AdventureSail helps women take the helm

Jul 6 | By Elaine K. Howley

 

Russ Bolt/Courageous Sailing

 

AdventureSail outings last a full or half-day and include everything from knot-tying contests to races on the water and post-event barbecues.

 

Doris Colgate had a challenge for fellow sailing aficionados.

 

She issued it while delivering the keynote address at the National Women's Sailing Association (NWSA) annual sailing conference. Colgate, 69, CEO and president of Offshore Sailing School and the NWSA's founder, asked the women assembled to not just embrace sailing for themselves, but to share that passion with those around them.

 

Unfurling the Sails for NWSA Though Doris Colgate often says that sailing has changed her life, she came to it later than most. Early in her career, she landed a job at Yachting magazine, and "on Monday morning, all these tan, smiling faces would come into the office. I figured out that happiness was sailing, so I asked, 'where do I learn to sail?'" That question led her to the classroom of her eventual husband, Steve Colgate, a well-respected sailor and teacher who had founded the Offshore Sailing School. Colgate "married the company" in 1969, and together she and her husband have been running and expanding the business ever since. Although Colgate was very much a partner in the business from the beginning, she said it took her a while to realize that she was "constantly deferring to men when I was on a sailboat." In looking around her sailing school, Colgate noticed another disconcerting pattern: There were three times as many men in each class as there were women. Colgate decided to challenge the prevailing headwind of perception: That women were always less competent than men when it came to commanding a ship. "Early on, I noticed a tendency that never seems to change -- the impulse many men have to grab a line the moment a woman puts her hand on it." But just bringing more women into the Offshore Sailing School wasn't enough, as that effort catered only to a particular swath of the population and left Colgate wanting to find another, more sustainable and meaningful way to make sailing a true lifestyle choice available to all types of women and girls regardless of economic status or educational attainment. That's how she came to found the NWSA and AdventureSail. Today, both organizations continue to offer opportunities within the sport of sailing to women and girls from all walks of life.

"To me, sailing is freedom. It's empowerment. It's challenging and it's relaxing and exhilarating," Colgate said.

 

"If sailing is a passion that you feel deeply, I wonder what you're doing to share that passion with your family or any woman or man who gets in your way?" she asked.

Colgate has earned the right to ask pointed questions. Not only did she write the book on sailing for women -- literally -- as the author of "Sailing: A Woman's Guide" (International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 1999), but in founding the NWSA, Colgate wanted to give other women a chance to experience some of the opportunities the sport and "sailing lifestyle" have afforded her over the past 45 years.

 

The year after creating the NWSA, Colgate founded AdventureSail, an educational program for underprivileged girls that offers the opportunity to experience the freedom and self-esteem sailing provides.

 

In partnering with other non-profit organizations like Big Sisters and Girls, Inc., AdventureSail has introduced at-risk girls to a sport that could give them confidence, a broader perspective on life and new ideas about what they might achieve one day.

 

For some participants, taking the leap from shore meant entering a completely alien world.

 

"We did a program in Texas one year on Galveston Bay. It's an ugly piece of water, but we had a group of kids and their mentors who all lived less than a mile away and most of them had never been to the water. I was on the boat with the kids and one of the girls asked if she could put her feet in the water," Colgate said. "She didn't know it was OK to do that."

 

AdventureSail has hosted dozens of different groups of young women around the country over the past several years and each session is different, said Joan Thayer, the current president of the NWSA, who took over running the organization after Colgate stepped down from her leadership role in 2002.

 

The programs are run at the request of the sponsoring club or group and can be coordinated anywhere in the country where there is sailable water.

 

In early June, AdventureSail hosted 19 Big Sister/Little Sister pairs at a session held in Boston Harbor. AdventureSail programs are typically a half- or whole-day affair featuring everything from knot-tying contests and compass-reading lessons to races on the water. The Boston event launched from the Courageous Sailing School in Charlestown, Mass., which donated the use of its facility, boats, lifejackets and the grill for the barbecue afterwards, Thayer said.

 

But it hasn't always that easy. Organizers behind an AdventureSail program sponsored by a West Coast yacht club were reluctant to lend the use of their equipment, Thayer said, "until they saw the kids and how excited they were. Their eyes are just aglow and they're so happy. I think the volunteers get just as much out of it as the girls do."

 

Introducing girls to the water and a lifestyle they can embrace for the rest of their lives is part of the overall aim of AdventureSail, but an even bigger aspect of these events, Colgate and Thayer said, is to spend a day with girls who need the chance to see other women achieving something.

 

Sailing skill "is not dictated by strength or gender, only by desire," Colgate said as she addressed NWSA members at the June conference. "Let's take our passion for sailing to new and inspiring heights for those girls and women who, in this unsettled world, deserve a far better life."

For a copy of Doris Colgate's complete speech, please click here.