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Sailing for Sallies
by Debra McQueen
Sailing, it must be recognized, is a man's endeavor. One need only gaze at the
bare-breasted sirens that grace the bows of most tall ships to confirm a long and cherished history of sailing's masculinity.
The boats are female, those who sail them are male. Who but men would think up terminology like wet lockers and whisker poles? Who else would invent things called spreaders, snatch blocks and cockpits? It's a man's pursuit, and the wenches who dare to question that fact may well be labeled mutineers and made to walk the plank.
As a she sailor, I know the perils of which I write. My husband Neil and I live aboard Tranquilo, our 1963 Pearson Vanguard sloop, in the Santa Cruz Harbor.
Together we have the singular, grand aspiration of beginning a two-year voyage on Tranquilo in October 2000, and there are only two things standing in our way. He's a man. I'm a woman.
Ten years ago,
I spent a season crewing on large luxury yachts in the calm Caribbean. The experience didn't translate well to handling a 33-footer on the blustery Pacific.
It took two years of exasperating day sails for either one of us to admit I needed lessons, and Neil couldn't teach me. Most of Neil's sailing experience was gleaned as crew on a race boat in San Francisco and Monterey Bays, where winds often exceed 25 knots, skippers down a few beers before leaving the dock, and sailing wisdom is imparted through shrieks, bellows and insults. Most everything I know I learned in a classroom from instructors who offered encouragement in hushed, respectful tones. I wasn't prepared for Neil's yelling --
"I'm not yelling!"
- or raising his voice
"You can't hear me over the wind unless I raise my voice!"
On a good day, I could chalk it up to our different
learning styles.
On an overcast day with squalls on the horizon, I was ready to jump ship. It was just such a gloomy day, in the midst of yet again contemplating couples counseling, that I noticed a comely little flyer at the end of our dock announcing instruction by Krista Lighthall - sailing for a woman, by a woman.
The phone conversation went something like this:
Me: "My husband and I want to go cruising --"
Krista: "And you need to develop confidence at the helm, right?"
"He's tried to teach me --"
"But somebody always ends up screaming and somebody ends up in tears, right?"
Wow. A woman skipper and a psychic, too.
Krista Lighthall's
been a licensed skipper since 1984 and according to her website (www.lighthallcharters.com) she's successfully taught hundreds of people the pleasure of sailing. She's athletic and youthful, sporting a great
tan and well-developed biceps. Her appearance belies her vast experience as a sailor, and it was easy to feel relaxed around her.
My fellow classmates aboard Navé Navé, Krista's 36-foot Catalina, were
all 40-something women from three distinct walks of life. Nancy hadn't been sailing in 15 years, since the days she and her ex (emphasis on ex) sailed a 16-foot Hobie catamaran together.
Shirley was brand new to boating, and Deb and her husband recently purchased a 30-foot Catalina named (aptly) DebOnAir.
At 33, I was the youngest student, and my goal to cruise to Latin America and beyond
was quite apart from theirs of day sailing.
We had a couple of things in common, though, and the main thing was fear. Not just ordinary, run-of-the-mill fear of the elements, or even the slightly more specific fear of the deep blue sea, but explicit, paralyzing fear, like fear of our partners falling overboard, and fear of not being able to retrieve them if they did. Another thing we had in common was a distaste for being yelled at.
The yell factor was Krista's number one reason for starting a women's sailing class.
"One day I just told myself it didn't have to be like that," she said, referring to the discouraging bedlam that seems so prevalent when women sail with men. In 1996 she started her own business, teaching coed as well as all women's classes. Krista's experience has taught her that women simply learn differently than men, and so she concentrates on catering to her students' particular learning styles.
In 13 hours of lessons, Krista never raised her voice, not even when we sailed out past Mile Buoy into winds that whipped around our heads like a frigid blow-dryer and caused the boat to heel to port -- way
to port. Attempting to mask my alarm with intellectual curiosity, I asked, "Do you have a wind meter? What speed is the wind blowing?"
She smiled. "Yeah, I got a wind meter."
She licked her finger, stuck her hand up in the air and squinted. "About 22-25 knots."
Deb was at the helm, wearing a look of terror that mirrored my feelings perfectly.
"How's everybody doing?" Krista asked.
We looked at each other. Silence.
Now I don't know about my fellow crew, but I'd been trained in the school of hard knocks to never admit to
fear on the water. It was irrational --
"The boat's not going to tip over!" Neil would yell. "There's 5,000 pounds of lead ballast in the keel! It's gonna take more than this little
breeze to knock us down!"
