Retirement time for Whangarei Harbour stalwart Bill Evans

Whangarei Harbour has plenty of moods and when 80-yearold local tug master Captain Bill Evans retired recently, after 53 years on these waters, he reckoned he’d seen all of them. Bill claims proudly the record of being the only person to have skippered every single vessel ever owned by, first, the Northland Harbour Board, then Northland Port Corporation and, finally, North Tugz. Watercraft of every description are in Bill’s DNA. He grew up on Houhora Harbour where his family had always kept boats. His great-grandfather had emigrated to New Zealand from the UK in 1860 and had set up a chain of family-run gum trading stations across the Far North, using a schooner to transport kauri gum to Auckland and return goods up the coast to his trading sites in the Far North.

So it wasn’t really surprising when young Bill decided to build a boat after leaving school and then went fishing three or four years later. In May 1967 he applied for a position that had opened up in Whangarei – work-boat master with what was then the Northland Harbour Board.

And so started an association with Whangarei Harbour that continues to this day, despite his retirement as tug master recently.

In his first years with the Harbour Board Bill skippered a wide variety of craft; dredge tenders, the survey boat, work boats and the pilot boat all came under his command at one stage or another. Even the oil-spill barge. He skippered vessels involved in the development of the Whangarei Town Basin and marina, and marinas at Kissing Point, Parua Bay and Tutukaka, as well as projects up in the Bay of Islands.

He trained as a tug operator on Harbour Board’s original four large tugs; Herekino, Waitangi, Parahaki and Raumanga.

In the early 80s he was appointed skipper of Whangarei Harbour’s pilot boat, the Manaia.

“The VIPs we hosted on that boat!” he exclaims. “There were dozens of them, from the Governor General and ambassadors to New Zealand, all the way through to government ministers, mayors of Whangarei and city dignitaries. I remember at one stage a Minister of Transport quizzing me about pilot boats and how they operated.

“Hosting people on the water was a real big deal back in then. It’s not like that now.” When the Harbour Board became Northland Port Corporation Bill stayed on with his precious floating charges operating the new voith tugs, Reinga and Awanui. He remembers clearly a “very basic” Town Basin and inching construction vessels under the spans of Whangarei’s Canopy Bridge while it was being built. “A lot of that thing was built from the water!”

The Whangarei Harbour of today is a very different place to what it was in the 60s and 70s, Bill says. Part of that is because that is when the harbour was being developed. “We were on the go all day, every day building, developing, creating. There was a lot of commercial traffic - Portland in particular was very busy. There were colliers coming in with coal from the West Coast of the South Island, butter ships exporting dairy produce to the UK, fertiliser ships, cement exports. And in the 1970s the logs started, building up in volume gradually over the years.

He has vivid memories of the spectacle created by the annual Whangarei to Noumea yacht race in the 1970s, with hundreds of yachts gliding around the start line near Marsden Point.

In 2003 Bill joined what had become Whangarei’s commercial tug operator, North Tugz, and was soon on the bridge of some very different beasts to those he had trained on.

With such a maritime background it comes as something of a surprise to learn that Bill was also a passionate aviator. Not only did he like to fly planes, he also liked to jump out of them.

“All that pretty much came to a grinding halt when I got married.” He chuckles at the memory. “My wife said she wasn’t keen to become an aviation widow and I was pretty-much grounded!”

Bill plans to spend his well-earned retirement with grandchildren, helping on the avocado orchard he bought more than 20 years ago, now operated by his youngest son and spending time back on the family farm in Houhora where it all began. He and his wife Isabel have three other children, two sons and a daughter, living elsewhere in NZ and in Australia.