An Adventurous Young Woman. A 62-Year-Old Wooden Sailboat. Life in the Caribbean
by David H Lyman
This story appeared inn the December 2022 edition of
Caribbean Compass Magazine
I first met Sarah Schelbert at last year’s Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta. I was walking the Yacht Club docks, looking for a story, and stopped to admire a classic 36-foot wooden sloop, Alani. The deck was crowded with crew furling sails, coiling lines. A thin, young, fit woman with dreadlocks was obviously in charge. I inquired if she was entering the regatta. “Yes,” she said. “My first.” There was a story to be told.
I learned Sarah was the only female skipper in the regatta of 35 boats, and after three days of hard and wet racing, she had won her division. One evening, a few days after the regatta, Sarah and I sat at Pineapple House where her story unfolded.
Sarah, at 25, had escaped her small village, Crailsheim, in southern Germany, soon after graduating from college. She planned on heading for Panama, on a quest to see the world and surf. She’d not sailed before, or even been on a boat larger than a kayak, but as a surfer, she’d come to love the sea and the thought of venturing out on it. She hopped a ride to Grand Canary, and from there, aboard a 78-foot sailboat called Aria, headed for the Caribbean. She was the only female among a crew of seven. When they reached Grenada, she left the boat. It was not long after that she met a young Canadian solo sailor who’d just arrived on his small wooden boat, a Novibuilt Herreshoff ketch. She fell in love with the small boat, and the idea of living and sailing the Caribbean, and then she fell in love with the young man.
The couple sailed together that winter of 2013, visiting the ABC Islands, Haiti, Jamaica, and then Central America. She backpacked through Guatemala while he flew back to Nova Scotia. The couple spent a second season cruising together in Central America. Sarah helped her young man and his family restore a 78-foot classic schooner, Sorca. But shortly after they launched the schooner, the relationship ended and she flew home — heartbroken.
The gloomy skies of Germany didn’t help and the idea of sailing wouldn’t leave. She longed to be back in the Caribbean, on a boat. She landed a crew position on Eye of The Wind, a 132-foot windjammer, heading for the islands. She got as far as Cuba. When they landed she headed for Guatemala, where she had friends she’d met in Nova Scotia.
It was here, tied to a dock in Tijas Bay on the Rio Dulce, she found a derelict 36-foot wooden sloop. Alani had been built in 1960 in Denmark after a design of Alan Gurney. It needed work. How much the owner didn’t say, but he’d sell it to her real cheap.
Living on a backpacker’s budget, Sarah, with the help of her parents, acquired the boat. With no professional survey, no insurance, , no idea about the the extent of repair needed, and no skills to effect needed repairs, Sarah plunged in.
A few weeks into the project, she discovered the boat was not seaworthy. The engine was questionable, there was rot, the backstay came loose, and there was a serious leak by the sternpost. She found a six-foot section of cracked frames and not a shipwright in sight. Someone told her about a village on the north shore of Belize where local shipwrights were building wooden boats. She threw off the lines and sailed there, pumping all the way. Yes, there were shipwrights there, but no travel lift, no marine railway, just a beach. Fine for hauling out the shallow draft, flat-bottom boats they built there, but not a full keel, deep-draft boat like Alani. She paid the men to build a cradle. When it came time to haul the boat and cradle ashore, the entire village turned out to help, but the sand was too soft. No go. Back to Guatemala. On the way, the engine’s head gasket blew and the engine died. Now what?
“No engine, a leaky boat, nobody around to fix my boat, and no money left. I had no idea of what to do,” she told me. She got a tow to a boatyard up the Rio Dulce and hauled the boat. What options did she have? Fly home, get a job, earn money and return? Buy another boat?
“I didn’t give up.” She heard that sailors were needed to teach sailing and skipper charter boats in Belize. She got hired. Now, she could earn her repair money in the Caribbean.
Over the next two years, Sarah worked as a charter skipper a few months at a time, then returned to work on Alani. She stripped the boat, “to see what I had.” During those two years, Sarah and a few friends replaced ribs and planks, the sternpost and horn timber. They tore out the entire cockpit and rebuilt it. Ribs were laminated and sistered, floors were replaced. Sarah was acquiring the skills of a shipwright.
After finishing the structural repairs, Sarah and her friends sheathed the hull in fiberglass. She replaced the chain plates and the rig, and installed a new engine. With money from her job as a charter boat skipper, slowly, the boat came together.
She now knew her boat intimately.
What next?
With the boat fixed and seaworthy, Sarah was itching to begin exploring. The trades and tall islands of the Eastern Caribbean were calling.
In November of 2019, Sarah, her three-month old mutt, Maya, and a novice sailing friend left the calm waters of the Gulf of Honduras and sailed into the Caribbean Sea.
“This was my first time being the captain on my own boat, sailing offshore. Sailing behind the reef off Belize was easy, but with ocean swells and strong trades, I was nervous. Was my boat strong enough? Was I?” They sailed along the south coast of Cuba, her friend left, and she singlehanded through the southern archipelago of Cuba. Then her younger brother, Lukas, joined her.