It didn't matter how many times he mentioned those 5,000 pounds, when the boat heeled over so far that the toe rail touched the water, a 48-degree chill ran up my spine that
left me gripping the cockpit coaming with knuckles the color of whitecaps.
"Everybody okay?" Krista asked again.
Then Deb admitted softly, "I'm not -- uh -- exactly -- uh -
comfortable right now."
A chorus chimed from the cockpit, "Me neither!"
"Well," Krista said simply, "you can always head up a little if you're uncomfortable."
We blinked our inexperience in unison.
We cringed. We anticipated her disgust. Instead she just shrugged and smiled. "When in doubt, sheet it out." With one hand, she uncleated the mainsheet and spilled a little of the wind. The change in Deb's expression informed us the boat was instantly easier to steer. Navé Navé also heeled over less, and that meant the rest of us didn't have to clutch the high side quite so dutifully.
Krista managed to be a calm and comforting instructor without coddling us like sissies. She'd go over information with us until she was certain we'd gotten it, using colorful metaphors that seemed tailored
to each of our personalities.
When she was reasonably assured we were going to retain the terminology or technique, she'd say, "Okay, crumple that up and throw it in the trash. It'll come back to you later when you're sailing." She discouraged overthinking, promising that too much contemplation wouldn't do us any good. "Men like to overanalyze sailing," Krista said lightly. "We should just let them."
The rest of the day we absorbed all sorts of skills.
We each took several turns at the helm, gradually increasing our aptitude, confidence and ability to assess when to fall off and when to head up. We piloted the boat on all the points of sail, practiced tacking and jibing (and comprehended the difference), sailed a compass course, and learned how to heave-to, retrieve a man overboard and dock the 36-foot beast in a slip.
Of course there was some good-natured man bashing -- what all-woman's event would be complete without it? As we began the man overboard drills, Krista told us, "If anyone ever tells you to call
them 'person overboard' drills, you tell them this," she said, and we all leaned forward and held our collective breath.
"You tell them, 'No, they're man overboard drills.' Only the man's fool enough to fall off a boat." While we found this hilarious, Krista said in earnest that most bodies retrieved from the water are men with their flies open. Apparently (after one too many pilsners) these unfortunate chaps stumble aft to relieve themselves off the stern. "At the last boat show I went to, I tried to get the Coast Guard to give me an exact statistic," Krista said. "But they just looked at me like I was crazy." And then, as an afterthought, she shrugged. "Men."
To most efficiently retrieve a man overboard, you sail from a beam reach to a broad reach, and thanks to Krista, we understood the difference. On a beam reach, the wind is crossing the widest point of the
sailboat, roughly the middle. But on a broad reach, "the wind comes from the back quarter, which you can remember because it's where the men always want the broads to sit."
On the second and
final day of our sailing lesson, we began by reviewing docking, and then headed out. It was a calm, clear morning, and we observed the wind line about a mile offshore.
As Nancy steered toward it, close-hauled, Shirley and I trimmed the sails in tight. For the first few hours we practiced the same skill set as the day before, each taking a turn at the helm and periodically rotating our positions. When the wind picked up again, Krista taught us how to heave-to and reef the mainsail. Since one of my biggest arguments with Neil has been whether or not we have too much sail up, I took copious notes. I went so far as to fantasize about the first time I would sneak out and put a reef in the sail without even consulting him. Talk about feeling empowered!
We each successfully piloted our way through retrieving our husbands and boyfriends from the chilly water. Depending on the helmswoman, the lifejacket we threw over to symbolize our man overboard took
on a different name. Krista swore that naming the lifejacket increased the success ratio in retrieval, with only one exception.
She'd once observed a student hurl insults at the lifejacket named after her man, and instead of retrieving it, she beat it with the boat hook. "I was glad it was one of my cheaper lifejackets," Krista said. "I didn't want to have to charge her for it."
By the end of that second day, a feeling of confidence and competence had crept up on me, so much so that I almost forgot I'd ever been insecure at all. I found I was utterly relaxed at the helm, steering
through 25-knot winds, and I observed how eagerly my shipmates and I took turns at the wheel. On a course bound for Santa Cruz Harbor, I took a good long look at the shoreline. Squeals of delight from the
Giant Dipper rollercoaster and the smells of fried fish and cotton candy wafted across the water from the Boardwalk. Families were scattered across the beach, and children jumped into the surf and squawked
with pleasure. It felt good to be out there sailing -- no, extraordinary -- and when I looked around the cockpit, the faces of Deb, Shirley and Nancy beamed with the enthusiasm I felt.
And suddenly it occurred to me that Zihuatanejo, Puntareinas, and waypoints further south weren't as far away as I'd originally thought.
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