TAMPA — Sally Gardiner-Smith is off to college, and she should arrive in time for classes.
In the fall of 2015.
Gardiner-Smith, a Woolwich, Maine, teenager accepted to Eckerd College, is taking the long way to campus. The experienced sailor is piloting Athena, her 29-foot Erikson sailboat, solo from her hometown down the U.S. eastern seaboard, with a stop in the Bahamas, around Florida and up the state’s west coast to Eckerd on St. Petersburg’s waterfront.
She left on Sept. 29. Although plenty of friends offered to tag along, Gardiner-Smith decided it was something she needed to do alone.
“It’s almost like I understand it better now that I’ve traveled so far,” she said last week. “It’s knowing you have done something all by yourself. When there’s a tough situation, you get yourself out of it. That’s really important for people, especially for young people. Once I got to Florida, it just felt really good.”
Athena is now docked in Jacksonville while Gardiner-Smith spends the holidays with her family back home. On Jan. 3, she’ll be back aboard the sloop to continue down the Florida coast.
She’s technically not traveling solo. Elli, her 10-pound cockapoo, has been along for the ride.
But the trip has taken a toll on what Gardiner-Smith calls her “furry first mate.” In October, when they went for a walk onshore in a port south of Boston, the dog bolted onto the street and was struck by a truck.
Elli’s right hind leg was badly shattered and had to be amputated.
“It was so sad,” Gardiner-Smith said. “I couldn’t keep her from going into the road. It’s so crazy.”
She said she cried for days, but when reunited with her dog also came away with “the lesson I am trying to learn from my little dog. That lesson is to be resilient, unyielding in a desire to live, and, most importantly, to pick up from wherever life has placed me without resentment or anger,” she wrote on her blog, which is being published by the Portland Press Herald in Maine.
Elli spent some recovery time in Maine but was back on the boat in November. She’s getting around fine on three limbs, Gardiner-Smith said.
There have been other, less catastrophic setbacks. Gardiner-Smith backed over her dinghy line in York Harbor, Maine, tangling her propeller and requiring a dive into the frigid October sea. A fuel tank clog required repairs in Stonington, Connecticut. She needed a lift up the mast in a bosun’s chair after the mast tangled in some tree branches in the Intracoastal Waterway and bent her wind vane.
In each case, fellow sailors came to her assistance.
“For some reason, people in the sailing world are exceptionally nice and kind,” she said.
Gardiner-Smith comes from a family of avid sailors and said she learned to walk on a boat. Along with her father, mother and sister, she’s traveled to Central America, the Caribbean and has crossed the Atlantic to Europe.
Her grandparents winter aboard a sailboat in the Bahamas, and when she resumes her trip, Gardiner-Smith will take a detour to visit them — probably with Fort Lauderdale as the setting-off point — and sail around the Exumas.
She relies on electronic GPS mapping, an iPod app and paper charts to set her course, largely along the Intracoastal Waterway, a series of protected channels that can be safer, but much busier than open sea.
The boat has a single-burner propane stove — “I eat a lot of canned soup,” she said — and she reads a lot.
She takes precautions with Elli. The dog has a “really cute little lifejacket” and gets clipped in when the boat is moving.
Fighting loneliness can be challenging.
“I’ll psych myself out once in a while, sailing at night, imagining everything that can go wrong, sitting there in the dark,” she said. “There are a lot of things that can go wrong.”
The sailor spent Halloween in New York City and watched the marathon there. She had a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner of rotisserie chicken and pasta on the boat with her mother and sister.
This holiday week, surrounded by friends and family, enjoying hot showers, she said she is torn by that companionship and the longing to be back at sea. She’ll return to Jacksonville on Jan. 3, resuming her trek down Florida. After the Bahamas, she’ll head through the Florida Straits and up the west coast to college.
Gardiner-Smith was considering attending New College in Sarasota when she learned about Eckerd. “I went to check it out, and I didn’t even apply elsewhere,” she said. The college’s extensive waterfront activities are a particular draw, she said.
She’s not sure about a major yet,but hopes to arrive in July to find a place for the boat and for the August “Fall Term” for freshmen.
There’s “no set route yet” for the back end of the trip. “Just Eckerd at the end of it,” she said.