Story date: Monday, September 14, 2020.
About Linda Newland
Linda Newland holds many accomplishments, as a woman sailor and in her personal and professional life. She is the record holder for “Fastest Woman Single-handed Transpac (San Francisco to Japan)” and has entered many single-handed races, including multiple SF–Hawaii Transpacs. Amongst many crewed events, she skippered an all-female 1997 Transpac team.
Outside of sailboat racing, Linda is a maritime attorney, nautical sciences instructor, certified ASA instructor in coastal and celestial navigation, and is retired from the Fremont Unified School District.
Linda has a yacht delivery service, is a specialist on offshore safety and emergency equipment, and single-handed racing. She holds a 100-ton USCG Captain's License, not to mention, decades of sailing experience.
Linda is a past Commodore of the Pacific Coast Yachting Association and Pacific Interclub Yacht Association. She was also a past President of the Recreational Boaters of California and the National Women's Sailing Association (https://womensailing.org).
Finally, Linda is the founder of the IYC Northern California Women's Sailing Seminar and a lifetime member of Island Yacht Club, Alameda.
Outside of sailboat racing, Linda is a maritime attorney, nautical sciences instructor, certified ASA instructor in coastal and celestial navigation, and is retired from the Fremont Unified School District.
Linda has a yacht delivery service, is a specialist on offshore safety and emergency equipment, and single-handed racing. She holds a 100-ton USCG Captain's License, not to mention, decades of sailing experience.
Linda is a past Commodore of the Pacific Coast Yachting Association and Pacific Interclub Yacht Association. She was also a past President of the Recreational Boaters of California and the National Women's Sailing Association (https://womensailing.org).
Finally, Linda is the founder of the IYC Northern California Women's Sailing Seminar and a lifetime member of Island Yacht Club, Alameda.
Photos
Video transcript
Melissa Grudin (00:00):
Linda Newland is the founder of Women's Sailing Seminar 28 years ago. And she is past president and she's on the board now of NWSA - the National Association of Women Sailors. And she is amazing. She has been able to travel. So without further ado, Linda Newland.
Linda Newland (00:41):
Thank you, Melissa. Yes, I started with Island Yacht Club many years ago and learned to sail and ended up single-handing from San Francisco to Japan. And I'll save some of those stories for another time. But after I did that, in 1980 I single-handed to Hawai'i and brought the boat back. And then in 81, I single-handed from San Francisco to Japan. And so leading up to my story tonight in 1982, I decided that I was going to jump into delivering boats for owners that had raced over to Hawai'i and I wanted to bring a boat back. So of course I chose one of the toughest assignments that I could find. And I told my husband who then was my boyfriend. He said, “that's going to be a hate mission”.
Linda Newland (01:49):
And I said, no. I said, if I can bring an Olson 30 back from Hawai'i double-handed, then I will cement my reputation and I'll get more deliveries. So with that in mind, I decided to take on in 1982, an Olson 30, and--here we stand on board. This is my second crew, because I had an unfortunate situation where I took an original woman friend out and in 24 hours, she wanted off the boat and I had to bring her back to Honolulu.
I'll give you a little background on the boat. This is a 30 foot Ultra Light Displacement Boat (ULDB), built in Santa Cruz. It was about 3,500 pounds. And it was about four foot above the waterline. So it had no standing headroom. It had no through hulls. So there was no head. There was no inboard engine. There was no galley. It was basically a day sailer. We had a VHF radio, we had a knotmeter, a log, and that was pretty much it. We had an autopilot that worked some of the time and a wind vane, and it had been sailed to Hawai'i by a single-handed sailor in the race that year. But it was pretty stripped-out. This is before GPS. So navigation was by celestial, which I did. We had a battery that was run by solar panels and we had no built in water tanks. So that was kind of an overview of the boat.
But she was fast and it was a hardship race. I mean, we couldn't stand up in the boat, either on the deck because of the motion, or stand up down below. So we crawled around for everything we did.
So here I am on the foredeck getting ready to change a head sail. And you know, I've put the shower cap on to keep my hair dry, so it wouldn't get full of salt. And it was easier not to wear very many clothes because I was just going to get wet. And it was too hot to wear foul weather gear. This is a kind of a precursor to what happened when I took the first woman out. She didn't realize the hardships that we were going to have on the boat. She ended up screaming for mercy and I had to take her back to Honolulu. And then I picked up my crew that did the trip with me, my friend, Karin, who hung out in Honolulu and hid from me for three days because she knew I had come back for a reason. She knew I would have her in my sights.
