LEARNING TO SAIL THE HARD WAY
The story of two motorless boats, twelve inexperienced crew mates, five dollars a day, four countries in the Caribbean, and one unconventional experiment of community in close quarters.
I had never stepped foot on a sailboat before that evening in the residential mangroves of the river that runs through Guatemala to the sea. Río Dulce is a small port city, crowded and commercial. To reach the catamaran I had boarded two buses, a tuk tuk taxi, and a motorboat at the pier. I was with two women, then sheer strangers, who would over the course of the following four months become my closest crew mates. The sight–and the smell–as we rounded the corner into the swamp and collected spare bills as the driver cut the engine, was discouraging. We were the first of the crew to arrive, and the boat nearly blended in with the wreck across the way, dirt coating the deck and a foul stench of decomposition encasing it like a cloud. Without pause for doubt or dread, we dumped our heavy backpacks onto the fiberglass floor and boarded Friend Ship for the first time.
It all began on the internet, as many adventures do these days. I found the captain on a website called WorkAway that connects travelers with volunteer initiatives around the world. His listing was atypical for the platform which generally publicizes work exchanges where people receive food and accommodation for their labor, say, cleaning sheets at a hostel, caring for animals at a wildlife sanctuary, or planting crops on a permaculture farm. The terms of the opportunity to join a sailing community in the Caribbean were slightly different: all crew would contribute equally to daily tasks on the boat and pay the local currency equivalent of five dollars a day to cover group expenses, primarily food. It was less a concrete exchange and more an invitation to participate in an egalitarian sailing expedition (or experiment). I messaged the captain and within a month was boarding a flight from Philadelphia to Guatemala.
Mine was a journey of two sailboats, a juxtaposition of floating worlds. Friend Ship is the catamaran with the steering wheel and the relatively spacious cabin, the qualified captain and the four sails (the fourth constructed spontaneously by hoisting our spare Genoa from the spinnaker pole that we cushioned with a torn mattress and secured with wads of dirty rope to the railing at the bow of the boat). Utopie is the monohull with the tiller arm and the dramatic keeling that at times causes hot pans to leap off the stove and cabin dwellers to fall from one wall to the other. The boats had commonalities like a lack of motor, toilet, oven, shower, sink, fridge. Each of the anchors were to be lifted manually, and both boats sported windows and deck fittings that leaked fervidly at all hours and winches that often grew weary and decided not to turn. But life on the two sailboats felt different, at times so distinct as to oppose.
Friend Ship belongs to the captain with the listing on WorkAway and Utopie to his friend who was, at that time, stationed on an island in the Bahamas employed in the construction of luxury timeshare condos. The original idea was to deliver Utopie to him, retrieving it from the overcrowded Río Dulce marina where it sat abandoned at anchor and transporting it across the Caribbean Sea. Though the two sailboats never made it to the Bahamas–our plans morphing and disappearing like the faint ripples formed on waving water out at sea–our passage saw the remote coves of Lake Izabal, atolls off the coast of Belize, a small Mexican tourist island, and a fateful stretch across the southern coast of Cuba.
I realize now, in reflection, that what I learned and what I loved during my time on Friend Ship was not the same as that of Utopie. I spent the first two months residing for the most part on Friend Ship. We found her in that mangrove overrun with mold, infested with cockroaches, abandoned to the invasion of the rouge tropics. Cleaning and repairing Friend Ship spread out over three weeks, and then we departed for the lake. Floating from coast to coast across Lake Izabal, it was Friend Ship that provided the backdrop to my early relationships formed with fellow crew. It was Friend Ship that tested the strength in my arms and the thin skin of my palms. It was Friend Ship that taught me what it means to sail a boat and gave me my first real introduction to the wind and the waves, the sea and the stars.
March 16, 2024
It’s morning and I’m at the helm of Friend Ship as we pass through the cool river that flows at the base of a great green canyon. We’re moving slow enough that I can write while steering because we’re drifting with no sails on the current out toward sea. The tide is rising, so we are confused as to why the current is dragging us out, but it works in our favor. Daeli and Sem are on kayaks attached to the front of the boat because we are starting to slow now. Everything is gold in the morning light. The crew are swimming and kayaking and sunbathing and eating fresh piña. The pelicans float in groups of three around the boats of the fishermen. The old woman in the white shawl paddles by with the young boy in the canoe. The canyon of jungle is broken by exposed rock face, beige and black and brown. With their long necks and yellow beaks and bright white feathers, the herons coexist with us, catching fish or otherwise populating the branches on the steep sides in large numbers, perched as they watch us inch by.
The birds don’t flee our passing; they are not scared of us. We are enabled this proximity to nature because we are moving at its pace.
"No motor," said Josephine from Utopie, tied up against fenders at our side.
"No sails either," I responded.
