Many cruisers start part-timing when commitments to career and family tie them to a home base. It’s either squeeze in cruising in drips and drabs or not go at all. “Part timing was our way of cruising for our first twenty-three years,” say Bev of Cloverleaf. “We had five children, so cruising was limited to school vacations, sometimes with slight extensions on our part, when we preceded the kids and stayed on after they went home. This all required good help at home and in Dave’s business, as well as good communication capabilities.” Knowing they could be reached in an emergency allowed Bev to “extend the leash,” and when time ran out, they left the boat wherever they were and then resumed their cruise at the next opportunity.

These days – thanks to email, sat phones, and in some places Internet and Skype via WiFi or cellular broadband – onboard communications has advanced sufficiently to let would-be cruisers lengthen that leash even further, particularly from work. After all, in an era when so many people are working from home, why shouldn’t home be a boat?

“Do the math, though, in terms of how much you must use the boat to justify the expense,” advises Bev. “We figured we had to use the boat three months minimum or it was cheaper to charter. With chartering, you don’t waste time prepping to go or putting the boat away, both of which are a lot a of work, and, although there are restrictions on where you can sail and maybe not so homey a boat, you do get to jump around to different cruising grounds.”

Of course, many people come to part-timing at the other end of their cruising career. Suzanne and John of Zeelander found that after their circumnavigation, they were ready for ‘home comforts’ but unwilling to totally give up the cruising lifestyle. “So, we turned ourselves into ‘snowbirds’, cruising the Caribbean seven months, then enjoying all the modern conveniences, culture and family visits of shore life during the five months of hurricane season. It works out beautifully. Just when the constant boat chores, stuff breaking yet again and small spaces threaten to close in on us, in mid-May we fly home using frequent flyer miles earned by buying all that expensive boat stuff and eating local dinners out. In mid-October, when the air starts getting nippy and modern USA life starts to feel too frantic, we’re more than ready to fly back to warm climes and a simpler lifestyle.”

Some cruisers make part-timing part of their long-term cruising plan. “One reason I love cruising,” says Kathy of Hale Kai, “is the flexibility and variety it gives my life, and for me that includes taking time off the boat each year.” Kathy uses her time off for inland travel – such as hiking the Inca Trail and back-packing South America, or visiting places she’s not likely to sail herself – like the canals of France, trips often made in the company of cruising friends! She also takes time off be with family when they need her. “People worry that cruising away will make them unavailable to their families, but I’ve found it to be the opposite. As a cruiser, I am actually more able to drop what I’m doing and respond to a protracted call home than most people would be.”

Like many cruisers, Don and I started part-timing when we took a season off to be on hand for our grandson’s birth, something we’d promised Don’s daughter before we left. She and I did have a heart-to-heart before we headed across the Pacific about when a “convenient window of opportunity” might be! I can’t tell you how many cruisers in the Pacific we’ve encountered who’ve had to fly back to the US for weddings and births smack in the middle of the short cruising season. How inconsiderate! It may be unrealistic to expect landlubbers ever to accommodate us, but it certainly won’t happen if we don’t educate them.

Of course, many cruisers part time, because they must work to replenish the cruising kitty. Jane of Lionheart, for example, and her husband, after two seasons out from New Zealand, have slipped the boat in Mooloolaba and taken full-time jobs they hope will fund their round-the-world ambitions. Robin of Whisper and her husband – fortunate to have skills that eased them through visa obstacles – worked three years in New Zealand, for both the income and the experience of working overseas.

When you come “home” to work or visit regularly, as we chose to do with our growing grandson, there are a variety of complications that you encounter. Not only must you find a secure and affordable place to leave the boat for an extended time, but on the home end, it’s hard to avoid acquiring a place to live, a car, phones, etc. and the recurring payments that come with them. This virtually doubles your living expenses. If you don’t have your own shore base and stay with family and friends, you’re limited to what stuff you can schlep around in a suitcase and sleeping in strange beds.

Part-timing also adds complications to your strategic planning. “Now that we have a house,” says Mary of I Wanda, “we plan our cruises based on when we DON’T want to be at it.” For cruisers with homes in America’s south, that means cruising elsewhere during hurricane season, while for those from the north, it usually means getting out of winter’s cold. Full-time cruisers have to plan around seasons, too, of course, just without as much of the storage, insurance and travel costs and without, as Kathy of Sangaris notes, “the significant time and effort each commissioning and decommissioning cycle takes.”

