SIGHTINGS eight bells for jocelyn nash Many a Bay Area female looked up to Jocelyn Nash as a contemporary pioneer in women's sailing. She set the pace for the rest of us, past her 90th birthday, and clear up through the end of 2019. After spending a couple of weeks in hospice, Jocelyn passed away in her sleep during the night of April 8, 2020. She was 91. She didn't have the coronavirus, and, masked and gloved, her family was able to be by her side. Her son Gordie Nash said that she was simply worn out, having lived such a full life. "For the last three months, every day was worse and worse." Gordie told us that his mother was the first woman to serve as an active crewmember in a Transpac race (in 1957), the first woman to win the Mallory Cup, the first woman to drive a boat in the Big Boat Series, and, in 1961, the first woman to sail in the Bullship — while eight and half months pregnant! In 1975 and '76, Jocelyn won the Nimitz Cup at Berkeley YC with her new Hawkfarm El Gavilan. Hers was the first female name on the trophy. She was the first woman to sail in the Singlehanded Faralcontinued on outside column of next sightings page
CINDE LOU DELMAS
Jocelyn Nash helms the Alerion 38 'Another Girl' during a Richmond YC Wednesday night beer can race.
Page 48 •
Latitude 38
• May, 2020
out there doing it One thing we have a lot more of these days is time at home. Aside from the occasional covert mission to drive a nondescript sedan to some windswept vantage point and just stand there to look at the empty Bay, we have turned into a bunch of unwilling homebodies. If you can't be out there doing it, you can still read about it. And we don't mean just in these pages — although we certainly appreciate your time in that regard. There are lots of great sailing books out there. So when those honey-do's are all 'done-honeys' (or you need a break in between), check out one of these titles. Who knows? One of them might make you a slightly better sailor by the time
Right: Jocelyn at the end of a victorious El Toro Bullship Race; and, winning the Mallory Cup in 1963 with Jim DeWitt and Jake van Heeckeren.