And so she finally agreed to go with me after her male crew members heard of our delivery. Folks said, well, you should go with Linda because you're going to learn a lot more on an Olson 30 than if you just come back with us on a 50-foot race boat. So the big difference between Karin and Barbara was Barbara was terrified. It's Mother Nature, you don't fight Mother Nature. When you're sailing an Ultra-light Displacement Boat, you start to compromise with the weather and you do the best you can. And it's all about attitude. Barbara's attitude was, “I'm terrified. I want off this boat”. Karin Saskatoon was, “Hey, this is a great adventure. Let's go out and find out what Mother Nature has to dish out and head up. We'll just meet it, head on and, and see where we go from there”. And that really set the tone for the trip.
It was really hot in the tropics. So we actually thought about this ahead of time and brought our umbrella. And it worked some of the time when the wind wasn't blowing it over, but it did give us some respite from the heat. And we ended up finding other ways to survive on the boat. I mentioned we had no through hulls, so we had to add a “brown bucket”. We had a “blue bucket”, for everything that we did in any kind of water or a seawater, either for our personal hygiene or whatever. You can imagine what went into the brown bucket; the blue bucket was for washing dishes and dipping water when we needed to sluice down the decks.
One of the things that we had a problem with in the tropics is cockroaches coming on board, little hitchhikers. We had one that got on board because they were flying on board. One of the tricks and the tropics as you don't bring cardboard on board. So we stripped all of the food out of the cardboard on the docks and got rid of the cardboard, hoping that we didn't bring any hitchhikers. And this one guy was running around on the ship, for as long as we were in the tropical waters. But then as we got into colder waters, the little guy got slower and slower and slower.
And finally, one morning he was slow enough that I could catch him. And we just wanted to get rid of him and hope that there weren't any little ones coming on. The one thing I can’t tolerate is cockroaches. So Karin and I, Karin had a great sense of humor. So this was her idea. Let's give him a Viking funeral. So Flemish. And with a little yellow lid that came off of a--I think it was a dried mustard can--I mean, I don't even know where it came from. And so we gave him a Viking funeral with a match and no more Mr. Cockroach. And it was pretty funny because by then the temperatures were getting much colder and he was actually losing color.
So, as you approach the coastline in California in the summer, you come across what we call dry gales.
Dry gales are basically not storm conditions. It's when the heat in the Central Valley of California rises and heats up as the air rises. You've got the cool air on the ocean and that cold air is sucked into the Central Valley, to fill in for the rising hot air. And that, that brings up some pretty severe winds. We call them dry gales; if the situation doesn't change from year-to-year, you know, you're going to hit those conditions. And we had them about a day out of San Francisco. And so we are in this super lightweight boat. And we realized in these 15 to 20 foot waves, that as we're surfing down the face, our rudder wasn't in the water very far. It was out of the water some of the time, which obviously didn't give us the ability to really control the boat.
So to counteract that, we threw drogues over the stern. So you can see here, we've put our spinnaker sheets over the stern. We tied on fenders. And if you notice at the top of the wave, there's an orange life vest. So we took all of our extra life jackets and we just tied everything on that we could. And by and large, the two spinnaker sheets that we threw over with all this junk tied on them really held the stern of the boat down into the wave enough that it gave us pretty good steerage.
One time, Karin was down below… We didn't both stay on a deck steering. We couldn't use our autopilot on this. There was no way an autopilot can steer and this kind of a seaway. So we had to take turns steering. So she went down below and pulled the hatch boards down, so if we turtled, we wouldn't capsize and fill the cockpit and fill the cabin with water. She came back up to steer and she said, “it was very quiet down there. I don't know why”. And I said, “Karin, the reason it's quiet it's because the whole front end of the boat is out of the water!”.
As we're surfing off these waves, the front of the keel edge is probably outside the wave that we're coming off of. So our biggest problem was trying not to pitch the boat; slowing it down with the drogues enough that we had control, that we weren't just driving the bow into the base of the trough ahead of us. And here Karin is steering with a lot of concentration because just before this picture was taken, she had steered it down to the bottom of a wave and we took a knock down, not a pitch pole.
