Doing More With Less

Ann Davison and Felicity Ann

Article by Susan Gateley • Illustration Joseph Buchanan

All last summer, week after week, a 19 foot Cape Dory Typhoon sailed by a singlehander set forth on my home waters. He doesn’t look old enough to be retired, so I imagine him to perhaps be a second-shift worker; maybe he’s taking time for a quick waltz with the wind before trudging off to work deep in the bowels of some nearby power plant or factory.

Whatever his story, I saw him out there almost every weekday when there was a decent breeze. He often simply took a tour of the bay, though sometimes we chased each other through the channel out onto Lake Ontario. More often than not, though, he declined my challenge and was content to glide past the cottages and coves of the bay. Perhaps he found the empty blue horizon of the lake boring. Or it filled him with a longing that he knew he couldn’t satisfy on a workday—a longing to journey far and free which torments the sailor’s soul who can’t fulfill it.

It’s that way with me, too, but I go out there anyway. I imagine his workday routine limits him to the bay. With me it’s a limit of courage. I no longer feel bold and brave enough to strike out on an overnight cruise alone as I once did.

I’ve just finished reading a book by a remarkable woman who sailed across the Atlantic solo with a 23-foot sloop. She did it fifty-six years ago and was the first woman to do so. Ann Davison made the trip to challenge her own personal devils. Just three years before, she had lost her husband and everything else in the sinking of their 70 foot ketch. That tragedy and her subsequent self-redemption with a successful crossing at the helm of her little sloop Felicity Ann might be seen by some as a good argument for staying small and simple in one’s choice of cruisers. Davison’s boat was a sweet lined little double ender. Built of pitch pine and English oak and given a graceful sheer and scant freeboard, Felicity Ann sat upon the water like a pert little seabird. When Davison first saw her, she was instantly taken by the small sloop’s look. She appeared competent and confident to Davison. And she was. The Atlantic crossing was long and difficult. Plagued by light and contrary winds at first, then by a gale and thirty foot waves, Felicity Ann lived up to Davison’s expectations. The two of them arrived in Dominica after 65 days at sea.

They subsequently parted ways, and Davison has since passed on to Fiddler’s Green. But her boat lives on and is now being rebuilt. Two young women are spearheading the project at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding at Port Hadlock, Washington.

Go simple and small, but go now is the message I take from Davison’s several books about her adventures afloat. After settling in America she made a second long solo cruise. She took an 18-foot outboard-powered boat from Florida up the Inland Waterway, through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi. Her courage has inspired my own sailing life for a half century. Her triumphs and recoveries, first from shipwreck, then from a near fatal bout with cancer, were made with small boats.

As I watch the Cape Dory glide past the forty-footers in their slips, I ponder the wisdom of doing more with less. The greatest limits so often lie with the skipper, not the boat. •SCA•

Ann Davison’s books My Ship Is So Small, Last Voyage and Voyage of the Gemini are often still available as used books or in libraries. She was an excellent writer.

The author sailed and cruised a 19-foot Lightning and a 23 -foot wooden sloop alone on inland waters for 27 years before marrying a Sunfish sailor. She and her husband and several other deluded souls now co-own and are slaves to an elderly wooden 38-foot schooner.

First appeared in issue #78