“It was a constant fight to get east. I was frustrated. This upwind sailing, with persistent winds on the bow, spray, was not what I had been dreaming about.” They slogged on. Sarah, her brother, the pup, and Alani arrived Dominica in the spring of 2020, just as Covid shut down nearly the entire Caribbean. That’s where they stayed for a while. But by May, Sarah was worrying about hurricane season. She also wanted to find work, earn money, and get a social life.
“I sailed to Grenada, alone,” she told me. “And waited on the boat for the two-week quarantine period” in St. George’s. She then sailed around to Hog Island and anchored, but nothing was happening there. No work, no friends. In September, she sailed up to Tyrell Bay on Carriacou. Here she found boatbuilders, boat work, and friends. She also started working for LTD Sailing, based in Grenada, teaching sailing classes. Life was now looking more like the dream she’d had.
Sarah heard about the Classic Yacht Regatta in Antigua, a renowned gathering of traditional sailboats that assembles in English Harbour each April. There are three days of racing and a week’s worth of parties, but the real reason these yachts and their crews come together is the boats themselves. There are half a dozen divisions: Classic, Traditional, Vintage, Spirit of Tradition, Historic and Tall Ship. Alani is a wooden, full, deep keel boat and would qualify for the classic division. Sarah wanted to enter, but Covid forced the cancelation the regatta that year, 2021.
But 2022 was another story. She entered. Sailing north, she picked up crew: her brother, who was still in Dominica, now with a girlfriend, and her uncle. No one had any racing experience, but no matter, they were family.
They arrived and were given stern-to dock space right next to Thorp Leeson’s classic sloop, Apollonia, a 1963 Bill Tripp-designed 56-foot wooden yawl he’d just rescued and restored. They were right in the middle of all the action. The crew had only one day to practice sail changes, setting the spinnaker, and tacking, before racing began.
“I’ll admit I didn’t understand, or even know, the racing rules then. I didn’t know the start sequence, or
who had the right of way around the marks, or where the marks were.”
The first day of fleet racing last April was boisterous. The 35 boats that crossed the start line found the trades blowing 25 knots and more; the seas were eight to ten feet. (Stronger conditions the day before had forced the cancellation of the Singlehanded Race.) No one came ashore dry. Spray swept the decks of even the largest yachts. Columbia, the 142-foot schooner, buried her bowsprit numerous times.
“We ripped out the jib block on the port toerail,” Sarah told me when she had backed Alani into her space at the dock after the race. “We were so late crossing the finish line,” she added, as the crew furled sails. “The committee boat had already departed. I was crying all the way in. ‘My boat is not fast enough. I’m embarrassed to even be here. Look at all these bright- finished yachts around us.’”
“That may be,” I told her, standing on the dock. “But you placed first.” She didn't believe me.
The next two days, they raced Alani hard, and of the three boats in their division, she came in first each time. “Just the fact we went out and finished each day’s race made me proud of my crew and of my boat. I’d fixed her up and sailed all the way here from Guatemala, and we won. I learned so much about my boat and in the process it gave me a great feeling of empowerment.”
During the awards presentation on the regatta’s final evening, Sarah and her crew were cheered as they climbed onto the stage to receive their prize for first in class: a prestigious Locman timepiece. But all first- place awards were men’s wristwatches. No problem, the representative said, come by the store tomorrow and exchange yours for a lady’s watch that suits your fancy. Sarah was breathless viewing the selection in the Locman shop at the Yacht Club the next day. “This is the most expensive thing I have ever worn on my body,” she exclaimed.
On the last evening, with the day’s competition put to rest, the dock party at the Antigua Yacht Club was standing room, or dancing room, only. There was a steel band, and with plenty of Carib beer and Mount Gay rum the boats’ crews, skippers and owners partied until past midnight.
Next year’s Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta has been advanced by two weeks: it will take place from Wednesday, April 19th to Sunday, April 23rd, 2023. I plan to be there.
Will Sarah and Alani be at the Antigua Classics next April? There’s a good possibility. I reached Sarah via email recently and she sent me this update.
Catching up with Sarah and Alani
Hi! I’ve been back in Grenada since the Antigua Regatta. When not out teaching sailing classes with LTD Sailing, Maya and I mostly stay in Tyrell Bay, Carriacou. Lots of friends around and I feel very much at home there. I took part and helped organize Carriacou Regatta last August. It was super fun. The regatta bug has definitely bit and I am eager to learn more about my own boat’s performance and about racing in general.
I did a bunch of upgrades on Alani this summer. She now has a set of bigger winches, and a new main and headsail. During the annual haulout in September, I replaced the old roller furler with a new one.
Life is really good! I feel very at home here in the Caribbean. Sailing has become second nature and I am looking forward to new challenges in the future. Would love to do more woodwork, maybe even be part of a crew building a new wooden boat. But you never know what life will bring, maybe something completely different. As long as we stay open and curious and follow the things that fill our hearts with joy, there will always be a new adventure and more learning and growing out there for us!
Sarah S.
