A sailor is grateful for her fellow bold sailing women.
Issue 143: March/April 2022
It was mid-March in Rock Hall, Maryland, and boaters were emerging from hibernation to prep for the upcoming season. Our newly acquired Beneteau 411 was sitting on jackstands near the docks, having recently completed its sea trial. My husband was painting the hull while I spruced up the interior. Our teenage son was oiling the teak trim.
Needing a break, I descended the ladder and met a woman passing by named Teri. She and her husband, Craig, had sold their sizable horse farm in Canada and had bought a gorgeous 2011 Hunter 50 CC. They had purchased it virtually, via the Internet and a FaceTime tour, and now were busily outfitting the boat. Teri invited us to their renaming ceremony planned for later that afternoon.
“So nice to see another woman here,” Teri said. “It’s mostly been guys working on their boats. They tell me their wives aren’t into sailing; one guy said his wife divorced him because of it.”
Illustration by Fritz Seegers
This wasn’t a new refrain, and while I’ve wondered if there weren’t other untold factors at play in these stories, it brought to mind a recent conversation I’d had with a woman who fit this description. She had harped about her husband’s boat, calling it his mistress because of the amount of time he devoted to it.
Then there was the sleek black racing yacht that my husband had pointed out last fall, its glossy hull inscribed with the name Widow Maker. We had laughed, assuming that the owner’s sailing passion might leave his partner feeling like a widow. It called to mind Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Harp Song of the Dane Women” that begins:
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
Told from the perspective of the women whose Viking mates each spring would “steal away to the lapping waters,” the poem’s speaker laments the loss of the men who would rather go to sea than enjoy home with its creature comforts and domestic pursuits.
Admittedly, recreational sailing bears little comparison to the wild and woolly lives of Viking men. But I couldn’t help thinking that women like Teri and me are more like the men of the poem than the bereft women left at home; unlike some, we understand the draw of the water and the desire to escape from everyday routines.
Even as I was mulling these thoughts standing in the marina, our two-story brick colonial was 94 miles away on a wooded acre, the demands of its annual spring cleanup unmet as we drove happily to Rock Hall to prep our boat for the season instead. The maintenance requirements of a 42-foot sailboat—all to get her out on the blissful water—were deeply appealing compared with the “home-acre” and its endless chores.
Later that afternoon, we gathered to rename Teri and Craig’s boat, and we all toasted as Sanctuary was laid to rest and Cala II was initiated. The champagne flowed freely.
As we hung out afterwards talking and sipping, I met another kindred spirit, Liliia, who was there with her husband, José, and their two daughters. They were preparing to sail south on their Hunter 34. Liliia was describing how they had hiked to Mt. Everest base camp with a baby and toddler.
Here I sat, in the cockpit of a gorgeous yacht, meeting fascinating, ambitious people, while a crimson sunset graced the Chesapeake sky. Surely we aren’t the Dane women, I mused. You know what? We are the sane women! A counter to Kipling’s first stanza came to mind:
What is the lure, you Home-maker
O laundress, maid and baker
When you could go with the Spinnaker?
The next afternoon, Teri stopped by to chat. We glanced across the boatyard and saw someone in a bosun’s chair high up the Hunter 34’s mast.
“Is that José up there?” Teri wondered. But a couple of hours later, when I bumped into Liliia, she set me straight.
“That was me,” she said. “I wasn’t strong enough to hoist him, so I went up instead.” And in true “sane” woman fashion, she added, “At first I was scared, but then I looked around…and wow, what a view!”
Lisa Livezey is a freelance writer and spiritual blogger who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, but escapes whenever possible to sail the Chesapeake Bay or to kayak in Maine. Her spiritual musings can be found at: likeagree¬nolivetree.blogspot.com, or read her devotionals in Strength and Grace magazine, published by Guideposts.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