This morning, we move forward at the will of the current alone. We do not move with artificial force, nor in disproportionate power. We are moving in rhythm with the life around us. We are not separate from it. We are not disrupting it. We are a part of it.
I faced my first big winds on Friend Ship. I braced myself at the helm in the night, the captain by my side, as the speed of the wind crept up to over thirty knots and suddenly we were fighting forces grown violent in the dark. The boat awoke in a new way as we sailed upwind, nearly ten nautical miles from mainland Belize, and Friend Ship–with three broken winches, thirty year old sails, and a boom tied to a random cleat at the back–was ill equipped for the magnitude of thrashing wet air and mounting swells. Hours passed in tense concentration, adjustments made frantically to rigging on board and steering held at a precise angle to avoid the damage of an accident under such conditions. Time moved not slow nor fast; in fact time fell away. We braved the big winds moment by moment, all encompassing, wholly experienced. And then, sudden as it began, the world eased with the rising sun, day dispensing of cold and wild winds as though all but a dream brought on by the dark.
For me, the big winds paled against the complications of navigating community and contribution in such confined living quarters. On Friend Ship, I faced a lot of friction, first within myself and my body confronted by the physical power and emotional stamina required to operate such a large and weathered vessel, and later within the group. Born of individual anxieties and social dynamics alike, comparison and competition simmered beneath the surface. An experiment in equality resulted in an absence of authority, a disorganized crowdsourcing of decision, a tension that arose out of uphill communication. Sailing in community became a delicate balancing act, rest and responsibility at odds in an environment forbidding break from external perception, privacy replaced by an incessant pressure to prove oneself. And, as is unfortunately often the case for young women traveling on their own, I eventually needed to evaluate my safety amid particular power dynamics, compelled by the imposition of male desire to defend myself and to draw harsh boundaries.
There is something important to note here about the nature of free-spirited, alternative-lifestyle opportunities put forth on platforms like WorkAway. Inherent in these programs is the dependence of the volunteers on their hosts and, as is the case for all relationships with power imbalance, there remains the potential for vulnerabilities to be preyed upon. It is not at all uncommon to hear horror stories from volunteer initiatives, from the exploitation of free labor in an exchange that does not match the online agreement to the manipulative placement of possessive or sexual pressures on female solo travelers in isolated environments.
This is not to sway young women from these opportunities, only to issue some words of advice I wish I would have heard a few years back: listen to your intuition, honor your own perspective above others, and never be afraid to express any objections. Recognize your own autonomy. Know that you are present and participating out of your own free will and, regardless of your initial commitment, do not owe time or tolerance to anybody you do not trust. Be prepared to stand up for yourself should anybody attempt to belittle your boundaries or to persuade you into compliance with circumstances you find uncomfortable. Traveling safely, alone, and immersively as a young woman is possible (modern women have been doing it for decades), but it demands fierce intention, awareness, and self-advocacy.
On Utopie I found refuge. It was some combination of social burnout and intrapersonal conflict that inspired my fulltime move to the monohull, and in the coming weeks, Utopie forced me to face all of the tribulations entailed by tough living conditions and responsibility on my own terms. Sailing on Utopie meant minimal luxury, including a lack of communication technology and reliable access to electrical power. It also meant being relentlessly drenched, both on deck as the waves crashed up over the relatively small sides into the condensed cockpit and below where the small chamber filled up hourly with water that seeped in through endless holes in the hull and ceiling.
I was, though dramatically under qualified, elected co-captain of the nine meter boat while we crossed between the mainland of Cuba and the archipelago below. Compared to Friend Ship, the challenges sailing Utopie were more literal–like ripped sails or lack of rope, sleep deprivation or skin sores–and the lessons more sublime.
I lived exclusively on Utopie with three crew members at a time, all of whom rotated from Friend Ship, for more than a month. The exaggerated and amusing struggle of sailing such an unconventional and frankly dilapidated little sailboat served, in the end, as an exercise in fortitude, one that I reminisce with endearment. Days of dead wind exposed my own hints of lunacy, and depleting rations saw rice noodles cooked with seawater and canned sardines. My time there was in no way easier or harder, better or worse than my time on Friend Ship, only different. I reaped the benefits and suffered the consequences of leadership, and it was on Utopie that I found a true sailor’s sense of freedom and independence, that I was beckoned by a brief notion of great expanse, the emptiness of long days and nights at sea and under stars filled up with something close to the woman I want to be.
April 30, 2024
Today is one of my favorite sails. I cannot imagine any conditions more ideal. We are headed 150° (south east) on angle for the channel to Cayo Largo. The southward current turned east a bit but mostly died here in the center of the gulf. I haven’t seen weather data for days, but the wind must be somewhere around 12 knots, coming almost from the north. The air blows warm. The sea is flat. The sky is clear. The moon is risen. Max woke me up at two in the morning for my night shift. He told me I could keep dreaming if I wanted. "I’m happy to continue," he said. "I feel very connected." I yawned but proceeded to crawl, contorting my body to maneuver the awkward space, out of the tiny sleeping compartment at the front of the cabin.
"It’s okay," I replied. "I want to be here.”"
He nodded because he knew. "That’s why I woke you."
I heated the cacao and honey gone cold on the stove and poured it into the yellow mug for us. Then I poked my head out of the small square door into the cockpit and saw all that made the night so special. Max leaned his head back resting on the wire railing, his big brown sweatshirt surprisingly still dry at this hour (lately the wind and waves had picked up every night around eleven), his feet resting on the opposite side of the cockpit floor and his hand clutching the tiller arm, eyes closed, silence but for the sound of wind and water. Little was said. I took the steer, laid flat on my back on the opposite bench. Max offered to put a light on the compass but we both knew on a night like this, for navigation, you need nothing but the sky.
He brought out the sleeping bag and his favorite pillow to get comfortable at the back. "Una noche preciosa," he spoke softly, before rolling over and closing his eyes to go away for a while. Then he left me alone with the boat and the night, the world made up of cloudless sky and calm water cut by an empty horizon, the wind tender, the gray face on the white moon as her light trickles silver pools into the empty sea beckoning before us. I can take a deep breath and allow all my senses to be soothed by this nurturing night. Tonight’s sail is nothing short of embrace, holy and natural as one in the same.
I stayed like that for hours until the sun rose. I watched it lift slowly off the horizon, returning colors to the world. Then I woke Sem and went to sleep in the early hours of a new day.
For me, the physical voyage parallels a personal one. Sailing feels like a first step into a search for a way of life more sensitive, a challenge to the doctrines of a culture that makes me feel more lost than landless sea, the blunt antithesis of those things I have been bred to value: comfort, convenience, consumption.
Sailing is an exercise in surrender. It requires submitting to harsh circumstances of which there is no option for immediate escape, and it asks a lot of you: to be aware, decisive, accepting, accurate, present. All of these qualities I seek to cultivate in my regular life were, out at sea, required by circumstance, whether that be the intensity of big winds, the boredom of dead ones, or all that fell within.
There is a dominant conception of sailing as an elite sport, something exclusive to the wealthy, and within reason. Owning and maintaining a boat costs constant money. But everything in life costs money, and the world’s oceans are the most free terrain left on this earth. Beyond immigration fees and often avoidable costs to moor or dock, the water is free. There are no landlords raising rent at remote anchorages or toll collectors charging to pass between islands. After upfront costs for panels, a converter, and a battery or two, a solar power system eliminates electrical bills. We even went without gas (except for the stove), the boat being motorless and all. The captain of Friend Ship was gifted the catamaran years ago by a retiring sailor, and Utopie was bought by four friends for five hundred dollars a piece (less than half the average one month rent of a studio apartment in a United States city). And there we were, the twelve of us crewmates, sailing the Caribbean sea for free.
The point is that the type of sailing I experienced, living rustic on old boats in dire need of repairs spending at most five dollars a day on food, is not the same kind of sailing you see in competition at ivy league universities or on holiday chartering a yacht in the Mediterranean. I am only starting my studies of the legendary adventurers and philosophers of the sailing world–see Bernard Moitessier, Beth Leonard, Paul Erling Johnson, and Corentin de Chatelperron. But already I’m beginning to understand the rich history of sailing as an avenue of sustainability, spirituality, proximity to nature, adventure, and alternative.
That’s not to underestimate its often harsh reality. Amid a lifestyle strenuous like nothing I’d previously endured, I struggled on this adventure with ability and doubt. In the first weeks of the project, my body strained to the labors. I failed to tighten the Genoa fully when we sailed upwind. I threw the entirety of my body weight into turning the winch handle because the strength in my arms proved inadequate. I worried I was not contributing fairly during town trips when I made it only twenty feet at a time carrying, compared to the men, only half the weight of water for reserve. I thought once on a kayak trip to land headed straight into the wind and against the current that I simply would not make it. But I did, and because I did, my body grew stronger. I did things everyday that challenged the boundary of my body’s ability, things that in turn broadened the scope of what I could accomplish, and because of that, the ability gap dwindled until it all but disappeared.
Being one of only three women among a crew of nine men actually encouraged me to refine my technical skills. Rather than, for example, relying on brute strength to switch the Genoa during tacks, I studied the motion of the boat, the swing of the bow, the flap of the sail, such that if I timed my release perfectly, I could reel in the rope with enough speed and precision to secure it fully tightened before the upwind pressure set in and required overexertion.
