Sailing: A Woman's Guide

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Summary: Fun and facts of sailing made real, through women's voices.
Review: What if you'd been introduced to sailing by a group of wise woman friends, all exceptionally skilled sailors and consummate psychologists, who anticipated your learning pace and nudged you on to triumph with gentle good humor. Impossible? What if someone combined the on-water wisdom of hundreds of women into the only sailing instruction book to address how you learn and incorporate information? That's exactly what this book does. Doris Colgate, president of the National Women's Sailing Association, called her book "a gallery of profiles," stories of women who've made sailing an important part of their lives. Her gallery, a gathering of voices, is what makes the book unique. At every level of sailing, crucial information is made real by women's voices or amplified in a sidebar, explaining how someone mastered the skill. The reader is never left staring at a mysterious paragraph, wondering what the author meant. It helps, too, that there's a thorough index, and you can look up sailing terms in their context instead of in a brief glossary. The book handles how-to-sail information professionally: basic material is clearly organized and well illustrated. But the basics haven't changed and they aren't gender specific. It's the presentation differences that strike you, such as hearing someone admit she had doubts about heeling boats, then explain how she learned to control the boat and her fears. That's what we need--the rationale for a new and, at first, daunting activity. The author, who's operated a sailing school for over 20 years, calls on her substantial trove of anecdotes from the beginners, women who've learned good lessons in her sailing courses, and the experienced women who've presented their wisdom at NWSA boat show seminars Colgate organizes. To add intrigue, Colgate adds tips and attitude from some of sailing's celebrities--women racers, long-distance cruisers, authors and editors whose words appear throughout the book. I've often given friends who want to learn sailing one particular how-to book, hoping they'll get into the sport. Now, I'll give the women, and some of the men, Doris' new book instead.