13. Sharon Sites Adams Had the Right to Sail Alone
It is a cool, foggy morning in 1969. Sharon Sites Adams looks over the rail at waters so lively that she feels compelled to whisper into her tape recorder so that she will not disturb the whale whose spout she just heard. Soon she is able to see its dark back emerge close to her boat. She smells its fishy, mossy breath in the fog.
Around 1:45 p.m. she makes out Point Arguello, California. In relief and celebration, she raises two colorful windsocks with a Japanese carp design to decorate her rig and to honor her two children. About an hour later, she finds a northbound fishing vessel named the Little Swede. She waves her arms. The boat alters course and motors over. Its engine thumps loudly and echoes across the surface of the gray water.
“Did you want something?” the captain asks.
“I’ve just sailed from Japan,” Adams states, unfamiliar with the sound of her own voice and unable to contain her thrill and pride.
The Little Swede is a salmon boat bound for Oregon with two men aboard. The captain tries to use their radio to make contact with her people in Los Angeles, which does not work, so they radio a fisherman buddy in Morro Bay, who says he will walk up the dock and make the call for her.
“You sure have a lot of friends with you,” the mate says, nodding down toward the water where two dolphins swim off the bow of Adams’ boat and a large seal paddles off her stern.
Little Swede spends about forty-five minutes floating beside her, then motors off, having done what they could do. Adams watches them suddenly spin back around.
“We forgot to ask if there’s anything you need.”
“What I needed most,” she wrote later, “to be found—had already been taken care of.”
After the meeting with the fishing boat, Adams continues sailing south down the California coast, knowing she has realized her dream—yet still anxious. She gropes in the fog and sometimes drifts too close to the shore in calms. Sea Sharp II, unlike Horie’s Mermaid, was equipped with both an engine and kerosene running lights, but both had failed by the end of the first week off Japan, so she had no auxiliary power at that point and had to run dark every night of the crossing. Hoping her news has gone through, she tries to find a boat sailed by her friends, who she anticipates are sailing up to meet her. She hears the train on shore. She inhales the smell of the cedar trees and the dunes and the kelp. On her radio the next morning, she listens to the announcement of her own arrival. Later a small plane flies overhead with a cameraman filming her boat. She looks up and waves. To try to stay awake and focused, she takes a Ritalin pill, as she had done occasionally while in the middle of the Pacific.
On the afternoon of the next day, something extraordinary happens, an event that Adams mostly brushes aside (but I cannot). She is napping with her self-steering gear engaged, but then wakes up abruptly after about forty-five minutes, sensing something wrong.
“We had just slipped past an oil rig on the starboard side,” she writes. “Not ten feet from our stern was a black mooring can used by the tenders. The men on board looked startled to see us, but their expression didn’t compare with mine when I realized Sea Sharp II, all on her own, had steered us safely through the maze. Another angel at the helm.”
When her friends find her, the two vessels sail south in company. They pass her fresh fruit over the rail. So she can sleep occasionally, they keep her boat lit at night or blare their horn to wake her up if there is danger. At 5:15 a.m. on the morning of 23 July 1969, wearing the same flamingo pink pantsuit that she had worn when she left Yokohama, Sharon Sites Adams sails Sea Sharp II into San Diego Bay.
Although she would be a national celebrity for a time, including as the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year, Sharon Sites Adams could not find a publisher for her story, even with multiple agents. She was told there wasn’t enough interest in her voyage. She gave it multiple tries over the years with different agents and editors.
“Women weren’t supposed to be out there doing those things,” she told me.
Forty years later her book was finally printed by a small landlocked academic press at the University of Nebraska, co-written with Karen J. Oates, with the title Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World’s Largest Ocean (2008). Adams was now living in a tidy trailer home in Oregon, retired from a range of jobs that included stints in banking, property management, owning a coffee shop, and for many years serving hot dogs at a stand on the campus of California State University at Hayward.
Wearing her pink pantsuit, Sharon Sites Adams left Tokyo Bay seven years to the day after the departure of Kenichi Horie, which, she said, was a coincidence. She sailed across in seventy-four days, the fastest non-stop single-handed passage of the North Pacific at the time and as only the third known person to have done so.
Adams’ passage across to San Diego was a longer distance overall than Horie’s and Platt’s, nearly 7,000 miles as the albatross flies, and she covered the passage in nearly three weeks less time. To be fair, her boat Sea Sharp II was a full third larger than Mermaid. (Marine architects explain that a boat’s maximum speed through the water is mostly a direct function of its length.) Built of fiberglass, with a larger suite of sails, Sea Sharp II was also equipped with a wind-vane self-steering system.
