Feature
Story
SeaSense & Sensibility
At SeaSense,
women- and some men- learn to enjoy powerboating.
By Jay Winchester
There is a pull to the ocean that goes beyond its tides.
It speaks to the hearts of some people in an almost
mystical siren’s call, drawing them from land out on to
the vast waters that make up 75% of this planet’s
surface. While there is something incredibly romantic,
in the old world sense of that word, about being out on
the sea in a boat, it really isn’t a place for the
average landlubber. However, for those who believe
they’d find themselves lost at sea, Captains Patti Moore
and Carol Cuddyer can help.
The two ladies are partners in SeaSense, a sailing and
powerboating school for women- and occasionally men-
headquartered in St. Petersburg. However, Moore and
Cuddyer are not land-locked ladies in any sense of the
word. They are both experienced ship’s captains with a
combined 50 years on the water, and both hold Masters
licenses from the U.S. Coast Guard. They know their way
around a ship, and they know their way around the seas.
They also know the ins and outs of safe boating, a must
in any on-the-water instructional situation. “First of
all, we are real bears on safe boating,” says Moore, in
the serious, confident tone of someone clearly used to
being in command. “We teach our students about all the
safety equipment that is required to be on a boat, as
well as where it is found and how to use it. All of our
instructors are U.S. Coast Guard licensed captains,
which means they have extensive training and testing in
which they must stay current.”
The school offers a variety of courses, as well as a
variety of destinations for those courses. SeaSense
offers instructional powerboating courses in the Pacific
Northwest, Chesapeake Bay, New England, the Virgin
Islands, the Mediterranean, and of course, in and around
Tampa Bay, as well as a few other ports of call. The
most common crafts used in the courses are boats ranging
in size from 35 feet to 45 feet, but the school has used
boats as small as 15 feet and as large as 68 feet. “They
are boats that are big enough to spend a weekend, a week
or a month on,” says Moore. “They are boats that are big
enough to go cruising on. You could take a week and
cruise from St. Pete to Key West. They are big enough to
live aboard and be comfortable for periods of time.”
That’s a good thing because many of the instructional
jaunts the school offers require students to be on the
boat for considerable lengths of time. “We have
scheduled live-aboard courses that are 5 to 7 days long,
where we actually go places on the boats,” says Moore.
“It becomes a combination of floating classroom and
hotel. We just move aboard and take the boat with us,
moving from port to port. It’s all a learning
experience, but it’s happening in different locales,
which we think is kind of cool.”
Costs of the training depend on the courses involved,
and the duration of the course. For example a 5-day
live-aboard course generally costs $2,295.00. Included
in this cost are the expert instruction, docking fees,
fuel costs, beverages and food. Students do pay extra
for those few times the crew and captain go ashore for
dinner on the mainland. Students are also expected to
pay their own way to and from the course’s starting and
end points.
While students certainly gain both the sense of safety
and the knowledge required to enjoy boating from the
SeaSense experience, its chief benefit goes beyond the
boat and the water, extending into the lives of the
students themselves. Moore says, “One of the wonderful
things about being in this business is watching people
change. Mastering something like this- becoming
confident and comfortable running a 45-foot powerboat-
is a tremendous achievement. Our students gain an inner
confidence from their achievements that carries over
into other areas of their lives. It’s great watching
that transformation happen.”
The idea for SeaSense, or more accurately, the idea for
its focus on teaching women, springs out of the
seafaring experiences of both Moore and Cuddyer, who was
unavailable for this interview. Their stories are
similar. Moore didn’t grow up around the water. In fact,
she didn’t get her first exposure to boating until she
had moved to Atlanta, GA. Once she’d experienced it,
boating became both a lifelong love and learning
experience. “I wanted to learn more about it so I stayed
with it. I did some more sailing, I married a sailor,
and it escalated from there. It got to the point where I
was learning more and more about the operation of boats.
I found out it was something I could learn to do.”
The focus on teaching women grew out of the essential
differences between men and women. Moore measures about
5’2”, while her sailor husband (now deceased) topped out
at about 6’2”. Their life together on the boat involved
a working relationship where his experience naturally
led to him being the captain. Moore was left with the
role of erstwhile first mate, something that created
what would best be described as a workload imbalance.
“For years, he would be at the helm of the boat and I’d
be handling lines,” she recalls. “That didn’t make a
whole lot of sense because he was taller, bigger and
stronger. Finally, we swapped roles, and I discovered
that captaining the boat really was a doable thing for
me. It was a learnable skill. I determined then that
what I wanted to do was teach other women to become
participatory partners in boating, and not just be along
for the ride.”
It was a ride that encompassed 14-years of life onboard
a boat. During those 14 years, Moore found herself
passing through lots of different places, always living
on board. At one point, she lived aboard a sailboat
while working a 9-to-5 job at Delta Airlines. “I’d get
up in the morning, put on my uniform and my heels, and
traipse down the dock on my way to work,” she says,
acting as if that were the most natural thing in the
world. Eventually, Moore quit that job, and she and her
husband set off to cruise parts of the world they loved.
More and more, her life came to be centered on the sea.
She spent several years living aboard a powerboat that
she captained. Eventually, she took that boat on a
trans-Atlantic journey to the Mediterranean and back.
“Back” was delayed, as Moore ended up living on the
Mediterranean for a year before beginning the trip home.
Along the way, Moore crossed paths with Cuddyer and, in
a moment marked by serendipity, SeaSense was formed. “My
partner and I met while we were both teaching for
another school,” says Moore. “Carol is originally from
New England, and I’ve lived in Florida forever. I had
thought of opening a school but didn’t want to do it by
myself. When I found that she had the same interest, we
thought, ‘Aha…Florida in the winter, New England in the
summer. What’s more perfect than that?’ That’s what
kicked the idea off.”
Ah, the beauty of that idea! Spending enormous amounts
of time on the water, pursuing an endeavor they enjoy,
all the while teaching other women to enjoy it, too.
It’s a dream job…except for those pesky little
land-locked details that make up the bulk of being in
business for one’s self. While the two are highly
skilled on the water, that didn’t necessarily translate
directly into the office.
“Neither Carol nor I was a businesswoman,” says Moore.
“So learning the business end has been a whole other
education. There are parts of it we like and there are
parts of it we don’t. We didn’t know anything about the
business end of business; we just knew we wanted to
teach people how to handle boats. The thing is, if we
want to keep doing what we love, we have to pay close
attention to the parts we love less.” They’ve achieved a
comfortable level of success, marked primarily by having
been in business together for 19 years.
Today, Cuddyer and Moore are two skilled women pursuing
their joint passion and dealing with the ups and downs
of being in business. Sounds like an entrepreneurial
endeavor, although neither of the two thinks of
themselves that way, at least consciously. “What an
entrepreneur is to me,” Moore says thoughtfully, “is
someone who is doing what they want to do in the way
they want to do it. Usually, it’s doing something they
love. It also means being your own boss, and accepting
all the responsibility, but also all the joy of it as
well.”
For her part, Moore, who spent the early part of her
professional life winning a grudging acceptance as a
woman working in a male-dominated profession, sees
similarities between captaining a boat and running a
business. “A boat and a business are similar in that
both require that you steer them in different directions
from time to time,” she says. “Sometimes, you get into
choppy seas, and sometimes things run smoothly. The
biggest difference is that on a boat, there are some
things you have no control over, so you have to be able
to predict situations a little better. You have to know
when to cut and run, and head for a safe port.”
There it is…trademark good sense from SeaSense that any
corporate captain should follow.
back to top |