Sailing provides a rare opportunity in sports, due to its equally physical and technical nature, for women to compete at the same level as men–and win. Since precedent set by Tracy Edwards participating in the 1989-1990 Whitbread Race circumnavigating the globe with an all female crew, women have taken up well deserved space in the racing world. In 2005, Ellen MacArthur set the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation in history, beating the previous record by more than a day. She held her spot for almost three years. And to this day, the youngest person ever to sail alone around the entire world was a fourteen year old girl named Laura Dekker.
That’s all to say some of the most impressive achievements in all of sailing have been accomplished by women and girls. And that is because, as I learned during my own four months both on Friend Ship and Utopie, sailing is not so much about muscle (though superior strength is definitely an asset) as it is about willpower.
But there is much to endure in a life at sea beyond the expectations of sailing as a sport. My experience, for example, involved even more humbling hygienic adjustments. In the beginning, concentrating a dozen people in a twelve meter cabin that lacked the basic amenities of which we are all accustomed made for a less than glamorous personal care routine. It was mortifying at first. We bathed and used the bathroom in the open ocean. We scrubbed dead skin off our backs with loofahs like sandpaper and we treated each other's sunburns, salt rashes, and open wounds with coconut oil, green clay, and petroleum jelly. Menstruating, a regular part of a woman’s cyclical schedule, became daunting and complicated on a rocking boat far from land.
But quickly, the depravity became normalcy–humans are adaptable creatures–and, somewhere along the line, enlightening. From a home culture held at the throat by the beauty industry, women's bodies praised and scrutinized in society for their aesthetic value, a few months away felt like healing.
The off-grid, rugged travel lifestyle helped me cultivate a genuine love for my body, not as a commodity in a marketplace but as a vessel of life, appreciated not for its reception but its utility. On one of the early days on board, I became very ill. On one of the early days on board, I became very ill. I was the first of the crew to catch the virus. We thought initially it was sea sickness, the nausea and indigestion common symptoms of somebody yet to acquire their sea legs. But the sensations of my immune system at war peaked and then passed over one prolonged night, and I awoke the next day with my body reclaimed.
In a place far removed from the sounds of civilization, detached from the claws of social conditioning, I learned that my body could exist simply as that: a body. Living for weeks without so much as a peek in the mirror, in touch everyday with the work ethic enabled by my physical health, my relationship with my body changed completely. I gradually refocused on aptitude over appearance, and I began to view my physical form as a tool which can inhibit or enable me. I found a sense of gratitude for my body, the home to all of my wonderful senses, the way I am able to move through the world, as dependent on me as I am on it. Silence descended in a place previously polluted by shame, obsession, and imposed implication. I understood the simplest thing that had long been buried: the only priority of my body is its function. This wasn’t an idea to further integrate into the politicization of the female body, a new point in the discussion; this was, for me, the end of discussion. At least for a sacred space in time, free from the barrage of unconscious influences and unsolicited opinions, there was no noise.
I like sailing because I like seeing myself rise to the occasion. I like the way that, when it comes down to it, there is only you and the thing which needs to be done: open the sail at the right time to prevent the boat from being sucked back to shore, turn downwind to furl the Genoa in high winds, keep the perfect angle to avoid losing progress when working against the current, catch enough speed to tack around an obstacle like metal buoys, shallow bits of coral, or other boats at mooring.
And then, between fleeting bursts of action, there are idle hours that stretch on as eternal as the water below.
"Do you ever get the feeling of nothingness?" one of my crew mates asked at sunset with light wind and low waves and nothing in sight but purple skies on the horizon.
Being in nature, not just engaging with it routinely but truly residing in and depending on it (an experience I wish for all humans to have at some point), allowed me to be present in a manner unlike that of other parts of my life. Being on a boat at sea forbids distraction. So in the moments of intensity, my self was silenced, and in the moments of emptiness, my self was confronted. It’s strange I want to use the word disconnected to describe it all, like we associate being away from the manmade–from the infrastructure of civilization, made full by technology and transaction, business and power imbalance, markets and media–with a separation from reality, as being disconnected.
But connection is relative, and it all depends on what you deem real. After all that, I’ll tell you what is real to me: the wind and the waves, the sea and the stars.
Tara Cooney is a 22 year old woman from Pennsylvania. She has been traveling solo since she was 18, living and working in countries such as Costa Rica, Ireland, and Spain. She studied Media in university and hopes to continue writing about nature and sailing as she endeavors to buy a boat of her own in the new year.
Additional Information
All Photos and journal scans by Tara Cooney: @taracooney_
Information on the vertical phots:
Left: Ricky, the river canyon between the city of Río Dulce and Livingston, Guatemala
Right: Josephine (legs), Seba (back), the cabin of Friend Ship
To follow her journey, subscribe to Tara's substack where she will be documenting her travels through literary essays, film photography, and journal entries.
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