We took a knock down and the boat popped back up. Fortunately, no damage was done. So, now she knows the seriousness of why she has to steer. There was just no way in a 24-hour period that the two of us could both steer--or I could steer them all time.
So after that day, in the night, when the temperatures change and get cooler, the winds die down at night. And we found ourselves in the main shipping channel coming into San Francisco, completely becalmed, pulling in our stuff behind us--seaweed and all kinds of stuff. And we had no way of moving the boat. So we called the Coast Guard and gave them our position and asked them to be sure to tell shipping traffic that we were becalmed in the lane, and to please watch out for us--we did have running lights that we had saved our juice for.
From 12 miles out from the land, outside of the Golden Gate, to the berth at Richmond, it took us 12 hours to get there. So finally, we were home. This is like, mid-afternoon, or the next afternoon? We're on the dock. We just crawled off the boat. You can tell our hair's still a mess. We changed our clothes and grabbed a beer. And this is our hallmark, our home-bound experience. And this was probably the first time that any two women had the, I don't know, I don't know if I want to say courage or stupidity to double-hand a boat of this type across the ocean, but we were pretty proud of ourselves that we got home.
You can see how happy we were. It's like, “thank God we're back”. But the thing that came out of this that was so special to both of us, is that we could have stepped off this boat and hated one another and never spoken to one another again. But, as it turned out, it was a bonding experience. And we ended up being best friends for life. Unfortunately, Karin passed two years ago and I still miss her very much. She was an excellent friend.
I don't think you can read the plaque (on the boat), but it says the “Maytag One”, because the boat's name was Gold Rush, but we nicknamed it Maytag One because of the violent motion down below in steep seas--and the noise that it made. When we were trying to sleep down below, it was like the inside of a washing machine. That was pretty much our experience. And for cooking, I might add, we didn't have a galley. So we had a single-burner stove strapped to the mast. And when we ate, we sat on the cabin top. We had no real place to sit, no table. I don't even think we had at that time a chart table to really do any plotting. So it was quite the experience, but anyway, a great experience a long time ago, but it's amazing how those memories never really leave. Thank you. Thanks for listening.
Melissa Grudin (15:43):
Wow. Wow. That was amazing. Linda, I have not heard that story in its entirety. What an experience.
Please start adding questions to Q&A, that we can ask Linda about this time of her life.
What year did this occur?
Linda Newland (16:04):
This was 1982, the summer of 1982.
Melissa Grudin (16:07):
So, 36 years ago, you had this adventure. I've got a couple of questions here. How did you do without stuff? Like, how did you do without a radio? Were you concerned about that, if you needed help?
Linda Newland (16:30):
Well, we had the VHF radio, so we could talk to anybody that we saw along the way, within radio distance, which is line-of-sight. Actually, we didn't see anybody along the way. We saw a sperm whale that breached, which was pretty exciting. And he was bigger than we were. But we did have an EPIRB--as I remember EPIRBs were out then. So if we'd had a major emergency, we could have set off the beacon, but we didn't have a radio that could reach shore. So no two-way single side-band or ham radio on this boat.
Melissa Grudin (17:13):
And how long did the trip take you from Hawai'i to San Francisco?
Linda Newland (17:18):
It was about 17 days. There was no way to propel the boat, so we just had to sit in calm weather. And so it took a few extra days to get home. We probably were becalmed maybe two or three days out of the trip. So about 17 days in total.
Melissa Grudin (17:56):
One of our participants is asking, what advice would you give girls like young girls, looking to do something similar?
Linda Newland (18:05):
Well, just be prepared. I think it's great that we've got teenage girls that have done some marvelous things, circumnavigations, and they have the ability and the experience. And I think that there's nothing wrong with a younger person doing something like this. It's just that you've got to have the experience and you get that experience by doing offshore racing. And San Francisco is a perfect place for that. You've got to really be prepared to know what you're doing, so there's no big surprises out there. And that's, that's the big thing--the preparedness starts before you leave the dock.
Melissa Grudin (18:55):
How did the watch system work, with just the two of you sailing?
Linda Newland (18:59):
Well, we were always one up and one down. So we bought a big beanbag chair and plopped it in the middle of the cabin, because when we got into the really wet stuff at night, we had to wear foul weather gear and we didn't want to get our sleeping bags wet.
