DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711140060

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E14  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHYLLIS SPEIDELL, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  113 lines

FEMALE SAILOR FULFILLS AMBITION

CAROLINE SMITH, her sailing teacher says, could have been reincarnated from an old, salty dog.

As her College of William and Mary classmates sat through corporate interviews or awaited graduate school acceptances, Smith packed foul weather gear, heavy-duty sun screen and her sextant.

As they donned cap and gown on graduation day in May, Smith skipped the ceremonies, picked up her environmental science degree and took off for Rockland, Maine, to launch her dream career.

Awaiting her in Penobscot Bay, four hours from Boston - and a world away from college - was a classic, three-masted schooner, the Victory Chimes.

``I have never seen anyone so dedicated or so impassioned about the sea, the wind and the waves,'' said the teacher, Sylvia Shirley, an associate professor and sailing teacher at William and Mary.

Smith, who grew up along Chuckatuck Creek in the Crittenden section of Suffolk, had been hired as second mate on the schooner, the largest passenger sailing vessel under the U.S. flag.

The work is transient, and the pay is considerably less than many land-bound careers, but Smith is content.

``You can't have a lot of ties, and you don't get home very often,'' she said. ``But when the sun is shining on the deck, the wind picks up, the sails are filled and we really get going, then you say `This is what it's all about.' ''

Smith's father, James G. Smith, is a construction contractor, but many family friends and neighbors earned their living on the water during Smith's growing-up years.

``When I was little, there would be 40 workboats in the creek. I remember walking across the culling boards when the boats were rafted together. . . . Now there are only two or three boats there, and they are not oystering.''

At Nansemond River High School, Smith focused her science projects on the water or on the declining oyster population. ``It was a big deal (in Crittenden) when things went bad on the water.''

An active Girl Scout since Brownies, Smith also became a Boy Scout in 1990, when she joined the Sea Scouts based on the skipjack Norfolk. The co-ed troop practiced basic sail training to the point that they could sail the Norfolk, a traditional oyster workboat, as far as Alexandria or Baltimore.

``I remember Caroline as only 7 or 8, when she was on the skipjack for the first time, climbing up masts and out on the boom and loving it,'' said Gene Wells, captain of the skipjack. Also the Sea Scout leader, he remembers how hard Smith worked to master sailing.

``We have been through some harrowing times and some big storms on the skipjack, but I never had to double check when she set an anchor or tied the boat off,'' he said. ``I knew she had done it right.''

As a crewmember of the skipjack at Norfolk's Harborfest 1994, Smith fell in love with schooners. The Alexandria, a 125-foot, three-masted schooner from Alexandria, was among visiting tall ships.

In a crew competition of knot tying, line throwing and seamanship, Smith was so competent that the Alexandria's captain invited her to crew for the sail back to Northern Virginia.

Arriving in Alexandria, Smith volunteered for the paint crew - two hot days on a paint barge in the Potomac, readying the hull for a festival in Baltimore. Then she caught a train back home so she could help sail the Norfolk to Baltimore for the same festival.

All through that summer and the next, Smith sailed the Chesapeake Bay and East Coast on the Alexandria as a deckhand, watch officer, boswain and sail training instructor. During the school year, when she began feeling landlocked in Williamsburg, she headed for Alexandria to work on the boat.

At William and Mary, Smith worked as a teaching assistant in Shirley's sailing classes and volunteered at Jamestown Festival Park, maintaining the park's three 17th-century replica sailing vessels.

Although her romance with the Alexandria came to a heartbreaking end in December 1996, when the ship sank about 80 miles southeast of Hatteras Island, Smith's love affair with schooners had been fixed well before then.

There were stints on other schooners along the East Coast, through the Canadian Maritines and around the Caribbean. There was a semester studying oceanography and sail training with the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass.

And there was a summer of ``bungee sailing'' aboard the Clipper City, a schooner out of Baltimore harbor. ``We could only go so far, and then we would have to come back in,'' Smith explained.

``All that time, I was doing it because I enjoyed it. I had no idea how far I would go with it.''

But her mother, Karla Smith, was not surprised when Caroline announced that she would earn her captain's license before graduating from college. Caroline, named for the woman who had been Karla Smith's girl scout leader and sailing teacher years ago, did seem destined for ships and the sea.

``We always told the kids to choose something you love to do for your work, and then your job will never seem like work,'' said Karla Smith, a Chesapeake teacher.

In mid-October, Smith joined the crew of the Tole Mour, a teaching schooner home ported in Honolulu. For six months, she will be instructing basic sail training to groups of at-risk adolescent boys living aboard the schooner.

At only 22, Smith has acquired more sailing experience and credentials, including a captain's license, than many older sailors - male or female.

Women remain the minority in the sailing world, but their ranks are growing.

Since women ``have to prove that we are really into it,'' Smith said, they are more likely to hold licenses.

Lane Briggs, owner of the schooner/tug Norfolk Rebel and one of Smith's mentors, said women sailors ``do have to work harder to prove themselves and not be mistaken for the cook on the crew.''

Smith's stack of resumes remains close at hand because, in April, she will need another job.

She has one in mind.

In December, the schooner Pride of Baltimore will embark on a goodwill mission to China and will need a turnaround crew for the six-month return to Baltimore. Smith wants to be part of that crew.

``Ultimately, I would like to captain a schooner . . . For right now, I love to go aloft, fix things, and furl the sail, and I don't want to be the one on deck saying `go aloft and furl.' '' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Caroline Smith of Suffolk has a lifelong love of sailing.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu