SIGHTINGS auntie eve completes the loop
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Latitude 38
• July, 2020
of humor, and it comes through on almost every page. Terribilita (Ben Wycoff Shore, $13.99) — This is a rollicking historical novel centered around the youngest member of a prominent Italian family, separated from his loved ones by duty and war in the second half of the 19th century. Except for the fact that young Lucca Ferrando spends several impressionable years aboard an old trading schooner, this book has zero to do about sailing, and we're not sure why a publisher would even have sent us a copy. That said, by the time we realized that, we were too engaged to put it down. — jr
ALL PHOTOS LATITUDE / ANDY
When singlehander Eve Wilhite made landfall in the Marquesas on May 1, it was definitely cause for celebration. Not only had she singlehanded her 53-ft ketch Auntie 4,000 miles nonstop from Panama, but she had closed the loop on a 5.5-year solo circumnavigation — westabout via the Cape of Good Hope and the Panama Canal — that began at Nuku Hiva's Taiohae Bay on Christmas Day 2014. Although the Monterey, CA-based sailor is certainly proud of her accomplishments, these days she's reveling in the luxury of having no schedule to keep or expectations to live up to. Since returning to Taiohae Bay, she's made a boatload of new friends, and she's diligently worked to improve her French, studied up on Marquesan history, gotten an ankle tattoo, and begun taking ukulele lessons from one of the local masters. It's probably fair to say that the seeds of Eve's globetrotting adventures were planted back in high school. She and some girlfriends went to Hawaii for spring break, and Eve decided to stay. "My schoolteacher parents were devastated," she recalls with a mischievous smile. But hey, it was the late '60s, an era when every teenage kid seemed to be bursting These days, one of Auntie Eve's priorities is learn- with wanderlust. ing to play the hand-carved Marquesan ukulele Eve eventually returned that she bought recently from a master craftsman home and got into the rapidly and instructor. expanding wine biz in Carmel and Monterey. But despite her success — and easy access to rich pinot noirs and chardonnays that "smelled like bananas" — she eventually decided to go back to school with hopes of living up to her "full potential." That urge paid off big time, as the science degree she earned from UC San Diego led to a career in the oil biz, which eventually financed the purchase and upgrade of Auntie, plus the expenses of her lap around the planet. Nineteen years ago, before Eve was an accomplished bluewater sailor or competent singlehander, she bought Auntie in Ventura after learning that this stout Van de Stadt 53 design was an offshore classic. In 1978, New Zealander Naomi James had sailed sistership Express Crusader into the annals of sports history as the first woman to circumnavigate alone via the Great Capes. Launched in 1970, Auntie was in pretty rough shape when Eve bought her in 1991. But she knew the big ketch was a proven offshore thoroughbred worth refitting. Tapping into organizational skills gleaned from her working life, she divided the many upgrade projects into categories: "I hired out some jobs that were outside my skill set, and those that required specialized tools. But with installations of gear I would later have to maintain, I worked alongside a hired pro and learned from him." As you can imagine, hands-on maintenance ability paid off countless times during the trip, Eve developed her love of cruising back in the '70s, when she explored Mexican waters with friends, the old-fashioned way. "It was much more difficult to cruise on a sailboat, so there were a lot fewer people out doing it. You had to navigate with a sextant, nobody had refrigeration, and nobody had even heard of watermakers. But it was a blast." It was crewing on a trip from Cape Town to Grenada in 2008, though, that really stoked Eve's passion for offshore voyaging. She loved sailing far offshore under the moon and stars. As she now recalls, "I had always wanted to circumnavigate, but in
seagoing novels
Inset and spread: Although launched 50 years ago, 'Auntie' is still in great shape — just like her owner Eve, who proves that cruising keeps you young and fit.