A childhood passion has turned into an esteemed career for Captain Joy Manthey and has helped her evolve into a trailblazer for women in the barge and towboat industries. A young girl with a dream, Captain Joy charted her own course to earn her 100-ton operator’s license at 18 years old and a First Class Pilot’s license on the Lower Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge at 21, a feat most women were not pursuing at the time.
One of her first experiences behind the wheel was when she was 10 years old on the mv. Mark Twain that docked alongside of the Steamer President at the Foot of Canal Street in New Orleans. In a 2023 article in the Waterways Journal, Captain Joy recalled the impact of the experience. “I couldn’t see over the wheel, so I got a steel milk crate to stand on while I steered the boat,” she said in the article. That afternoon behind the wheel solidified what she wanted to do when she grew up, and the following school year when she wrote an essay about her career dreams, she said she “wanted to be a 35-barge towboat pilot and a ship pilot.”
Her teacher didn’t believe her, given positions like that were not traditional women’s jobs. Captain Joy took that as motivation to prove that notion wrong.
And she did.
As soon as she earned her first-class pilot’s license, she applied to be a ship pilot, and in the 1990s began taking on more opportunities to get into the industry, as she told The Waterways Journal, “first shifting towboats from the Baton Rouge harbor and then working line haul for Scott Chotin, moving vessels from Baton Rouge to Freeport, Texas.” She was the only woman.
Her path to where she is three decades later did not come without challenges. During the 1984 and 1998 pilot association elections, Captain Joy ran each time but was not even put on the ballot. Despite this, she continued to gain notoriety in the industry by her presence and diligence to her career as well as the impact she had on those who she crossed paths with.
In her interview with The Waterways Journal, Captain Joy details an encounter on a dock that was similar to what she had experienced as a child. The moment sparked a religious call, one she already had deep inside as a devout Catholic. She entered the Sisters of St. Joseph convent in 1998, took four units of Clinical Pastoral Education and was certified to become a chaplain. It was then that she realized how she could merge her faith with her love for the river. She returned to piloting riverboats and towboats and serving mariners through chaplaincy when she was on the river. She started the Seaman’s Church Institute’s Ministry on the River in 2000 and has continued to grow the reach of the ministry through the years, with training chaplains in both Houston and the New Orleans area.