The Seed & the Winter Catalyst

Then last spring happened. I took my Great Pyrenees, Zeus, on a three-week road trip—tracking up the PCH and the 101 all the way from Los Angeles to Seattle—right on the heels of a winter where I went completely overboard on snowboarding. Something had shifted in me. I’d made a conscious decision to max out my time off, telling myself:

I am going to take every single opportunity to get on the mountain.

And I actually did it. I joined public club excursions, tracked down friends, and reached out to literally anyone posting an Instagram story on a mountain. I ended up buying my first real setup—a Burton board, boots, and bindings that served me insanely well—thrifted a jacket and snow pants, made a ton of new friends, and rapidly picked up speed during my very first season on an Ikon pass. Something had fundamentally changed in how I wanted to spend my time. Something wonderful, honestly.

So, I finally pulled the trigger on the sailing co-op.

Showing Up: The Co-Op Life

I joined with zero experience, no explicit goal, and not even knowing what “cruising” meant in a nautical sense.

I showed up every single Tuesday morning to help fix the boats—the mandatory sweat-equity part of the co-op—and then we sailed every single Tuesday afternoon. I got to know the community, which was largely folks of retiree age—a welcome, grounding change of pace from the West LA fitness and outdoor scenes I’d been running in for years.

Not that I stopped doing any of that; I was still grinding through:

• Run clubs & surfing
• Roller skating & VRC
• Coffee & Chill (which, funny enough, is where I met my amazing girlfriend in July 2025, just a month after I started sailing)

The learning curve was pure time on task. I didn’t even open a sailing book until I had a few trips under my belt. Once I did, it turned into a full obsession—binging YouTube videos, reading manuals, and eventually building my own flashcard app to memorize terminology, similar to what I did for my Tarot Trainer.

Mechanics, Quirks, and Boat Math

The volunteer maintenance time turned out to be the best part. Some people might balk at the requirement, but it forces you to learn how to fix a boat, which is a non-negotiable skill if you’re ever going to be a real sailor.

Boats are notoriously fickle. Learning the systems helps you avoid the dreaded BOAT phenomenon (Break Out Another Thousand) and actually connects you to the vessel. The boats stop being generic equipment and start feeling like distinct characters.

Our club has three Catalina 30s, each with its own specific quirks and personality:

• The Cruisers: Fitted with standard setups, reliable and comfortable for day sails.
• The Racer: Completely stripped of its bimini cover to save weight, clear the boom, and maximize speed.

I learned how to heave-to, set an anchor properly, execute man-overboard drills, and manage the endless minutiae of maritime safety. You quickly realize that safety maneuvers can’t be theoretical; you can’t pause mid-crisis to remember how to recover a man overboard. It has to be burned into your brain and muscle memory.

You have to know your knots, your rules of the road—like standing-on versus giving-way—your absolute responsibility to avoid collisions at all costs, and the habit of calling out nearby traffic to your helmsman regardless of whether you think they already see it.

Broadening the Network: WSA & Racing

I just kept sailing. Any time I could get on the water, I took it. I joined the Women’s Sailing Association of Santa Monica Bay—an association that, hilariously enough, has a membership that’s about 60% men. But they are incredibly welcoming, and members constantly post day sails you can hop on to crew or just relax.

It gave me a chance to meet more of the local female sailors—we definitely need more of them on the water!—and their monthly meetings feature great guest speakers where you run into familiar faces from our co-op, the California Yacht Club, and the Santa Monica Windjammers Yacht Club.

Then, I started racing. Which is an entirely different animal.

The Pre-Race Chaos & the Flow State

The pre-race skirmish—everyone tacking aggressively near the start line, jockeying for clean air and positioning—still terrifies me a little bit. I started crewing on different boats with different teams, and we had our fair share of absolute chaos:

• We broke a topsail.
• We completely missed a start window.
• During one wild maneuver, a crew member almost fell clear overboard—the lifelines caught her just in time as her legs dangled over the side, though we lost a GPS unit to the Pacific in the process.

Sailing teaches you very quickly to expect the unexpected. Having an experienced, prepared crew where everyone knows their job isn’t just nice to have; it’s vital. And soaking up knowledge from old-timers who have been doing this for forty years—even navigating their funny quirks and fierce disagreements—is the absolute best way to learn.

Now here I am, a summer later in 2026, still racing regularly in the Cal Yacht Club Sunset Series with a consistent crew. We’ve had our own share of misfires, mechanical fuck-ups, and genuine successes, but the most rewarding part has been watching a crew of almost entirely new sailors lock in together.

There was a moment during our last race that hit me hard. The spinnaker was going up, and we were frantically juggling the spinnaker pole, the sheets, the guy, and a dozen other micro-adjustments. Everyone was communicating cleanly, completely in the flow, reacting instantly to the wind and each other. I realized right then that when a team is dialed, the boat and its crew cease to be separate things. You turn into a single, synchronized organism moving across the water.

Horizon Lines

I’m excited to see where this journey—and these boats—takes me next. There are so many more people to meet, long coastal cruises to plan, and eventual trips to charter a boat in the Balkans or the Mediterranean like so many of our club members do.

But mostly, I’m just looking forward to being out on the water, continually learning, and surviving whatever wild emergencies the sea decides to throw at us next.