Sally has been a boater since she was little. Throughout her life there have been rafts, rowboats, canal boats, houseboats, sailboats, and kayaks. She grew up learning about the ancestor who fell off the Mayflower in monstrous storm waves, then pulled himself aboard with a trailing line; and of a collateral relative, Nathanial Palmer, who discovered the Palmer Peninsula in Antarctica in a 20’ gig riding those gigantic waves of the Southern Ocean. She knows her gene pool is filled with ship carpenters and sailing captains who built the clipper ships in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut in the 1700s.
She still has a boat — a 6’ blow-up kayak. During August and September of 2020 she got up early in the morning to kayak-guard a friend who swims two miles in the Willamette with a group of other early birds. She would like to get a sailing dinghy so she could be on the water nearly every day, rain or shine. She dreams of hauling it up to mountain lakes or over to the coast to the bay estuaries. There is something about the tang of salt water that lifts her spirits. She also hopes to go on a Windjammer cruise off the coast of Maine where her ancestors built boats and rode the waves long ago.
Here are some pictures from Sally’s life with boats. And you can read her full story here: “Ah – the boats I’ve known and loved.” This PDF will open in a new browser window.
Sally’s sailboat, Quiddity, was a small, 24’, ocean-going vessel with a full keel and a hull design built for ocean waves and big winds.
Sally as Captain
At anchor in Puget Sound
In 1979, Sally was one of seven women who trained for a year to canoe about 200 hundred miles down the Fortymile River and the Yukon for ten days. The Fortymile is famous for being the river where the gold rush started.
