Movers And Shakers SHEmanship: Women Take Charge! By Colin Sargent.

ven though Nathaniel Bowditch's AMERICAN PRACTICAL NAVIGATOR has the sexist affrontery to begin with the line, "Navigation began with the first man," the women you'll meet in this article are expert in all things maritime, both as an art and as a science, in the grand tradition of leadership at sea.

Each is smart enough to interpolate the remain a respected leader in her profession: powerful force on the waterfront; and around sea stories with bite and tang, adventures that take you over the horizon Banks ...

star charts; political enough to cagey enough to emerge as a colorful nough to be carrying waterfront and out to the Grand

LTJG June E. Ryan and her new command, the Cape Morgan.

M.e. Schnauck

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t's nothing really romantic," says LTJG June E. Ryan, United States Coast Guard, the new commanding officer of the 95-foot Cape Morgan, a beautifully kept Coast Guard cutter stationed in Portland Harbor, about her really romantic new assignment.

Then she comes clean: "I'm really . d V " very excite. ery nervous.

She has reason to be excited. She's one of 5 women nationwide who have been selected for command in 95footers in a competitive environment where only 2 percent of all Coast Guard officers, male or female, get selected for command. While underway, her favoritewatch is 4 to 8 a.m.: "Then, by 7:30, 'd h· "you re rea y to go see t e sunrise.

During her last assignment, she was the helm, everybody's watching to see how you do. I don't think anyone will challenge the way I do things. Safety of crew and vessel and people is No.1. Whether or not I'm macho enough to handle it, that's way down on the list. With a crew of 14, we're too small a I"crew to Quarre .

Like Lord Nelson, she can get seasick,but she's aided by some breakthrough prescription medicine that "far exceeds anything that Dramamine can do. The new medicine's been around for a couple of years," she says.

Her other liability? "Tootsie-rolls," she smiles. "You know I've been on watch when you find the T ootsie-roll wrappers on the radar repeater. "This set of orders to Portland is my 95-footer commanded by a woman."

Another first is the fact that of the 14-person crew on Ryan's ship,S are women, the highest female percentage to date.

The Cape Morgan can weather 10foot seas, a 45-degree heel, and routine patrols that can take her 200-400 miles off the coast toward the Georges Banks. LTJG Ryan herself is weathering much more. A new resident of Portland (she's just bought a 9-year-old house on Brighton Avenue), she's a newlywed, married to Warrant Officer Timothy P. Ryan, who's assigned to the Governor's Island station in New York, so it's a commuter marriage for a while. "We knew we were going to be separated. This is the closest 95-footer

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navigator for a 378-foot Hamilton Class CQastGuard cutter, the Gallatin, where she mastered sophisticated hardware likeSATNAV and LORAN, as well as celestial navigation. During operations aboard the Gallatin en route to Scotland, she encountered waves that bounded over the ship's 44-foot high deck and pounded the flying bridge another 54 feet higher. "We were taking on a considerable amount of water," she says. "Our five-inch gun mount on the bow unlocked and moved from the force of a wave."

A native of Bettendorf, Iowa, she's 25 years old, a graduate of Bowling Green State (with a major in Marine Biology), 5 feet 9 inches tall, steady, confident, and a level speaker, like Gary Cooper: "Obviously, if you take first choice. To get a command is a high honor. I'm not a pioneer or exceptional or anything awkward or weird. Our primary mission is law enforcement, mostly fisheries regulations. But everything drops if there's a boat sinking. For me personally, search and rescue is the glamour part of our mission, the most rewarding. You're not going to say, 'I'm sorry - this is an illegal fish . . .' You drop everything for S.A.R."

Captain John N. Faigle, Chief of Staff, 1st Coast Guard District (which covers the Canadian border to Tom's River, New Jersey), is greatly pleased with Ryan's command style. "This is the first woman commanding officer we've had in Maine. It's precedentsetting for Maine and New Hampshire, actually, and I'm not aware of another to New York. I could have requested to stay in New York, but I'd have had to take a desk job."

Of course, there's a lot to keep her busy while her husband checks into reassignment possibilities: confidential drug patrols; .gunnery practice with the two 50-caliber machine guns, two M16s, and other armament carried by the Cape Morgan; and, in extremis situations, the judicious exercise of the "hot pursuit clause," a high-pressure "opportunity to excel" she has found herself in before: "I was in charge of a boarding party off the shore of Haiti when I was on the Gallatin, and we chased a suspicious boat onto the shore. The people in the boat ran into the jungle and we started to follow, but a moment later a bunch of Haitian natives came out of

An original photograph of the Bowdoin near the polar cap during the MacMillan Expedition.

