We launched this site in April 2016, and an entire world has opened up to me in the year since. The "contact us" button (which is magic) has allowed strangers to send us messages with positive words of encouragement. On instagram (also magic), I have connected with dozens of women who sail for a living. As a girlfriend of mine recently said, the more I look for them, the more I find. They're on the ships we assist when I'm out on deck handling the hawser; we wave to each other and smile (or jump up and down and gesticulate joyfully, as the case would be with me some days). They're on tugboats, moving cargo up and down the coasts and across oceans; they're on the ferries that get you to and from work each day; they're on the research ships working to study our planet and preserve our ocean ecosystems. We connect and discuss and encourage each other to thrive in our work.
We have two new contributors since our last blog appearance: Lia, and Darcy.
I met Lia in September 2011 on a weekend sail aboard the Schooner Zodiac in the Salish Sea, which is the traditional name for the region also known as northern Puget Sound. The Zodiac carries a lot of fascinating history; she was once the San Francisco Bar Pilots station boat, retiring from that duty only in the mid-seventies. Lia is at once whip-smart, quite tall, and entirely captivating, and she intimidated me until I got to know her, whereupon we discovered that she had worked for my father's cousin doing research in the fisheries department at the University of Washington (this world of ours gets smaller all the time). Since we met, she took the workboat academy route, and has been garnering sea time aboard research vessels all over the Pacific and the Atlantic.
Darcy is another woman I've had the pleasure to find on instagram, and she was recently introduced to me via email by my friend Daryl of the Pacific Maritime Institute as a possible contributor. Darcy accrued sea time and experience on research ships and is now also a student of the workboat academy, pursuing her mate's license. I'm looking forward to seeing where she is headed; she has already experienced some sights that few people will ever see for themselves (just the words "oceanographic data acquisition systems" is enough to make my head spin and put stars in my eyes!).
At this time, I am working on a quarterly newsletter of sorts; you can sign up at the bottom of our Contact page. Its purpose will be to highlight notable women in the industry as well as our own contributors, and to discuss current maritime events and opportunities for women. Thank you for stopping by and stay tuned!
XO, Elizabeth