Part-timing can also leave you feeling “less connected to the cruising community,” as Debbie of Illusions notes, when full-time friends move on without you. SSCA (Seven Seas Cruising Association) dubs members who live ashore part-time “Rear Commodores”, which is surely meant to be respectful to retiring cruisers, but somehow rubs the wrong way. As Mary of Camryka, whose husband is approaching 80, says of part-timing at their new house in Bocas del Toro, “The transition is difficult, maybe because it makes us know the years are adding up far too fast.” Staying within a cruising ground they know and love, Mary and Carl alternate between the house and boat in shorter stints.

Practically speaking, the best cruising destinations for part-timers are ones that afford realistic travel home – Maine, the Bahamas or the Caribbean for East Coast sailors and the Pacific Northwest and Mexico for West Coast sailors. Although some do it, the South Pacific is not a great choice because of the distances involved, the paucity of storage options, customs limitations, and the fact that off-seasons in New Zealand or the Marshalls offer attractive cruising in their own right. On the other hand, after several seasons each, both Mary of I Wanda and Katherine of Sangaris would recommend the Med as made-to-order for part-timing. “You simply haul out your boat at the end of the season, return to the US, and in doing so avoid the annoying alternative of spending a significant part of the year wintering at dock on a sailboat in the cold.”

Contributing Admirals: ; Beverly Feiges, Cloverleaf, Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; Debbie Leisure, Illusions; Sheri Schneider, Procyon; Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Mary Verlaque, I Wanda; Jane Kilburn, Lionheart; Robin Owen, Whisper; Katherine Briggs, Sangaris.

This article was published in the September 2009 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles (on this website)

• Home for the Holidays (Admiral’s Angle column #16)
• Keeping a Home Back Home (Admiral’s Angle column #13)

But interestingly, what really struck me about the reports my Admirals sent me, is to what degree planning is counterbalanced by whim. Cruisers tend to start out with a plan to go to the Caribbean, Mexico, Europe or around the world, but very often plans get radically changed or even abandoned. In fact, a plan is very rarely ONE plan. Ask almost any experienced cruiser where they’re headed, and you will find they have an alphabet soup of plans, “Well, plan A is to do this, BUT Plan B is that and Plan C might be this other.”

“Being an indecisive person,” says Kathy of Hale Kai, whose primary cruising ground is the Caribbean, “I love the cruising lifestyle because we have such flexibility in our decisions about where to be, and I love the Caribbean because we can so easily bounce from English, to French to Spanish cultures. We often don’t plan our season all that far out, and our itinerary is not always logical. We might sail to Venezuela to rendezvous with friends, then back north to Martinique to buy wine, or pop over to Fajardo to get boat supplies from West Marine. What plans we do have are always ‘carved in jell-o.’”

A more extreme example of cruiser spontaneity is the itinerary of Katherine and Craig of Sangaris, writing me from Siracusa, Sicily. After the initial draw of climate and good sailing in the Caribbean, Katherine and Craig pushed through the Panama Canal to the Pacific, where they first went south to Ecuador where a daughter in the Peace Corps gave them an inside track on inland exploration. Then they went north to Mexico where they had an offer to care-take a friend’s house while studying Spanish. Later, while sitting at a dock in San Carlos, Katherine read an article about Europe, and like that, she asked Craig if he wanted to do a trans-Atlantic crossing. He said “sure,” and they started planning their next journey from that day forward! They spent two years traveling the British Isles exploring their own English, Scottish and Irish roots, and now they are cruising the Med, where their course has been crafted by interest in historical and cultural sights but also by economics. “The Med is an expensive place to cruise,” Katherine says, “but, as a destination, Siracusa has proved ‘molto bene,’ because it’s been our cheapest winter storage yet in Europe, with a very well-protected harbor/anchorage for our before and after storage prep, and an interesting place with Greek and Roman ruins, bustling piazzas and an international group of 12+ cruisers to keep us happily distracted!” Along with good food, that pretty much exemplifies typical cruiser criteria!

When cruisers aren’t couples, they often shift their itineraries to accommodate interests of the crew they’ve recruited. Rachel of Ventana was accommodating crew when she changed her own plans of heading east across the Atlantic when she took on Norwegian Elizabeth who wasn’t interested in backtracking to Europe. Sufficiently interested in the Pacific, Rachel simply changed directions, and the two women have dived their way across. Although Rachel has the final say in planning, when the two women disagree on smaller-scale decisions about when and where to go, they have been known to determine their course “based on the outcome of a backgammon game.”