Similar to how Horie had strategized regarding public relations, so too Adams had planned ahead. She connected with an American builder who already had a company in Yokohama that built boats for export. Yokohama was the sister city of San Diego. The American designer donated the boat for her trip, knowing that if she were successful Sea Sharp II would be both easily sold after she arrived in California and tremendous advertising for his company. All of which proved true when Adams gave the boat back after she arrived safely. Adams was, however, allowed to customize the boat, which she did with extra rigging, larger winches, a beefier bow pulpit, more substantial safety lines, the self-steering system, and a unique plexiglass dome that stuck up from the cabin, which she conceptualized herself so that she could see outside without having to open the hatch in rough, wet weather. She had the deck painted a pastel pink, a pink stripe painted on the topsides, and a hot-pink stripe stitched into her sails.
Once the passage was all arranged and boat construction nearly complete, Adams rewrote her will, had her appendix removed, then flew to Tokyo to meet the new vessel. She tried to go on several sea trials, but was often stymied with press obligations and other impediments. So after only a couple of days of sailing Sea Sharp II, she stuck to her departure date with the hope that she would figure it all out once she was underway.
At sea she began reading Horie’s Kodoku. Adams felt fortunate when compared to how much rough weather he had had at the start. Although she did not experience difficult weather conditions at first, she needed to cope with a brand-new vessel, aboard which parts kept breaking and systems failed in maddening succession. Much of this, she believes, was due to hasty, even shoddy work by her soon-to-be ex-husband, her first sailing instructor, who had flown over to Japan to rig the boat. Sawdust and oil clogged a bilge pump. A radar reflector blew off in the first gale. A backstay disconnected. Two halyard blocks broke. Winches, topping lifts, a string of hardware malfunctioned. At one point, though, in a gale of over forty knots she ran ahead of the weather with only a small rolled staysail and still made one hundred miles over twenty-four hours. That’s a fast, dramatic run in a small boat, especially with rigging you haven’t yet learned to trust.
Adams got help figuring out the self-steering before she left Yokohama, but she never had it quite mastered in Tokyo Bay. Sailing eastbound into the open Pacific, she soon began to get the hang of how to adjust it properly, but she, like all single-handers, could never turn over the helm with entire confidence. Once during a gale, when she happened to be awake and on deck during the day, she watched a full-sized log, “like a torpedo,” speed down a steep wave and just miss her bow. This would have sunk her boat in seconds.
With merchant shipping, Adams’ experiences were similar to those of Horie and Pidgeon. She could count on one hand the number of times she saw large ships. About three weeks out, early in the morning, a large freighter named the SS President McKinley scared the wits out of her. The ship powered slowly up while she was sleeping and blasted the horn. She peeked through the hatch, realized she was naked, and then returned below while the ship kept blasting the horn as she struggled to pull on damp sweatpants and a shirt. Once back in her cockpit and presentable, looking up at the captain and trying to shout to be heard, she found she had little to say. The conversation was brief. She said she did not need anything. They offered her the latitude and longitude.
Sharon Sites Adams taking a sun sight aboard her first boat, Sea Sharp, on her solo voyage to Hawai‘i (1965).
“It was nice seeing you,” the captain of the bulk carrier said. A few of the passengers and crew looked down at her over the rail, taking pictures. Then they powered away. Adams took a photograph of the ship’s stern. She felt shattered and confused, suddenly launched out of her rhythm and profoundly alone at sea, having lost the opportunity for at least some conversation.
Especially in contrast with Horie’s Kodoku, Sharon Sites Adams’ what-they-saw and her perspective on the ocean seem to represent the start of a turn among single-handers who began to tell their stories with more environmental concerns in mind. Adams noted human impact on ocean ecosystems and considered marine life as meaningful in and of itself: animals were no longer just resources for humans to exploit. Her narrative Pacific Lady is complicated, however, in that it was published forty years later. Less interested in writing while at sea, Adams had spoken her daily journal into a tape recorder. She finished with seventy-five hours of tape, which she revisited over the years to write her account. Her published story, she told me, was barely influenced by her co-author, who mostly served to copy-edit and organize it, but the final revision did happen after four decades of distance and dramatic cultural shifts in American perspectives on ocean spaces and marine life.
For example, like Horie, Adams wrote in Pacific Lady that she was not interested in washing her clothes on her first solo passage, from California to Hawai‘i a few years earlier, so she had thrown her dirty garments over the side. “I know, I know, I was a litterbug!” she wrote. “But everything went overboard in those pre-eco days.”
In Pacific Lady a sunset bathed her in pink. Dolphins swam “gracefully.” Squid that washed up on her deck had “pretty faces.” Like her predecessors, Adams saw sharks as ravenous and dangerous—one shark developed a red stripe on its back from bottom paint it rubbed off her hull (Johnny Wray witnessed the exact same thing in the 1930s). Yet another time a shark was graceful, and when she threw overboard a red plaid shirt, she did not imagine the shark rushing after a patch of blood, but instead swimming into the shirt, a Disney image, making it “the best-dressed shark at sea.”
