Hannah Barton Dartmouth Lower Ferry
31-year-old Hannah Barton has been working on the Lower Ferry since September 2015. She’s now just a couple of months away from officially being the first ever woman to drive the historic vessel.
Hannah certainly doesn’t have far to walk to work each morning. She can feel the vibrations of the ferry docking from her living room! “It has its advantages,” she says with a cheeky smile. “You can get up with 10 minutes to spare and be home with a drink in your hand five minutes after you finish.” Hannah’s cosy apartment overlooking Bayards Cove does have some disadvantages though; “I couldn’t ever pull a sickie - the boys would be able to see me watching TV!”
It soon becomes clear that Hannah loves to be as close to the water as possible. She always played on boats when growing up, regularly taken on trips to Fowey from her family home in Cheshire. “It’s all Dad’s fault, he got me and my two sisters into it,” she says. Her eldest sister went to the Mediterranean to set up her own boat charter company, the other is an oceanic geologist. Hannah spent her first four years away from home in a narrow boat. Soon after she came to Dartmouth to work on the passenger ferry. But she says she always had her eye on the Lower Ferry; “When I first saw it I thought ‘I want to drive that thing!’ There’s nothing like it in Britain, maybe even the world.” She soon got cracking with that dream and joined the crew nine months ago.
Her main place of work is at the yard down at Old Mill, where she fits out the floats (where the cars sit) and rebuilds the tugs. She works on the ferry as much as she can covering holiday and as there are 16 river staff there are quite a few holidays to cover. Hannah doesn’t seem at all fazed that she is the only lady on the crew; “the team themselves are fantastic, they don’t treat me any differently, which I love.” She says being a woman helps when it comes to dealing with music festival goers who’ve had a few too many; “They can, perhaps, see the ferrymen as a threat but it’s surprising how much a lady can achieve with a cheery smile!”
Hannah has been in the wheelhouse steering the council-run ferry for a couple of months now, but she’s not yet qualified to drive alone. She already has her boat masters licence, but everyone has to have 200 supervised hours before they can legally take control. Hannah says she has had the odd ‘interesting’ comment from customers; “People definitely do a double take when they see me in the tug. So far I’ve overheard ‘are we safe?’ ‘Well done to her, getting on in a man’s world’ and ‘Is she competent!?”
Hannah says it is much trickier than it looks; “Most people on the water use the tides to help them but in this job you have to work across the tide and when you’re moving 70 odd tonnes, there’s no room for error. You’ve only got one chance when you’re coming into the slipway and the scaffolding by the old Royal Dart in Kingswear has made it even harder. The guys I work with are amazing, they could do it with their eyes closed, I have a lot to learn from them.”
The deck job is a little more straightforward; “There’s a saying on the ferry” laughs Hannah “that ‘if you can count to eight and open the gate you can do the job’ (the ferry holds eight cars) but each day really is different. There are the people who try to drive off the side of the ramp. The day-trippers with Higher Ferry tickets who can’t tell they’re on a different ferry to the one they came over on. The other day one man drove on perfectly then, for no apparent reason, he turned and bashed into the side! (I think he was looking at the view.)” Hannah has also conveyed women in labour whose husbands ask if she can speed up the trip over the water. She loves watching the waterborne wildlife too; the birds, seals and dolphins, “There’s usually someone on the ferry that has never seen a seal. They rush to grab their phone or a camera, or tell their children to come and see. It pleases me every time.”
So what does this water-loving lady do in her spare time? “Don’t laugh but I row! I probably spend 80% of my time on the water.” Hannah says she’s worked out that two of her colleagues have done about 24,000 sea miles; “Not around the world you understand - just between Dartmouth and Kingswear! I hope that will be me in years to come.”
First published in By The Dart July 2016 issue
