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 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.
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