Boats and Their People: Blue Dancer & Charlene Gauthier
Charlene Gauthier, who goes by the diminutive Char, is herself a rather diminutive person. Not even 5 feet tall, weighing less than 100 pounds, just turned 70, she’s never been one to let her size, gender, age, or grievous misfortune stand in the way of what she’d like to do next.
Twice divorced by age 37, with two daughters by her first husband, Char once worked as a professional truck driver, owner of a big Peterbilt 18-wheel tractor-trailer she ran for nearly 15 years. Recreationally, she used to ride big Harley-Davidson motorcycles. At age 32, she had her esophagus removed after 10 hours in surgery and became a cancer survivor. At age 50, she went back to school and earned the degrees she needed to work as a surgical and orthopedic nurse, a dream she had nurtured since high school. It wasn’t until fairly recently, in 2015, that she decided to pursue another dream she had.
“I have loved sailboats all my life, just watching them in the water,” she told me not long after we first met at a marina in Cape May, New Jersey. “I have this little thing. If nobody’s going to let me drive their sailboat, just like nobody’s going to let me drive their big old Peterbilt, just like nobody’s going to let me ride their motorcycle…OK? So I just got one of my own.”
Char back in her biker days.
Photo courtesy of Charlene Gauthier
Her first was a 15-foot Vanguard sailing dinghy she bought and sailed on lakes in Missouri, near where she was living at the time. Char’s first instructor, who was then teaching Boy Scouts to sail, told her she was a natural. About three years later she stepped up to a 35-year-old Hunter 31 she named Dance with Waves. She sailed Dance on a Missouri lake for about a year, getting the feel of her, then trucked her down to Mobile, Alabama. She spent another year refitting the boat on the Alabama coast, poking out into the Gulf of Mexico from time to time, nurturing a dream of cruising down to the Caribbean one day.
But on September 15, 2020, that dream was abruptly crushed by a hurricane named Sally. Char was on the boat, in a marina behind Orange Beach, just east of Mobile Bay, when it came ashore—Category 2, with winds hitting nearly 90 knots, a direct hit.
“The hurricane really devastated me,” she told me. “Three boats hit me that night. Three huge boats. One was a Gulfstar, and then there were two powerboats after that.”
Char’s insurance company put Dance with Waves down as a total loss, and for a time she believed that was the end of her sailing career. “It was such a traumatic experience for me! I decided I wasn’t going to do this again.”
She went back to work and took a job as an orthopedic nurse at a hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, because she wanted to be on the coast. And it wasn’t long before her dream of sailing was rekindled. She crewed around a bit, and a friend lured her back into boat shopping. In North Carolina, in the other Beaufort, she found a Pacific Seacraft 34, hull No. 95, built in 1988, that needed a lot of work.
“She was calling my name,” Char said. “So before I left to go back to South Carolina, I drove over to Washington, North Carolina, hoping to see the factory where Pacific Seacrafts are made now.”
Much to her surprise, Steve Brodie, the owner and president of the company since 2007, greeted her personally and gave her a tour of the place. After Char bought the boat, which she named Blue Dancer, Brodie also gave her lots of help and advice as she worked to refit it. “He’s my buddy!” she told me proudly. “I have his personal phone number.”
These past two summers Char has cruised the East Coast from the Carolinas well up into Maine and back. Each winter she has lived aboard while working as a nurse, first in South Carolina, and this past winter in Beaufort, North Carolina. As an ex-trucker and biker, she is very handy maintaining Blue Dancer. When I found her in Cape May last May, she was confidently jury rigging a repair to a leaking raw-water strainer. Since then she has fought an ongoing battle with a dodgy old Raytheon autopilot.
Last we spoke, Char was looking forward to installing a brand new autopilot herself, with a custom mounting bracket her buddy Steve Brodie is making up for her. Once that job is done, she expects to end her current nursing gig in North Carolina this January and hopes to start catching up with her old dream by striking out south for the warm waters of the Bahamas.
“I feel like I’m getting more and more experienced,” she told me. “People meet me and say, ‘I want to shake your hand. You do this all by yourself!’ But I don’t know anything different. There still can be scary times. But to me it’s all just new adventures.”
January/February 2025