So we couldn't really lay down and take a nap. When we were off watch or when we were on watch, we'd sit in our beanbag chair and then pop up every 15 minutes and look around and make sure that we weren't going to be run down by a ship. But as I said, there was nobody out there except us.
Melissa Grudin (19:45):
So we all like to ask about food. So you have this one-burner stove. What did you eat? Did you catch any fish? What was going on?
Linda Newland (19:55):
We didn't fish. Since then, I've learned how to fish, but we basically heated a pot of water. And we had some kind of beef stew, and those little packets--I think they still sell them--you just pop them in boiling water, heat them through and peel off the top and eat them.
We didn't have a lot of fresh water because we had to take that with us cause we had no fresh water tanks. So we couldn't use reconstituted food because we didn't have enough water for that. We had to save most of the freshwater for our drinking.
Melissa Grudin (20:40):
And we have time for one more question. Obviously you had a girlfriend with you and that made a difference, as she was a bit of an adventurer. Was there ever a thought of wanting to have a guy up there in there with you? You know, this is who you were going to crew with, to go from Hawai'i to San Francisco.
Linda Newland (21:04):
Nope! I never, never thought of having a guy on board. Physically, the boat wasn't that difficult to handle. It was more because the boat was an Ultra-light. We just had to be very good at steering and really being sensitive to the boat. We didn't really need any beef on the boat, to haul sails and do that sort of thing. And we had a great time. I think we had out there--I guess it was a Walkman in those days-- and we played Jimmy Buffett's “Margaritaville” until we got so sick of it. We didn't want to hear it anymore. And that was our entertainment, really. And my mother had given us a couple of puppets. Can you believe, puppets?! And so we created these puppet shows, except our puppets were anatomically correct for male and female. So our puppet show content was probably a little on the porno side.
Melissa Grudin (22:13):
That's amazing. That's very amusing for both of you, I would imagine. Okay. I have one more question and it’s about tying all those things to the sheets, to slow the boat down and help you maintain force on the rudder.
Linda Newland (22:25):
When we put the drogues together, oh, we just were looking around the boat, trying to find something that we could tow over the back, that would help the boat maintain steerage and keep that stern down and the rudder in the water. So we had control on the waves, when surfing. We had a storm jib that we borrowed off of Chuck Hawley. Chuck is doing a lot of US Sailing videos these days. And he had sailed an Olson 30, so we borrowed his storm sail to come home, which came in quite handy. So now we saw the spinnaker sheets and I said, “perfect”. We just started tying anything that was loose around the cabin that we thought would help out. When the wind stopped in the middle of the night, it took us about three hours to pull all that mess in and untangle it.
Melissa Grudin (23:28):
Amazing. Thank you. I just want to say that when we get back together again for Women's Sailing Seminar, everyone should try to take a class with Linda. She's got such a great story, wonderful experience and she's such a great teacher. She certainly enjoys sharing her knowledge with others--and she's so creative too. So thank you, Linda. Thank you.
Linda Newland is the founder of Women's Sailing Seminar 28 years ago. And she is past president and she's on the board now of NWSA - the National Association of Women Sailors. And she is amazing. She has been able to travel. So without further ado, Linda Newland.
Linda Newland (00:41):
Thank you, Melissa. Yes, I started with Island Yacht Club many years ago and learned to sail and ended up single-handing from San Francisco to Japan. And I'll save some of those stories for another time. But after I did that, in 1980 I single-handed to Hawai'i and brought the boat back. And then in 81, I single-handed from San Francisco to Japan. And so leading up to my story tonight in 1982, I decided that I was going to jump into delivering boats for owners that had raced over to Hawai'i and I wanted to bring a boat back. So of course I chose one of the toughest assignments that I could find. And I told my husband who then was my boyfriend. He said, “that's going to be a hate mission”.
Linda Newland (01:49):
And I said, no. I said, if I can bring an Olson 30 back from Hawai'i double-handed, then I will cement my reputation and I'll get more deliveries. So with that in mind, I decided to take on in 1982, an Olson 30, and--here we stand on board. This is my second crew, because I had an unfortunate situation where I took an original woman friend out and in 24 hours, she wanted off the boat and I had to bring her back to Honolulu.