Even cruisers who do have carefully thought-out long term cruising plans temper them with flexibility. “Randy and I are both planners,” says Sheri of Procyon, from Tasmania “We like to know where we are going tomorrow, next week, next month, next hurricane season and even the next few years. We like warm weather so try to stay ahead of cold seasons, and we fly home at least once a year, so need to know we’ll be in a safe place to leave the boat. Planning well ahead allows us to make high season reservations for marinas, flights and even special events like the Christmas concert and New Year’s Eve cruise we did this year in Sydney. However, we usually have multiple plans on the table at any given time, and having plans doesn’t mean we don’t change them. For example, we’ve enjoyed Australia so much; we think we’ll add another year here!”

Although cruisers love the variety and flexibility of the cruising lifestyle, they often contradict that by falling in love with a place and never leaving, or by leaving and then coming back over and over. Mary and Carl of Camryka chose the Rio Dulce in Guatemala as their first major destination because circumnavigators they’d met said it was their all-time favorite place and they’d read a magazine article describing all its remote wonders. “We wanted to see it before it spoiled. We stayed a year, and when we left, we left reluctantly, convinced we had seen the best first but feeling we really should see what else was out there.” They went back to the US for a bigger boat, spent several years in the Caribbean between Trinidad and Curacao, before the draw of Central America kept “pulling, pulling, pulling” them back.

There was one other random factor that cropped up in almost every report to a degree I really hadn’t quite anticipated. But I should have, because it has been a major factor in our own cruise. Betsy of Salsa summed it up best. “We often go where we go because of friends, cruising friends. Maybe they’ve told us about a secret, beautiful cove with a path through a Tarzan-ish jungle to a secret pristine beach.  Perhaps it’s an inland trip, like the trek on the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu that several friends told us about or the Venezuelan eye clinic another recommended where I had my eyes lasered at a fraction of the cost of doing it in the U.S. But more often, it’s that we take off to meet cruising friends at some sweet place – Glover’s Reef in Belize, or The Basin up the New Meadows River in Maine, or between the Pitons in St. Lucia or …..”

Contributing Admirals: Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; Katherine Briggs, Sangaris; Sheri Schneider, Procyon; Jane Kilburn, Lionheart; Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Yvonne Katchor, Australia 31; Rachel Emery, Ventana; Debbie Leisure, Illusions; Mary Verlaque, I Wanda; Susan Richter, Wooden Shoe; Terri Watson & Kimi Harrison, Delphinus; Betsy Morris, Salsa; Ellen Sanpere, Cayenne III; Karyn Ennor, Magic Carpet.

This article was published in the April 2009 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles (on this website)

• How We Choose Where We Cruise – Part 1 (Admiral’s Angle column # 32)
• How Yvonne Chooses Where We Cruise (Women and Cruising blog)

Many single female sailors I’ve met were once part of a cruising couple where the partner is no longer in the picture.  Debbie of Illusions, for example, did not become a single-hander by choice.

Her husband died unexpectedly leaving her with a difficult decision: either learn how to continue on her own or give up the boat and move back to Missouri.

When Joy faced divorce from her husband thirty years ago, she wanted their cruising boat. “In my mind there had always been ‘two captains,’ although I doubt he shared this concept.  Not many did back then. But, I had the buy-out money and the perseverance, so eventually, painfully, I did end up owning Banshee on my own.”

Marjetka signed on for a three-year circumnavigation adventure with the male owner of 26’ Little Mermaid, but after 30 days sailing around Europe he wanted to cancel the deal.  Marjetka was so angry, she impulsively bought him out and, despite having little sailing experience, continued across the Atlantic on her own.

And when her former husband lost interest in sailing and their cruising boat sat unused on the dock, Sherry got involved in local racing, eventually buying her own race boat Fast Lane and putting together an all-woman crew. “It took several years and a few hundred races, learning all the tactics and rules the hard way (by making mistakes), but I eventually ended up with the fastest boat and the best women’s crew in all of our women’s racing circuit.”

None of these women set out to be pioneers.  They didn’t sail on their own to make a statement.  They just wanted to keep sailing when, one way or another, their men failed them.

Other women start from scratch. Kiwi sailor Jackie of Soulmate got the bug as a youngster when she co-opted her father’s sailing dinghy.  “I used to take off sailing all over the place on my own, which caused my parents no end of worry.” Focused on having her own cruising boat someday, Jackie put her head down and built up and sold two businesses to raise the capital needed for the boat that now carries her around the South Pacific.

