The fresh southeasterly shut off, only to roar back with a vengeance from the opposite direction. Conifers groaned as they bent to the force of the onrushing air, accompanied by the rapid-fire staccato of a plastic tarp tearing itself to shreds on a tired-looking long keeler jacked up next to a rusted ship’s saw. The boat? A mahogany-planked Nordic Folkboat, a humble yet elegant lapstrake craft. Designed by committee in Scandinavia at the onset of World War II, it has always had a decidedly non-elitist appeal.

The boat recently was donated to the People’s Boat Project in Port Townsend, Washington, which aims to “build community through empowerment” by teaching women, trans, nonbinary, and other gender marginalized folks boatbuilding, sailing and seamanship skills. This vessel, however, is not just any creaky old Folkboat. The proof is an autographed plank that bears the signature of Sharon Sites Adams. She’s 94 today, but back in 1965 as a rookie sailor she single-handed this boat from Los Angeles, California, to Hawaii. She was the first woman to do so. It took her 39 days, but she persevered with determination and grit, and with money she’d saved while working in a dental office.

“Sharon is the perfect symbol for pushing against the glass ceiling,” says Emma Gunn, 34, who was born and raised in Port Townsend, skippers a local schooner and otherwise works as delivery captain and sailmaker. A principal in the People’s Boat Project, she wants to help create more opportunities for women and others who are not always accepted as equals in the marine trades. When Sites Adams embarked on her transoceanic journey, “she had not had a lot of training,” Gunn says. In fact, Sites Adams sailed to Hawaii alone only 8 months after her first sailing lesson. “That was considered insane, but also showed the human potential.”

Ginny Wilson, 42, is the other principal of the Project. She hails from Concord, Massachusetts, is an alumna of the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding and works as an independent shipwright in Port Townsend. However, Gunn and Wilson aren’t going it alone. They invited Sites Adams to speak and sign her book, Pacific Lady, at the recent Wooden Boat Festival, which helped create publicity for the project that in turn will give her former boat another lease on life.

“I was lucky to have such a reliable traveling mate, a boat that could weather the troubles that lay ahead,” Sites Adams wrote about the Folkboat. In her book, she also quoted a magazine that claimed, “the worse it gets, the better she likes it. The boat is so good it makes even a mediocre helmsman good.”

Folkboats were never meant for ocean crossings. That’s why Sites Adams, with a scant few months of sailing experience, had to add vital gear to the vessel, including lifelines and pulpits, extra winches, a self-bailing cockpit with scuppers, stronger rigging to fly twin foresails in the trades, reinforcements for key fittings, bilge pumps and a rudimentary self-steering mechanism. She named the boat Sea Sharp, a direct reference to readiness and an oblique reference to her practicing a crisp C-sharp note on the cello.

Sites Adams grew up orphaned in rural Oregon and had no real connection to saltwater until after a church service one Sunday in 1964 when she was a widow in her 30s and checked out the then-new yacht harbor at Marina del Rey. Seeing small sailboats tack back and forth, “I wondered how those sailors knew what to do. I was intrigued,” she wrote. “And that was it, my transformation. My genesis. It was honestly that much chance, or karma, or kismet, that brought me to the ocean.”

Spying an ad for a sailing school, she thought, why not?

She enjoyed sailing and quickly picked up basic seamanship and navigation. She bought a 21-foot fiberglass cruiser and then raced and cruised in local waters before setting her sights on sailing to Hawaii by herself, much to the consternation of friends and the office of the 11th Coast Guard District, who all tried but failed to dissuade her. “The disbelievers, they called me names—crazy, kooky, stupid, psychotic. I was all these things in the public eye,” she wrote.

Single-handing a small boat to Hawaii in the 1960s was sailing like Joshua Slocum with petroleum lights and no means of communication due to the lack of electric power. The goal was simply just get there–or not. Sites Adams said she never intended to become an example. She merely wanted to see if she could do it on her terms, ready to weather serious storms, which she’d done before when she left her first husband and their two children. “A woman doesn’t have to give birth to be a mother, and giving birth doesn’t always make her one,” she observed in her book. “But back in my day, you were an awful person if you left your children. You really were the devil.”

Later, she would reconcile with her family, but in the mid 1960s, after losing her second husband to cancer, she sought a new life and found adventure. Sailing to Hawaii was only the start. She also rounded Cape Horn on the Queen Mary, sailed across Lake Titicaca in the Andes at 12,500 feet of altitude, and visited a Nambas tribe on the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, where there was a history of cannibalism and locals were not yet used to people of light skin color or the concept of clothing.

After her return, she forgot her never-again pledge and prepared to cross the Pacific in 1969 on Sea Sharp II, a Mariner 31 fiberglass ketch furnished to her by the builder. She cast off from Yokohama, Japan, and headed for San Diego, California. It was another first for a woman, and the adventure brought her temporary fame. After weathering storms, dealing with broken kit and warding off loneliness by talking to her tape recorder, Sites Adams finished her voyage shortly after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, covering about 5,000 miles in 74 days and 17 hours.