I'll give you a little background on the boat. This is a 30 foot Ultra Light Displacement Boat (ULDB), built in Santa Cruz. It was about 3,500 pounds. And it was about four foot above the waterline. So it had no standing headroom. It had no through hulls. So there was no head. There was no inboard engine. There was no galley. It was basically a day sailer. We had a VHF radio, we had a knotmeter, a log, and that was pretty much it. We had an autopilot that worked some of the time and a wind vane, and it had been sailed to Hawai'i by a single-handed sailor in the race that year. But it was pretty stripped-out. This is before GPS. So navigation was by celestial, which I did. We had a battery that was run by solar panels and we had no built in water tanks. So that was kind of an overview of the boat.
But she was fast and it was a hardship race. I mean, we couldn't stand up in the boat, either on the deck because of the motion, or stand up down below. So we crawled around for everything we did.
So here I am on the foredeck getting ready to change a head sail. And you know, I've put the shower cap on to keep my hair dry, so it wouldn't get full of salt. And it was easier not to wear very many clothes because I was just going to get wet. And it was too hot to wear foul weather gear. This is a kind of a precursor to what happened when I took the first woman out. She didn't realize the hardships that we were going to have on the boat. She ended up screaming for mercy and I had to take her back to Honolulu. And then I picked up my crew that did the trip with me, my friend, Karin, who hung out in Honolulu and hid from me for three days because she knew I had come back for a reason. She knew I would have her in my sights.
And so she finally agreed to go with me after her male crew members heard of our delivery. Folks said, well, you should go with Linda because you're going to learn a lot more on an Olson 30 than if you just come back with us on a 50-foot race boat. So the big difference between Karin and Barbara was Barbara was terrified. It's Mother Nature, you don't fight Mother Nature. When you're sailing an Ultra-light Displacement Boat, you start to compromise with the weather and you do the best you can. And it's all about attitude. Barbara's attitude was, “I'm terrified. I want off this boat”. Karin Saskatoon was, “Hey, this is a great adventure. Let's go out and find out what Mother Nature has to dish out and head up. We'll just meet it, head on and, and see where we go from there”. And that really set the tone for the trip.
It was really hot in the tropics. So we actually thought about this ahead of time and brought our umbrella. And it worked some of the time when the wind wasn't blowing it over, but it did give us some respite from the heat. And we ended up finding other ways to survive on the boat. I mentioned we had no through hulls, so we had to add a “brown bucket”. We had a “blue bucket”, for everything that we did in any kind of water or a seawater, either for our personal hygiene or whatever. You can imagine what went into the brown bucket; the blue bucket was for washing dishes and dipping water when we needed to sluice down the decks.
One of the things that we had a problem with in the tropics is cockroaches coming on board, little hitchhikers. We had one that got on board because they were flying on board. One of the tricks and the tropics as you don't bring cardboard on board. So we stripped all of the food out of the cardboard on the docks and got rid of the cardboard, hoping that we didn't bring any hitchhikers. And this one guy was running around on the ship, for as long as we were in the tropical waters. But then as we got into colder waters, the little guy got slower and slower and slower.
And finally, one morning he was slow enough that I could catch him. And we just wanted to get rid of him and hope that there weren't any little ones coming on. The one thing I can’t tolerate is cockroaches. So Karin and I, Karin had a great sense of humor. So this was her idea. Let's give him a Viking funeral. So Flemish. And with a little yellow lid that came off of a--I think it was a dried mustard can--I mean, I don't even know where it came from. And so we gave him a Viking funeral with a match and no more Mr. Cockroach. And it was pretty funny because by then the temperatures were getting much colder and he was actually losing color.
So, as you approach the coastline in California in the summer, you come across what we call dry gales.
Dry gales are basically not storm conditions. It's when the heat in the Central Valley of California rises and heats up as the air rises. You've got the cool air on the ocean and that cold air is sucked into the Central Valley, to fill in for the rising hot air. And that, that brings up some pretty severe winds. We call them dry gales; if the situation doesn't change from year-to-year, you know, you're going to hit those conditions. And we had them about a day out of San Francisco. And so we are in this super lightweight boat. And we realized in these 15 to 20 foot waves, that as we're surfing down the face, our rudder wasn't in the water very far. It was out of the water some of the time, which obviously didn't give us the ability to really control the boat.
