My sailing skills developed alongside my partner’s. We went to sailing school together for my 40th birthday. We bought our first, second and third sailboats together, and he was with me nearly every time I sailed for seven years. And then, he wasn’t.
We shared a home for eight years, navigated a blended family with three teenagers, and owned a small cruising catamaran on the coast and a Hobie Tandem Island on our local lake. We shared a dream to sail our catamaran down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) to the Bahamas when the kids went to college.
When we split, he was disenchanted with sailing, and he was disenchanted with me. How would I continue sailing without him? Whether death, divorce or disinterest causes a sailing partner to stop sailing, many of us face the loss of our most familiar sailing partner at some point on our journey. Does the loss end the sailing journey? Not necessarily.
It was clear he didn’t want to be responsible for our cruising catamaran, so I got the cat. He got and sold our Hobie. This was mostly uncontentious, in our case. I found myself with a boat on the East Coast and a shattered dream to sail to the Bahamas together on that boat. What did I do? I moved to California, naturally. And then what?
WAIT
I allowed myself to delay my decisions about selling the boat, or not. Finances allowed me to keep the boat for a while and decide whether I could continue sailing on the boat we bought together. I prepared to sell the boat without returning to her, which included taking pictures and finding a local boat broker…just in case.
I asked a friend to help me move the boat to the marina where I would store her until I sold her or sailed her south. I moved the boat for the first time without him on it, and I tucked her away nicely in dry storage. I then drove cross country to heal and punted any decisions about sailing on that boat into the future. I looked at California boats for sale online as I drove cross country, but I knew I was a one-boat woman.
BE CREW
When I arrived in California a few weeks after storing my boat, I was already desperate to go sailing. Serendipitously, I was near San Francisco and all its sailing opportunities. I’d never raced before—even had an active disdain for racing. If I wanted to go fast on a boat, why would I choose a sailboat? Still, I wanted to sail, was thousands of miles from my own boat, and many boats in yacht club races need crew. I sent a few emails to the yacht club race contacts listed in the Latitude 38 magazine race calendar, and I received more invitations to join racing boats than I could accept. Apparently, I was going to start racing.
To my surprise, I LOVED racing in these friendly beer can races. Sometimes I raced on different boats in different places three or four times per week. I did this for about eight months as I considered what to do with my own boat. In that time, I became a better, more competent and more confident sailor. I learned to step onto any boat, in whatever weather, and play the team sport of sailing. I experienced boat mishaps that I’d always feared, and no one got hurt. We won races and lost races. I trimmed more sails in those several months than I had trimmed in the several previous years on my own cruising boat.
Meeting sailors also brought me invitations for fun daysails, and I did my share of these as well.
VOLUNTEER
In California, I found a few ways to volunteer as sailing crew, mostly to help get people sailing. First, a friend and I organized some sober sails on her boat for people in recovery from addictions. This turned out to be the most rewarding sailing I did in the Bay Area. On the first sail, during king tides, we faced some unusually strong current on the way back, and we ran aground in mud at low tide just a few feet from the slip. We spent an hour playing games, laughing and waiting for the tide to rise. This was my first grounding, and it wasn’t the nightmare I feared. When I later spent time in Southern California, I volunteered with Challenged Sailors taking people with disabilities sailing in specially designed boats in San Diego Bay.
GET CREW
As my confidence that I wanted to sail on my own boat to the Bahamas grew, I was pretty clear I did not want to do the journey from New England to the Bahamas completely solo. So I started recruiting crew to join me. I limited myself to friends and family members, some had sailing experience and some were inexperienced. My shortest crew committed to just a daysail with me, and my longest crew members stayed for three weeks. About eleven people said they would crew, and nine actually showed up at the boat at different times. Two people had to cancel their plans. Some of them returned up to three times for different parts of the journey.
GO SOLO
Although I was grateful for the crew willing to join my journey, I did not want to get stuck because I couldn’t move my boat without crew. When I launched the boat in New England after a year in storage on the hard, I decided to sail solo in the familiar waters for a few weeks before heading south. The day I left the dock solo for the first time, there was a gentle wind pushing the boat off the dock. It was as if the universe was saying, “It is time for you to go.” So, I went. In those first few weeks, I anchored, grabbed mooring balls and docked solo for the first time. For a few days, I just motored from place to place. Then I started lifting sails—first one at a time. After a few weeks, a gentle northerly breeze on a beautiful summer day again said to me, “It’s time to go south.” My first solo sailing with two sails went from Narragansett Bay to Block Island. This was the first of many day hops toward the Bahamas.
CONCLUSION
Looking back, there are a few things I did with my former partner that helped me prepare for sailing on without him. First, we shared responsibilities on the boat evenly. We had all the same sailing certifications and learned our cruising cat together. We happened to buy a small catamaran that is well designed and rigged for single handing, but neither of us sailed her without the other until recently. Although we had different strengths, we both could do all the major jobs onboard. Still, it was easy to fall into doing the jobs that suited our strengths. At one point a few years ago, I realized I hadn’t docked in a long time, and we rectified that. I did not want to be a boat owner who couldn’t dock the boat.
The summer before I stored the boat, when it was clear our partnership was failing, I practiced single handing with him on board. On these days, I instructed him to sit still unless life or boat were at risk while I did everything. I’m grateful for a challenging time I had practicing grabbing a mooring ball solo the first day. Our pendant was tangled around the ball, and I had to find a way to grab the ball and untangle it solo. I managed it, we survived. We didn’t sink and I didn’t hit anything. Each challenge brought me a bit more courage to continue.
Six months after leaving the Narragansett Bay solo, I motored from Florida across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas with experienced sailing friends for crew. My sailing dream survived, even though my sailing partnership did not. I spent two months cruising the Bahamas this year. Now my sailing includes adventures on my own boat, daysailing with people with disabilities in San Diego and occasional adventures on other boats. After living for several months aboard, I’ve learned I’m a happy part time cruiser. When I’m not sailing, you can find me on my RV, usually parked in the California mountains dreaming new sailing dreams.
I am sailing on, sometimes solo. So can you, if you want.