BOWDOIN ON ICE

DonaldB. MacMiUan(1874-1979), Maine's famed arctic explorer, was dead set against taking his wife, Meriam, to the North Pole. But the crew of the Bowdoin, MacMillan's famed arcticweather schooner, had other plans. FoiI· h . "M 'B " owmg a s ort excurSIOn, ac s oys decided Meriam was less a hindrance than an asset, and penned a petition requesting she stay aboard. Of the 300 scientists and young sailors who helped log over 300,000 miles and 26 trips to the arctic on the Bowdoin, Meriam was the only woman.

Today, the restored Bowdoin could potentially be skippered by a 30-yearold woman, Cate Cronin. Not only the first female captain of the Bowdoin, Cate is also the first female captain of such a schooner on the East Coast. Cate, a Bangor native, first began sailing seriously while involved with the schooner fleet in Camden during summer vacations. So seriously did she take sailing that she left the University of Maine (she later finished her Bachelors at USM, and recently completed her Masters in Education at Harvard), branched into the Outward Bound Program, and eventually became skipper of the Clearwater on the Hudson in New York.

Last fall, Cate heard the Bowdoin was mothballing in Boston Harbor while the Schooner Bowdoin Association debated on the ship's future. Just a few years earlier the association had decided to complete very expensive restoration of the boat, since the Bowdoin "was recognized as one of the strongest and . (most} beautiful wooden ships in the world." Unfortunately, strength and beauty had done little to dwarf restoration bills, and the ship was in danger of being sold.

Cate and Ken Shaw, another captain and recent chief mate of the Bowdoin and Nathanial Bowditch (sister ship to the Bowdoin), approached the association with a plan to work the Bowdoin as an educational vessel out of Portland. Whereas other large schooners have been refinished as vacation cruise ships and are only accessible to those with money and time, the Bowdoin would serve to teach about itself, schooners in general, the coast, and the environment, through tours both local and coastal.

Breezing away with a favorable response, the Bowdoin, under the command of Cate, set sail for Portland. After docking, however, unforeseen difficulties arose and as quickly as Cate had acquired her captainship, the Bowdoin was whisked out of Portland to be mothballed in Rockland Harbor. Due fo these complications and frustrations, most of Cate's skippering has been from an armchair, but the Bowdoin's new captain remains optimistic. Perhaps a short excursion is all that is needed to convince the Schooner Bowdoin Association to pen a petition to save the ship as a working, and not a privately owned, craft.

BY JOHN DAVIS BIDWELL

the jungle instead, running right for us onto the beach, and waving machetes. Big guys, 400 pounds. They weren't man-eating lions or anything like that. Maybe they were after Coca-Cola. We had a cooler in our boat. Anyway, it wasn't a big concern," concludes blueeyed LTJG Ryan. "They only had machetes and I had a 45."

Barbara Stevenson's appearance in Portland since September is perhaps the Portland Fish Pier's greatest achievement to date. Living proof that the Fish Pier is bringing new business to Portland Harbor, Stevenson, 39, read about the Fish Pier in a fishing trade magazine and decided to relocate her two $500,000 deepwater fishing boats, the Edward L. Moore and the Drake, from Newport, Rhode Island to Portland.

Inside her office at the Marine Trade Center, Room 313, Stevenson is giving a man with an English accent the straight skinny on zinc: • The Man: "That zinc is doing so well for you on that bare steel. Do you blast it before you put it on?"

Barbara Stevenson: "Yeah. We kind of coerce them to do it right."

She laughs a little, and you feel the strong undertow of a sense of humor that goes down full fathom five. "I was going to school at thel)niversity of Delaware, majoring in Marine Biology," she begins. "My husband wasn't in fishing either when we got started."

How did she get here, running a multi-million-dollar fishing corporation? "First we got the Novi boat," she says. "It was gray, strip-planked. We bought it up there from a man who'd been a stockbroker in Boston. Thirtyfive feet long. We worked potting conchs and gill netting on our Novi, baiting with horseshoe crabs and shark. What kind of conchs? Not the nobby ones. Nobbies eat livethings. Smooths eat dead things."

She smiles beneath her operatic blonde pigtail tied off with a green band, absolute in her knowledge of nobbies and smooths and zinc and dead things, and patiently explains that a Novi is a Nova Scotia style lobsterboat that they got for $15,000, and that you can trap conchs "with meat the size of my fist" in wooden boxes, as far north as Rhode Island.

In fact, she confides, consumers may be more familiar with the taste of tender Continued on page 37