The ice pilot
Andrew Leachman built a career navigating the treacherous waters of the Southern Ocean. He speaks with Charles Anderson about his life at sea.
Every day, the 14-yearold boy would take the basket of cod livers and dump them into a steam boiler. It was as bad as it sounds. Every day for 16 days aboard the fishing trawler he would repeat the task – boiling up cod livers to separate the oil from the muck.
When he returned from the sea and trudged back home to his mother, she ordered him to take off all his clothes. There was no way he was coming inside the house smelling like cod.
His father worked in a shipyard, building trawlers. His grandfather worked as an engineer, on trawlers. His whole town revolved around fish cakes and kippers, fish and chips. Grimsby, on England’s east coast, was a fishing town.
You didn’t get the chance to go to Cambridge University. It wasn’t that kind of place.
So Andrew Leachman went to sea. But after two weeks of shovelling cod livers, he thought there had to be a better way to earn a living.
It was a realisation that would lead him around the world, captaining ships across vast oceans, through treacherous waters. It would put him in command of the New Zealand Government’s research vessels, navigating them into the deep south on a path to becoming one of the country’s only ‘‘ice pilots’’. Even now, Leachman is in demand – tasked with helping negotiate the huge tracts of sea ice around Antarctica.
‘‘I couldn’t see that future ahead of me,’’ Leachman says from his home in Nelson. ‘‘I didn’t have the maturity to do that visualisation.’’
But now, after more than 55 years at sea, Leachman is coming to terms with the impending prospect of retirement.
‘‘You get to my age and the realisation comes that you can’t keep doing it,’’ the 70-year-old says.
‘‘You need to be fit and strong to do that job. I will have to. It will break my heart but I will have to do it eventually.’’
On the walls of his hallway are the reminders of a life on the ocean. There are photographs and old qualifications, port holes and nameplates from ships he has captained. On his bookshelves are tales of triumph and woe from early explorers.
There is his tenor saxophone – the one he knew he had to have after listening to old records of classic players – Coltrane, Ben Webster. The same one which he once played to penguins on the shores of Antarctica.
‘‘They are all bricks in the wall,’’ he says. ‘‘They all add up to who you are.’’
At 14-years-old, all he knew was that he needed an education. So he went a nautical college and got his university entrance.
Then Leachman became an officer cadet and jumped at the first job he could find, one with the New Zealand Shipping Company. There he transported New Zealand’s goods to the world – beef, mutton, lamb. On one trip he came here, to Nelson, to pick up a shipment of apples.
‘‘When I arrived it looked like no one was working. Everyone was playing rugby. It seemed like the best place I’ve ever been to.’’ Nelson was no Grimsby. So he decided that he would one day live here. It took another qualification and the spotting of a job ad in Timaru that would seal the deal.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries research vessel, the James Cook, needed a mate. At the interview, Leachman was asked where he was from. He told them he was from Grimsby. It might not have been ideal for a 14-year-old boy with big dreams, but it still had a reputation. He got the job. That was 1973 and Leachman has been here ever since.
He went all around the country fishing for research, carrying out surveys of scallop and oyster beds.
‘‘They would say what they wanted and I would go out and catch it.’’
He had 10 days as a first mate before the captain went on leave and Leachman had to take over. He was 27.
Then in 1991 there were plans for a new research ship to be built in Norway. So Leachman flew there, inspected the vessel and drove it all the way home. It was the Tangaroa – New Zealand’s only ice-strengthened deep-water research vessel.
Leachman spent 20 years as the skipper of the Tangaroa. He went as far north as New Caledonia and as far south as you can go – Antarctica.
‘‘I loved it. I like the challenge. It was exciting. There was always new stuff to learn.’’
But it was high-risk. On one trip Leachman was close to Cape Adare in eastern Antarctica in shallower waters of about 500 metres. The residual swell in the Southern Ocean is about six metres but if you put a strong sou’-west wind on it the waves can stand up.
‘‘It wasn’t a rogue wave. It was a rogue hole,’’ Leachman says. ‘‘The ship went all the way down.’’
It was submerged – all 2800 tonnes of it – juddering as it slowly emerged. ‘‘That one gave me a turn.’’ A life at sea might seem incompatible with raising a family but Leachman and his wife had three daughters. His contract with the ministry’s successor, Niwa, meant for every six months at sea he had six months at home.
‘‘So while most fathers would come home from work, I was already there. I was the only father that went on mother help on school camps. I would collect them from school and go biking with them. It worked very well.’’
Leachman ‘‘retired’’ five years ago when he turned 65 but he was only home about two months when he got a call.
In 2011, the Navy was investing in two new 22m, 1600-tonne ships to venture into the Southern Ocean to combat illegal fishing. They wondered if Leachman would be able to inspect the HMNZS Wellington to make sure they were up to scratch, particularly for handling the notorious pack ice.
He did the job and came back with some suggestions. Then the admiral asked him if he would like to go with them.
‘‘I wasn’t ready to retire,’’ Leachman says. ‘‘I still loved it, I would have done it for nothing.’’
So he went back to sea, this time as an adviser.
The ships weren’t icebreakers, they were ice pushers. Briefing the officers on the dangers, Leachman shared horror stories about ice piercing hulls and warned them on how much the vessel could handle before that might be their fate.
But as they headed further south there was no ice.
‘‘It was flat ass calm. No ice. They must have thought I didn’t know what I was talking about.’’
Then, a few days later, a weather bomb hit. A short while earlier they had seen a small yacht sail past. It wasn’t on any of the reports – it had sneaked in.
They were north of Ross Island, home to Mt Erebus, when the barometer dropped straight down. The wind snapped up to 100 knots.
Leachman advised the crew to stay put in the area where there was no ice.
The small yacht, they would learn, was called Berserk and belonged to a group of selfproclaimed ‘‘vikings’’ from Norway. They were intent on reliving their national hero Roald Amundsen’s journey to the South Pole in 1911. But this time they were doing it on quad bikes.
HMNZS Wellington radioed the Berserk to warn them of the impending storm. There was no reply. Then, about eight hours later, they got a mayday call. But the Wellington was facing the full brunt of the weather and was in no position to respond until it had cleared. They searched the area but there was no sign of the yacht or the three on board. Only an empty liferaft was found.
It was February 22, 2011. Due to the patchy communications in the area, the crew would learn in bursts of the devastation unfolding in Christchurch, which was home to many of them.
Leachman isn’t sure if a call to the ocean comes from one’s DNA.
He knows what he loves about it, though. The dawn and dusk, and being able to judge the weather by the morning cloud.
‘‘It’s not a career, it’s a life choice,’’ he says.
He loves the family you create aboard a ship. The people around him have made his job easy, he says. And although that pressure of retirement is there, Leachman still feels he has a contribution to make.
Acquiring experience of the Southern Ocean is difficult. The seasons are short – from the end of November to early March. Most of the Navy officers who make that trip usually only do it a few times before being promoted. Leachman has done it every year for nine years.
‘‘You accumulate all the things you need to know.’’
But he also says it’s a privilege to do the work. He has seen Mt Erebus on a clear day – blowing out ash from more than 600km away. He has seen humpback whales breach only metres away.
‘‘They will pop up and do a bit of a blow and you get whale snot all through your beard. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it lights my candle.’’
Leachman has been married 50 years and has been gone almost 25 of them. But he says his wife likes the arrangement.
‘‘It’s probably why we have been married so long,’’ he says.
So there is no pressure to come home. Not yet. But he will, he says. Eventually.