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Come sail away! Wind, water and thrills—a sister gets her sea legs during the Black Boaters Summit - Living well: travel

Susan McHenry

I'm no natural-born sailor. I was raised in the landlocked South and didn't see the ocean until I was 17. The boat I knew best was a little dinghy owned by a man named Mr. Friendly, who would take me and my siblings fishing on the Mississippi River cutoff at Tunica each summer. But during my adolescent years in Kentucky, my church or the local Black newspaper occasionally sponsored cruises on the Ohio River aboard the historic Belle of Louisville, so I've always associated boats with Black folks and good times.

Perhaps it was the memory of that floating party atmosphere that induced me last year to try bareboat sailing on a catamaran with the Black Boaters Summit (BBS) in the British Virgin Islands. Organized by Chicago-born "Cap'n Paul" Mixon and his wife, Doris Grant, it was not your typical Caribbean cruise. In bareboat sailing, the passengers are the crew. We lived in close quarters, taking turns cooking meals, maintaining the vessel and navigating. We sailed where large ships couldn't--secluded coves and out-of-the-way marinas.

To prepare, I enrolled at Steve and Doris Colgate's Offshore Sailing School at the South Seas Resort on Captiva Island, Florida (see sidebar). I'm directionally challenged; in fact, if I didn't have a scar on my left hand from an accident at age 2, I would never have learned to distinguish left from right. So learning the starboard side of the boat (right) from the port side (left) was no small hurdle. But I cleared it and even earned my basic keelboat certification from the United States Sailing Association (the equivalent of getting your learner's permit to drive) in just three days. When I went home, I got more practice at the school's New Jersey branch.

There are many more things to coordinate on a boat than in a car. At the helm, you're not only guiding the boat's direction but you're also constantly communicating with crew members about adjusting the lines that control the sails. It's a team effort to harness the power of the changeable wind. Working lines, canvas and tiller in beautiful synchronicity offers a tremendous sense of empowerment. Under full sail, you're one with the wind and the water, the sun warming your skin, the tang of salt spray on your tongue. It's thrilling!

You also come to realize that in a few seconds of lost concentration you could miss a change in the breeze or the water current, a squall on the horizon or another vessel in your path. Suddenly, instead of skimming the glassy surface, you could be struggling with the deep, dark world of potential disaster.

Still, I felt pretty comfortable on deck by the time I got to the Virgin Islands. Four of the 20 captains in the BBS flotilla were Black women, among them my own skipper, Brooklyn-born Valli Cook (Cap'n Val, never Captain Cook). Cap'n Val is a college administrator in New York, an experienced sailor and a member of the Coast Guard auxiliary.

Filling out the crew on the boat I sailed on were Ron Bush, a former Army communications officer who is now a systems analyst in Newport News, Virginia; Beverly Fountaine, a retired Atlanta schoolteacher, and her best girlfriend Ayishah Lewis-Shabazz, a natural-hair-care stylist; and Bill McKissack, another former military man who is now an information-technology manager in Washington, D.C. All of them were sailing novices.

We were blessed with fair weather and a decent wind. Our challenges really had more to do with the forces of human nature than with the forces of Mother Nature. Before we had even left the dock, Ayishah fell, requiring an emergency-room visit on the island of Tortola, where she received several stitches above her eyebrow.

The flotilla set sail from Tortola. Cap'n Val took the helm and Ron, Bill and I handled the on-deck sailing chores. Ayishah and Beverly served as galley crew and helped navigate. I soon found out that I just didn't have the upper-body strength to help the guys pull out the mainsail, so I kept busy tailoring (attending the lines) while they struggled to hoist the sail.

Our most frightening experience occurred on the third day as we were headed for Norman Island (the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island). One of our former military men (I won't say which one) got a little puffed up at the helm and thought his navigating sense was better than Cap'n Val's. He insisted on making a turn she had advised against, and 20 minutes later, nothing around us looked like anything on the maps. We had that helpless, sinking feeling of being utterly lost. The atmosphere became tensely quiet as we scanned the horizon looking for something familiar. Someone finally realized that we had circled all the way back to Tortola! We didn't anchor at Norman Island until the last light of day. (Face saver: We weren't the last boat in the BBS flotilla to arrive in the marina.)

SAILORS BOOT (OR TOPSIDER) CAMP STEVE AND DORIS COLGATE'S OFFSHORE SAILING SCHOOL has several locations: Florida (Captiva Island, Duck Key and St. Petersburg); New York City; Jersey City; Newport, Rhode Island; and the British Virgin Islands (Prospect Reef Resort on Tortola). The Learn to Sail programs include three to five days spent learning to handle the unsinkable Colgate 26, a 26-foot sloop used to teach sailing at the U.S. Naval Academy. There's a two-hour written certification exam on the final day.

COST: $895, not including accommodations.

For more information on the sailing school, call (800) 937-2451, or visit offshore-sailing.com.

ESSENCE editor-at-large Susan McHenry lives in Brooklyn and sails with the Offshore Sailing School Sail Club in Jersey City. Her all-woman posse calls itself Wine, Women and Sail.

ESSENCE contributing writer SUSAN MCHENRY tells us about her boating adventure as a crew member aboard a catamaran in "Come Sail Away!" (page 172). McHenry gets her mettle from her mama--a "highly motivated" woman who visited Egypt, China and even Antarctica in her sixties and seventies. "In my favorite picture of my late mother, she is dressed in a bright-red hooded parka and stands amid Antarctic snowdrifts with about a dozen penguins--she looks so cute!" she says.

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