Women at the Helm

Caribbean Travel & Life, January 1999

Copyright 1999, Dale Leatherman

"Something is terribly wrong," I said with mock solemnity."

    "Oh," Holly Davis responded, her smile wavering. The pleasant young woman had just introduced herself as our captain/sailing instructor, and had not expected trouble so soon.

"This marina’s in the wrong place," I explained. "It’s embarrassing for an all-woman sailing trip to originate in a place called Fat Hogs Bay."

    Holly shouted with laughter, startling a resident pelican from his perch, and the rest of us joined in. The ice, as if any could survive the heat of a Tortola summer day, had been broken.

"Then let’s go sailing!" she said, hopping aboard the Czech Mate, the 44-foot Beneteau that was to be our home for the week.

    Womanship, an all-woman sailing school based in Annapolis, Maryland, had brought five of us together in this ill-named harbor on an otherwise idyllic island, the largest landfall in the British Virgin Islands. Eighteen years earlier Womanship founder Suzanne Pogell tested these very waters with a few all-woman liveaboard classes. The response made her quit her day job. Today Womanship has schools in a dozen locations and flotillas to exotic places such as Greece and New Zealand.

    Holly’s new crew ranged from 39 to 50-something in age: a teacher from Maryland, a psychologist from New York; a photographer from Virginia; and yours truly, a writer specializing in adventure travel. We had common goals: to learn to sail, and to have a let-your-hair-down, forget-the-makeup good time in a beautiful setting. Womanship had promised: "Nobody yells, everybody learns"; it said so right on our t-shirts. . . .(more)