This achievement put her in the company of legendary Japanese ocean sailor and winner of the Bluewater Medal Kenichi Horie, who in 1962 at age 23 sailed a 19-foot plywood boat from Osaka, Japan, to San Francisco. After a lifetime of ocean adventures, he also single-handed from San Francisco back to Osaka in 2022, at age 83, celebrating the 60th anniversary of his initial voyage. He already was the first and the youngest single-hander to conquer this route, but now he’s also the oldest.

Unlike Horie, a consummate minimalist who started sailing in high school, Sites Adams came to the sport in her mid-30s. As a woman, she was pegged to a different stereotype and seemed hyperconscious of appearance, as photos in her book suggest. Partial to the color pink, she sewed dresses to pass time at sea and packed special attire for arrival. “I had nothing more to do but put on my pink suit and polish my fingernails,” she wrote about arriving in San Diego.

This year Sites Adams will celebrate the 60th anniversary of her trip to Hawaii. Six decades later, she’s keen, perceptive and active, still driving herself around Portland, Oregon, where she lives. Her former boat, on the other hand, will need invasive surgery, which brings us back to the People’s Boat Project.

“I want to try and keep the boat as original as possible, if we can get mahogany planking,” Wilson, the shipwright, explained. It will take painstaking deconstruction to secure the structure and determine what still is usable. Next, the keel will be removed before the backbone can be replaced. Wilson will be in charge of this work while Gunn will take care of spars, rigging and instruction on the water.

The lumber yard of Edensaw Woods supports the project by donating land for a workshop, and the boatbuilding community around town chips in with tools and advice. Wilson and Gunn are currently footing the startup cost, until the nonprofit is established and fundraising kicks in. “We want to create a sustainable program,” Wilson says. The People’s Boat Project is also working on partnerships to start sailing and seamanship classes even before the Folkboat is ready.

Much credit for the boat’s survival goes to John Janetty, 78, on Vashon Island, Washington. After her triumphant arrival in Honolulu in 1965, Sites Adams shipped Sea Sharp back to Los Angeles to sell it. A subsequent owner renamed the boat Seabell and converted it for coastal sailing with an inboard diesel. Janetty bought it in the late 1970s and cruised to Catalina, Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands. “It just saved my life, being in Los Angeles and having a place to go,” he remembered.

Janetty serendipitously crossed tacks with Sites Adams. “I was motoring out of Marina Del Rey, and she was on a boat with other people. She hailed me and said, ‘Hey, I sailed that boat to Hawaii’.” Years later the two met again and she gave him her logbook. He said he’d christened the boat Sea Lark, deferring to Sites Adams, who wanted to keep the name Sea Sharp for herself.

After moving to Vashon, Janetty daysailed around Puget Sound, but when the corroded keel bolts started to let go (a common malady of wooden Folkboats) Sea Lark nee Sea Sharp nearly sank at the mooring, which prompted Janetty to move it to a shed in the late 1990s. Attempts to sell the storied relic failed, until he posted flyers with the name Sea Sharp around Port Townsend. Gunn and Wilson jumped at the opportunity to get it donated.

Now, back on the subject of that brisk blow, when the wind abated the tarp that covered Sea Sharp was shredded and the boat was left unprotected, waiting for a shed to be built, one of the many things that need to get done as the People’s Boat Project takes flight. Fortunately, overcoming obstacles is part of Sites Adams’ encouraging story, one that could be summarized with two simple words: Why not?

A SPUNKY DIVA

When researching this story, Soundings visited Sites Adams (shown above with John Janetty) at her home. Slim and small of stature, she wore a pullover and slacks and peered at her company through rimless, pink-tinted glasses. She patiently answered questions, but canceled a scheduled portrait photo shoot, stating that “there are already enough pictures of me.” She takes pride in her story and in the recognition she still gets, but most of all, she says the wild blue ocean taught her what being alive feels like.

Your book never mentions heaving to as a storm tactic. Why is that?

I never hove to my whole life. Some books [also] suggest putting a parachute out, but I’ve never done that either. I don’t want anybody to learn anything about sailing from something I have said, because I used common sense of the moment, so I can’t tell you what to do.

What about the safety harness?

Never wore it. Well, no. I wore it once or twice and it almost threw me overboard, so I never wore it again.

How did you summon the courage to go on these long, solo voyages?

Well, that word has been used a lot, but I didn’t consider it courage. A few years ago, I jumped out of an airplane. Now, that took courage. But I’d always wanted to jump and had an opportunity, so I did.

How did the rigging issues impact your voyage from Japan?

I couldn’t put my big genny up for a long time, so it cost me time. I only put it up when I got close to the coast of California. I put duct tape where it would have worn, and it got me down the coast. I wanted that [sail], because it had the hot pink stripe on it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.

Did you ever consider yourself a paragon for women sailors who came after you?

No, I never felt that way.

Who are your role models? You mentioned Joshua Slocum.

Well, of course, he was the first, but you can’t compare what anybody else does. The girls who are out there now can call daddy every night, but back then people at home didn’t know if you were still on the boat or at the bottom of the ocean. It was a different life, a different thing.

February 2025