Adams loved “her friends” the albatrosses, which she called gooney birds, a nickname often used by earlier sailors. Adams wrote that she loved these goofy and funny seabirds. Her favorite seabirds were “sea swallows,” which by her description and distance from land perhaps were a species of tern, veering around her rigging and playing games with her.
One night Adams watched a green flash after the sunset, a phenomenon almost unique to life at sea. You need a clean long horizon and a clear sky. The exact moment after the sun has gone down, if you look a bit obliquely, you can often see a quick plume of green glow in your peripheral vision. “I don’t have the ability or the words,” Adams wrote of the green flash and the sunset scene, “to convey the beauty of what I saw.”
Environmentalism or simply the desire to connect with a beautiful ocean world had not been part of Adams’ initial why-go. Her motivation to cross an ocean alone began abruptly after she learned how to sail at the age of thirty-four. Adams had left her first husband and two children in Oregon, realizing that she was too young and never wanted that sort of domestic life. Then, over a decade later, after losing her second husband to cancer and working for many years managing a dentist’s office in San Diego, she decided to try sailing. She had spent almost no time on the water. Less than eight months after her first sailing lessons, she embarked on a solo sail to Hawai‘i, the trip that would give her the confidence to attempt the full North Pacific eastbound crossing.
Like Davison and Horie, in Pacific Lady Adams was candid about pangs of loneliness at sea; but in her telling, the sea was less about competition and more about companionship. Her love of the ocean and its inhabitants comes across not solely as garnish but as the main meal, foregrounding her adventure in the introduction to her narrative:
But you know, we sailors have this: Even in the worst of times, we see the best of nature’s beauty. On calm seas, the water acted like mirrors beneath my boat, in the center of an ocean, an utter silence broken only by the faint sound of a sail crinkling in the air. I drifted with sleek sharks that circled me and scratched their backs on the bottom of the boat. I watched the boat’s wake spread like a silver lace fan behind me. Many times I witnessed the disappearance of horizon as sky melded with water to form a belly that ate me whole. And I drifted in that misty tomb, wet and tired and often too annoyed to appreciate the magnificence of it all.
Other times, I relished the wonder of the universe . . . God has blessed me with these things.
As Adams completed her voyage, navigating by sextant and dead reckoning in the summer of 1969, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been out for several years. National Geographic magazine was sponsoring the voyage and publishing features about the solo circumnavigation of Robin Lee Graham, the golden-haired, big-smiling, barefooted sixteen-year-old who had left San Pedro, California, in 1965 and was now on the verge of returning (see this page). Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan’s self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) had continued to improve, delivering through television new vistas and access under the surface to the broadest of audiences. Cousteau’s underwater film documentary The Silent World (1956) had won an Oscar, and by the time of Adams’ trans-Pacific crossing in 1969 his American television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was in its third of ten seasons. The popular show Flipper had finished its run on television and crafted in the American imagination a dolphin that was as loving and loyal as a Labrador retriever.
Preparations were also underway to mark the first Earth Day the following spring, in 1970. Shortly to follow in 1972, from public pressure in the United States, were the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act.
In Pacific Lady Adams did not mention this rising tide of American environmentalism, nor nuclear testing in the Pacific. She did not mention the Santa Barbara oil spill, either, the largest oil spill in American history at the time and still the largest ever in California waters—a disaster that soiled beaches and coated bays in January and February of 1969, a couple of months before she flew to Japan to begin her passage. It would have been easy to strike a cynical or metaphorical note as Sea Sharp II steered around the oil rigs in the final days of her trip. The Santa Barbara spill was one of the key catalysts, a visual crisis for the television set, that boosted further momentum for those environmental regulations of the early 1970s.
What Adams did choose to explore in Pacific Lady was that on the very day she chatted with the men of the Little Swede, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Mixed with the emotions of completing her record-setting passage, Adams sat in the cockpit of her boat that night, looking up at the moon and listening on her radio as Walter Cronkite on CBS news announced the human steps walking on its surface. She wished then, like Slocum who returned home burning to be of use, that her passage had made some contribution to science or something helpful to humanity.
“I hadn’t done anything but bring an idea to fruition,” she wrote. “The journey fulfilled my own wishes, and maybe I’d be setting a world record. But I wasn’t charting new worlds. Or was I?”