So to counteract that, we threw drogues over the stern. So you can see here, we've put our spinnaker sheets over the stern. We tied on fenders. And if you notice at the top of the wave, there's an orange life vest. So we took all of our extra life jackets and we just tied everything on that we could. And by and large, the two spinnaker sheets that we threw over with all this junk tied on them really held the stern of the boat down into the wave enough that it gave us pretty good steerage.
One time, Karin was down below… We didn't both stay on a deck steering. We couldn't use our autopilot on this. There was no way an autopilot can steer and this kind of a seaway. So we had to take turns steering. So she went down below and pulled the hatch boards down, so if we turtled, we wouldn't capsize and fill the cockpit and fill the cabin with water. She came back up to steer and she said, “it was very quiet down there. I don't know why”. And I said, “Karin, the reason it's quiet it's because the whole front end of the boat is out of the water!”.
As we're surfing off these waves, the front of the keel edge is probably outside the wave that we're coming off of. So our biggest problem was trying not to pitch the boat; slowing it down with the drogues enough that we had control, that we weren't just driving the bow into the base of the trough ahead of us. And here Karin is steering with a lot of concentration because just before this picture was taken, she had steered it down to the bottom of a wave and we took a knock down, not a pitch pole.
We took a knock down and the boat popped back up. Fortunately, no damage was done. So, now she knows the seriousness of why she has to steer. There was just no way in a 24-hour period that the two of us could both steer--or I could steer them all time.
So after that day, in the night, when the temperatures change and get cooler, the winds die down at night. And we found ourselves in the main shipping channel coming into San Francisco, completely becalmed, pulling in our stuff behind us--seaweed and all kinds of stuff. And we had no way of moving the boat. So we called the Coast Guard and gave them our position and asked them to be sure to tell shipping traffic that we were becalmed in the lane, and to please watch out for us--we did have running lights that we had saved our juice for.
From 12 miles out from the land, outside of the Golden Gate, to the berth at Richmond, it took us 12 hours to get there. So finally, we were home. This is like, mid-afternoon, or the next afternoon? We're on the dock. We just crawled off the boat. You can tell our hair's still a mess. We changed our clothes and grabbed a beer. And this is our hallmark, our home-bound experience. And this was probably the first time that any two women had the, I don't know, I don't know if I want to say courage or stupidity to double-hand a boat of this type across the ocean, but we were pretty proud of ourselves that we got home.
You can see how happy we were. It's like, “thank God we're back”. But the thing that came out of this that was so special to both of us, is that we could have stepped off this boat and hated one another and never spoken to one another again. But, as it turned out, it was a bonding experience. And we ended up being best friends for life. Unfortunately, Karin passed two years ago and I still miss her very much. She was an excellent friend.
I don't think you can read the plaque (on the boat), but it says the “Maytag One”, because the boat's name was Gold Rush, but we nicknamed it Maytag One because of the violent motion down below in steep seas--and the noise that it made. When we were trying to sleep down below, it was like the inside of a washing machine. That was pretty much our experience. And for cooking, I might add, we didn't have a galley. So we had a single-burner stove strapped to the mast. And when we ate, we sat on the cabin top. We had no real place to sit, no table. I don't even think we had at that time a chart table to really do any plotting. So it was quite the experience, but anyway, a great experience a long time ago, but it's amazing how those memories never really leave. Thank you. Thanks for listening.
Melissa Grudin (15:43):
Wow. Wow. That was amazing. Linda, I have not heard that story in its entirety. What an experience.
Please start adding questions to Q&A, that we can ask Linda about this time of her life.
What year did this occur?
Linda Newland (16:04):
This was 1982, the summer of 1982.
Melissa Grudin (16:07):
So, 36 years ago, you had this adventure. I've got a couple of questions here. How did you do without stuff? Like, how did you do without a radio? Were you concerned about that, if you needed help?
Linda Newland (16:30):
Well, we had the VHF radio, so we could talk to anybody that we saw along the way, within radio distance, which is line-of-sight. Actually, we didn't see anybody along the way. We saw a sperm whale that breached, which was pretty exciting. And he was bigger than we were. But we did have an EPIRB--as I remember EPIRBs were out then. So if we'd had a major emergency, we could have set off the beacon, but we didn't have a radio that could reach shore. So no two-way single side-band or ham radio on this boat.