More typically, women evolve into owner-operators when various trial experiences don’t prove satisfying enough. “When I turned 50,” says Rachel of the CT 47 Ventana, “I decided to take a year or two off and cruise on other people’s boats, combining the two things I enjoy most, traveling and sailing. I answered ads for crew and ended up sailing for two years on four boats. The first three were all skippered by men, and in each case I experienced problems of being continually propositioned. I finally found a boat with a couple aboard who simply wanted help sailing their boat from Thailand to South Africa. A very pleasant year, but their style of cruising was not really mine. I came to feel that I would have to be extremely lucky to ever find a boat cruising the way I wanted to cruise with a man whose propositions I would welcome.”  Instead of giving up, Rachel took the big step of buying her own boat.

On the other hand, it was purely a taste for adventure in general that motivated successful professionals Linda and Dee to buy the Liberty 49 Serafin.  They divided up the duties they’d have to learn and subsequently cruised together for several years.  When an onboard fire stopped their cruise short, they shipped the boat to Ft. Lauderdale for a refit.   The refit sapped Dee’s commitment, but Linda, not ready to quit, has since sailed the boat back through the Canal and across the Pacific, using fellow cruisers met in Mexico for crew.

Single-handing is a lot of work. It means 24-hour watches under way and doing both the “blue” AND “pink” jobs every boat demands.  Most of the single-woman sailors I’ve met do sometimes use crew, particularly for passages.  Leery about using unknown pick-up crew, most women turn to friends, friends of friends, or boyfriends.  But sometimes that complicates life more than it simplifies it.  Men tend to develop what Joy calls the “rooster complex … they just can’t resist taking over,” while, as Linda has recently experienced, others can’t handle taking direction from a female which turns help into handicap. It can also be emotionally disruptive, as when Marjetka’s friend flies in from Norway.  “First I look forward to seeing him, then I fret about him being in the way of the way I do things. When he is here, he helps me get so much done on the boat, but then he is gone again, and I am lonely where I wasn’t before.”

Marjetka and Debbie, both sailing small boats, point out that single-handing as a woman can be very isolating, as they are often odd person out in the anchorage.  Says Debbie, “Since there are few single women and most couples socialize together, I find myself on my own or hanging out with the “guys” (male single-handers).  I pay my own way at happy hours and group dinners and don’t expect to be treated any different from any of the other guys.”

An alternative to being lonely or depending on men who may have other agendas is taking on another woman as crew.

Rachel of Ventana met Elisabeth, a young Norwegian, in Panama crewing on a German boat transiting the canal for the South Pacific. The boat was Elisabeth’s fourth boat with a male skipper.  Over a casual conversation on the vagaries of crewing for single women, a mutual friend mentioned Rachel and that she’d recently been through two disappointing crew. Elisabeth sought Rachel out and has been her crew for the six years since.

Joy of Banshee has a similar arrangement now with Leslie, who “dropped into” Joy’s life 13 years ago.  “Leslie was a broke, single-handing scuba instructor on a tiny boat.  She loved sailing, enjoyed boat work and dreamed of going offshore, but didn’t have the finances to do so.”  Joy did have the finances and the comfortable cruising boat, but no sailing partner.  Again, a match-up that has stood the test of time.

Is it weird cruising as two women?  “When we arrive in a small village in a remote island group,” relates Rachel, “the canoes will come out, look at Elisabeth and me and then ask where our husbands are?  When we explain that we don’t have any, they are very confused, and particularly the men have trouble relating to us. Imagine! Women, who have no children, sailing this big boat by themselves. We, in turn, look at their women and think how sad that they have not had the choices that we’ve had.”

Contributing Admirals:  Debbie Leisure, Illusions – SE USA; Joy Smith, Banshee –  Philippines; Marjetka K, Little Mermaid – Vanuatu; Sherry McCampbell, Soggy Paws – Panama; Jackie Hope, Soulmate – New Zealand; Rachel Emery, Ventana – Papua New Guinea; Linda Morgenstern, Serafin – New Caledonia;  Terri Watson and Kimi Harrison, Delphinus – Bay Area USA, and others.

This article was published in the November 2008 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles (on this website)

• Single Women Sailing – Part 1 (Admiral’s Angle column #27)
• Debbie Leisure learns to sail her boat single-handed (Women and Cruising blog)
• Sailing on, single handed, by Elizabeth Tyler
• On my own, but never alone, by Laura McCrossin