What Sharon Sites Adams charted were new routes and further precedents that led to the continued expansion of women’s roles and expectations in Western society. She did not refer to any specific previous solo sailors in Pacific Lady other than Slocum (“one of the greatest sailors to have lived”) and Horie (“I felt that we had some kind of connection”), but she had, Adams told me, read Pidgeon’s account and Davison’s, too. In Pacific Lady, she explained that her decision to embark on her first big solo trip, the one to Hawai‘i, had come somewhat out of nowhere, rooted only in her reading: “The idea plagued me, day and night, for two weeks. I couldn’t wipe it way, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think of anything else. Men had done it; I had read about them. I didn’t know that no woman had, and that had nothing to do with my fixation anyway.”
Although her name has largely been forgotten among American feminist heroes, Sharon Sites Adams became an inspiring figure for people ashore and especially for a new wave of solo single-handed sailors. Slocum, as you likely noticed, had encouraged only young men to go on a voyage like his. But one year before Adams’ solo sail to Hawai‘i, Edith Baumann of West Germany became the first woman entrant in the OSTAR, a single-handed trans-Atlantic race. Baumann had to be rescued off the Azores when her boat broke up in heavy weather, but hers was hardly the only one to founder that summer, as other sailors also ran into storms and wind of over sixty knots: only eighteen of thirty-five entrants made it across.
A few months after Adams became the first woman to cross the North Pacific alone, a woman named Ingeborg von Heister, in her mid-forties, became the second known woman (after Davison) to cross the Atlantic, as well as the first German sailor of any gender to cross an ocean alone in a trimaran. After the crossing, von Heister cruised the Caribbean alone on her trimaran and returned alone in the other direction. Von Heister once wrote in her logbook: “I believe that it’s better to sail alone than with a crew you can’t get along with. And who should I take with me? Another woman? Not sure a woman can make a good comrade. A married couple? Out of the question. A man you are not in love with? That will definitely cause big problems. And I can’t find or haven’t found someone with whom I’m in mutual love and also enjoys sailing. Either he has no money, no inclination to sail or he’s too old.”
In 1971 a young British woman named Nicolette Milnes Walker sailed across the Atlantic from Wales to Rhode Island. Largely new to sailing, like Adams, Walker completed a steady, safe passage. Although she did not further feminist movements—stating in her first chapter, titled “Why,” that “like most women I wanted to impress men”—her narrative When I Put Out to Sea (1972) was one of the first solo-sailor narratives that began to lean toward an environmentalist perspective. Walker wrote of her relationship with the sea as partly to test oneself—the ocean, with a male pronoun, is “a child of immense power and quick temper,” yet at the same time she explained that “one of the pleasures of ocean voyaging is the enjoyment of natural things, of the abundant life of the sea, from the smallest plankton, visible only when it lights up with fear, to the great whales, to the birds that live on the open ocean and rarely touch down on land.” At another point during her crossing Walker wrote how she let herself down in the way she was careless with plastic trash, throwing it overboard. She found it too hard to motivate herself when she knew that “the ocean liners discharge all their waste into the sea.” As she approached the coast of Rhode Island, she was surprised to see a whale, because she had heard that these waters would be too polluted. So Walker was pleased that “the great whaling fleets of New England had not completely wiped out their victims.”
Still more women made notable solo voyages in the 1970s after Sharon Sites Adams. In 1975 Noriko Kobayashi from Japan finished with six others in a single-handed trans-Pacific race from California to Japan. In 1976, Krystyna Chojnowska-Liskiewicz from Poland, in her boat Mazurek, became the first woman to sail solo around the world, departing from the Canary Islands in March 1976 and returning there in April 1978. Also that year, three other women sailing independently of each other completed single-handed circumnavigations. Naomi James (see this page) and Brigitte Oudry, from New Zealand and France respectively, each completed their voyages months later by going in opposite directions around Cape Horn.
In 2020 a man who lived on his boat at the harbor in Oakland, California, found Sea Sharp II sunk at the dock. He began to research its provenance and found the connection to Sharon Sites Adams, which was confirmed when he identified the custom Plexiglas dome on the cabin. Adams had not seen the boat in fifty years, since she gave it up after the crossing. The man extracted the wheel and brought it up to Adams’ Oregon home. Holding the wheel with her ninety-year-old hands, she began to cry. Now it leans against the window, resting on a doily. “I look at it every day,” she told me.
Adams said that despite what the world sees today as a powerful feminist act of being the first woman to sail the Pacific alone, she did not identify as a feminist then or now. Her why-go was not to prove anything about women. Adams feels as she always had, that this trip was simply something she wanted to do—and could. Her friend and fellow single-handed sailor Carol Baker, who herself in her late seventies still sails alone along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, told me that Adams has never had any axe to grind and “never had any patience at all with the feminist movement.” Nor has Adams ever thought of herself as an environmentalist. She had always just wanted to be an adventurer.
“Critics have accused me of being too independent, and I’m sure that’s true,” Adams wrote in Pacific Lady. “They called me a foolish housewife. They psychoanalyzed me. Some asked who gave me the right to sail the ocean alone.”