Portsmouth, NH - A seminar designed specifically for boating couples, and especially for women, will be offered to the public on November 16, 2002 at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hosted by the Cruising Club of America, "Suddenly Alone" is intended to help allay the fears that many women boaters experience at the prospect of having to assume full control of a boat in the event that the captain becomes incapacitated.

All too often, women find that their enjoyment of being aboard a boat is tinged with a fear that they might not be up to the task of assuming full control of the vessel in the event of an emergency. Presented by the non-profit Bonnell Cove Foundation, "Suddenly Alone" is intended to provide a spouse, or other crewmember, with the information, knowledge, tools and confidence to take charge in an emergency, to stabilize the situation and bring the vessel into a safe harbor.

"Suddenly Alone" is not simply a safety-at-sea program. The day-long seminar focuses on the mental challenge of being "Suddenly Alone" aboard a vessel, and aims to demonstrate a few of the basic skills, such as coping with panic, control of the vessel, simple navigation, communications, and recovery of overboard crew, that are necessary to overcoming fear and recovering from a potentially dangerous situation.

According to Ross and Lucia Santy, members of the Cruising Club of America and ardent sailors, the program is a lifesaver. "All too often," Ross says, "many men believe that they can teach their wives everything they need to know about boating, but the truth is that it's extremely difficult for one spouse to teach the other specific skills and, more often than not, the teaching is neither complete nor effective. Moreover, an essential element in overcoming fear and gaining skill is practice in accomplishing tasks, especially emergency tasks."

Lucia, who took the "Suddenly Alone" seminar with Ross last spring, points out that "pulling a person back aboard a boat when they have fallen overboard is far from easy." The seminar, which is taught predominately by women with very extensive boating experience, uses life-size firemen's dummies to simulate the dead weight of an average male in the water. "The difficulty of getting a 180-pound man back aboard a boat is staggering" Lucia admits, "and unless you recognize that you can use tools aboard the boat to overcome this much weight, the task can seem almost impossible. It took considerable practice to become confident that I could overcome such a situation."

"Suddenly Alone" does not deal with rough weather survival or medical emergencies, nor is it a beginning boater's course. Instead, the program aims to assist couples as a unit, by enabling women to ask for specific types of instruction or to practice doing tasks that they may have seen done hundreds of times, but which they've never actually practiced themselves, like navigating, or using a radio, or starting the engine. Frequently, men taking the course recognize that their very lives could depend upon their spouses ability to rescue them from an overboard or medical situation, and that by learning and practicing together a couple can develop a comforting mutual confidence in each other's ability to handle an emergency.

The program is broken up into three parts: a lecture format begins with a discussion of the psychology of fear by a woman psychotherapist, and continues with discussions of simple VHF radio communications; emergency navigation and the concepts needed to get a boat safely back to a harbor, including getting a boat under control and recovering an overboard victim.

The second segment of the seminar includes small hands-on workshops to practice radio communications, navigation and chart reading, boat handling and stabilization, and crew recovery. Participants actually practice the task of hoisting a dummy back on board a simulated vessel in the classroom using a mast and Life Sling. The final segment of the course is practice aboard a boat, and the seminar emphasizes the need for continued practice by providing participants with a workbook and exercise sections for each subject area.

The Cruising Club of America is an organization of experienced offshore sailors, founded in 1921-22 to further the "adventurous use of the sea" by improving seamanship and promoting the design of seaworthy yachts, safe yachting procedures and environmental awareness. Its members have cruised in every ocean and circumnavigated the earth east-to-west and west-to-east, both through canals and around the capes of the continents.

The cost for the program is $100 per person, and includes morning and afternoon snacks, lunch, program workbook and exercises, a chart for practice navigation, paper copies of program slide presentations, and a copy of US Sailing's booklet, "Safety Recommendations for Cruising Sailboats".

Persons interested in further details and registration information for the "Suddenly Alone" seminar may access the Cruising Club of America website at www.crusingclub.org, or by contacting Ross or Lucia Santy at 207-439-5824 or via e-mail at: [email protected].