Melissa Grudin (17:13):
And how long did the trip take you from Hawai'i to San Francisco?
Linda Newland (17:18):
It was about 17 days. There was no way to propel the boat, so we just had to sit in calm weather. And so it took a few extra days to get home. We probably were becalmed maybe two or three days out of the trip. So about 17 days in total.
Melissa Grudin (17:56):
One of our participants is asking, what advice would you give girls like young girls, looking to do something similar?
Linda Newland (18:05):
Well, just be prepared. I think it's great that we've got teenage girls that have done some marvelous things, circumnavigations, and they have the ability and the experience. And I think that there's nothing wrong with a younger person doing something like this. It's just that you've got to have the experience and you get that experience by doing offshore racing. And San Francisco is a perfect place for that. You've got to really be prepared to know what you're doing, so there's no big surprises out there. And that's, that's the big thing--the preparedness starts before you leave the dock.
Melissa Grudin (18:55):
How did the watch system work, with just the two of you sailing?
Linda Newland (18:59):
Well, we were always one up and one down. So we bought a big beanbag chair and plopped it in the middle of the cabin, because when we got into the really wet stuff at night, we had to wear foul weather gear and we didn't want to get our sleeping bags wet.
So we couldn't really lay down and take a nap. When we were off watch or when we were on watch, we'd sit in our beanbag chair and then pop up every 15 minutes and look around and make sure that we weren't going to be run down by a ship. But as I said, there was nobody out there except us.
Melissa Grudin (19:45):
So we all like to ask about food. So you have this one-burner stove. What did you eat? Did you catch any fish? What was going on?
Linda Newland (19:55):
We didn't fish. Since then, I've learned how to fish, but we basically heated a pot of water. And we had some kind of beef stew, and those little packets--I think they still sell them--you just pop them in boiling water, heat them through and peel off the top and eat them.
We didn't have a lot of fresh water because we had to take that with us cause we had no fresh water tanks. So we couldn't use reconstituted food because we didn't have enough water for that. We had to save most of the freshwater for our drinking.
Melissa Grudin (20:40):
And we have time for one more question. Obviously you had a girlfriend with you and that made a difference, as she was a bit of an adventurer. Was there ever a thought of wanting to have a guy up there in there with you? You know, this is who you were going to crew with, to go from Hawai'i to San Francisco.
Linda Newland (21:04):
Nope! I never, never thought of having a guy on board. Physically, the boat wasn't that difficult to handle. It was more because the boat was an Ultra-light. We just had to be very good at steering and really being sensitive to the boat. We didn't really need any beef on the boat, to haul sails and do that sort of thing. And we had a great time. I think we had out there--I guess it was a Walkman in those days-- and we played Jimmy Buffett's “Margaritaville” until we got so sick of it. We didn't want to hear it anymore. And that was our entertainment, really. And my mother had given us a couple of puppets. Can you believe, puppets?! And so we created these puppet shows, except our puppets were anatomically correct for male and female. So our puppet show content was probably a little on the porno side.
Melissa Grudin (22:13):
That's amazing. That's very amusing for both of you, I would imagine. Okay. I have one more question and it’s about tying all those things to the sheets, to slow the boat down and help you maintain force on the rudder.
Linda Newland (22:25):
When we put the drogues together, oh, we just were looking around the boat, trying to find something that we could tow over the back, that would help the boat maintain steerage and keep that stern down and the rudder in the water. So we had control on the waves, when surfing. We had a storm jib that we borrowed off of Chuck Hawley. Chuck is doing a lot of US Sailing videos these days. And he had sailed an Olson 30, so we borrowed his storm sail to come home, which came in quite handy. So now we saw the spinnaker sheets and I said, “perfect”. We just started tying anything that was loose around the cabin that we thought would help out. When the wind stopped in the middle of the night, it took us about three hours to pull all that mess in and untangle it.
Melissa Grudin (23:28):
Amazing. Thank you. I just want to say that when we get back together again for Women's Sailing Seminar, everyone should try to take a class with Linda. She's got such a great story, wonderful experience and she's such a great teacher. She certainly enjoys sharing her knowledge with others--and she's so creative too. So thank you, Linda. Thank you.