in, just in time for Labour weekend. The Coastal Classic racers leave late; the Louis Vuitton racers don't go to sea at all.

When McPetrie goes to sea, which is often, it's just like the old days - he goes out in a Navy boat and runs what is called "forward command".

In landlubber's terms, this means crowd control. In colloquial terms, it means that if you're going to play silly buggers on his harbour, the harbourmaster will slap you with a fine.

Being the harbourmaster during the America's Cup season is, says McPetrie, "like running a sort of circus. We take a circus out to sea, the circus performs and then we collapse the big tent to bring it home. Basically, I'm the ringmaster."

The ringmaster is one of the cup's biggest cheerleaders - and not just for the reasons you might expect from an old salt.

Before the America's Cup became New Zealand's Cup, being the harbourmaster was a little less exciting.

McPetrie was finding himself increasingly desk-bound, and he didn't have that desk with that view. He was based at Auckland Regional Council headquarters in Pitt St, a terribly prosaic address for a harbourmaster.

But he no doubt kept himself amused there. He has a inexhaustible supply of jolly good stories. His favourites are those which make him out to be a sort of Basil Fawlty of the waves.

Like the one about a mock battle in the North Sea in 1980 where McPetrie's ship "star-shelled" a flotilla of mine sweepers.

So transfixed were the crew and their skipper by the beauty of the night sea lit up by flares that they did not notice a mine sweeper vanishing under Arrow's bow.

A tragic collision was narrowly avoided, he says cheerfully.

And he once almost lost a young cadet "under a taxi". In 1975 McPetrie was an appointer officer for the Navy, responsible for planning the naval careers of cadets.

This particular cadet arrived at McPetrie's office in a horse-drawn brougham and, after his interview, was escorted by McPetrie across Whitehall to meet the First Sea Lord, head of the Admiralty. McPetrie narrowly averted a collision between a taxi and the cadet - a young Prince Charles.

London-born McPetrie joined the Royal Navy - he calls it "the machine" - at 18. He retired 25 years later.

Life at sea, he says, "has its dangers. You can become terribly autocratic. The service is a great life but you do stand apart from civilian life. You become remote from the rest of the human race."

To cure himself he went mini-cab driving in London: "That certainly brought me back to humankind."

He has cast off the autocratic manner of the officer, but he still has the clipped, upper-crust accent of the officer classes. His favoured tipple is gin.

He arrived in New Zealand in the mid-80s with his New Zealand-born partner, started with the Harbour Board as a moorings officer and became the harbourmaster 6 1/2 years ago. The qualifications for the job are a "reasonably phlegmatic outlook on life".

He's now 62, and has swapped being in charge of a frigate for being in charge of a sea area that extends from 12 nautical miles the other side of Great Barrier Island through all the Waitemata Harbour and over to the Manukau Harbour.

He's swapped being in charge of drilled-into-obedience naval ratings to dealing with miscreants on jetskis.

But the jetskiers are much better behaved now. McPetrie says the "testosterone-driven, absolutely lunatic" early behaviour has settled down. When I ask him if he's ever been on a jetski, he says, "You don't want to hear about that."

It doesn't take much to elicit the story, in which he has the starring role as the officer who ought to know better. He and the then-harbourmaster for Lake Taupo decided "before we actually started dealing with jetskis we should have some knowledge of what they were actually like."

The two, highly skilled in water safety, borrowed a jetski, took it out on the harbour, had a bit of a hoon and noticed "it was lurching around a bit and I thought 'well, this is bloody odd. This is a $15,000 machine, it ought to be stable'."

The jetski filled with water. Neither harbourmaster had thought to check that the bung had been put in.

So ... you will find the harbourmaster to be reasonably phlegmatic and quite entertaining - as long as you don't play silly buggers on his harbour over Labour Weekend.

If he catches you, you may well make the acquaintance of that other McPetrie, the autocratic officer.

Further reading
nzherald.co.nz/marine