Making It Happen

Jennifer Greer perplexed some of the cruisers she met in Alaska’s Glacier Bay. They expected the once-in-a-lifetime scenery, but not the first-in-their-lifetime encounter with her.

“People just aren’t used to seeing a female with nobody else on the boat, other than a cat,” says Greer, who was exploring the region aboard her Nordhavn 40, Symphony. “They’re like, ‘What do you mean you’re single-handing the boat?’ That’s not their experience. They always go with a spouse or a friend.”

Greer, with Boo by her side, is among an increasing number of owner-operator women who are heading off on big adventures aboard Nordhavns. Of course, women have always cruised as part of a couple on Nordhavn’s go-anywhere boats, but more recently, single females are in command of everything from the budgets to the thrusters.

In Greer’s case, the choice to own the boat solo was intentional, while for Carine Bullock, owning the Nordhavn 47 Downshifting on her own—and attempting to cruise it across the Pacific Ocean—was a decision that followed her husband’s death from cancer in 2013.

“It was kind of our dream,” Bullock told Passagemaker from Central America this past spring. “It’s all I ever had in my head, to do this, and it seemed crazy to get rid of the one thing that was making me happy.”

Jennifer Greer Symphony

For Greer, a love of the water took root early in life. She’s a New Jersey native who spent childhood summers playing with small boats on the lakes of Upstate New York.

“We’d go up there and go to the Erie Canal once in a while, so I got to see boats going through,” she says. “I didn’t realize it, but I was seeing boats doing the Great Loop.”

Bigger boats never crossed her mind until she started rowing crew as an adult, while living near Marina Del Rey in California. After that, she moved to Seattle, where a couple she knew told her they were selling their boat in 2016. They asked if she wanted to buy it.

“I work in technology, and I was in one of the tall buildings that Microsoft owns, and I was at the top of this building, and somebody said, ‘How can you live here and not own a boat? You can see all the water, all around. It’s gorgeous,’” she says. 

That boat was the 28-foot 1998 Wellcraft Excel Makala, which is Hawaiian for “be free.” The couple taught her the basics, including how to manage her nerves.

“My legs shook every time I drove the boat the first few times,” she says, recalling her first cruise, out to Cap Sante, about 60 nautical miles north of Seattle. “The boat didn’t have anything but my GPS that gave me coordinates, and I have no idea what I’m looking at, so I called my friend and said, ‘Hey, Tom, how do I get there?’”

Building confidence took a while. At first, she was afraid to go below while the boat was underway. She’d pee in a bucket instead. But eventually, she says, she realized “the boat can take more than you can. That always calmed me. And my friends did a really good job of training me about how to read the tides and weather, how to think about ways that the wind impacted my driving as well as my docking.”

The more she cruised, the more she became part of the local marine community, including rising up the ranks to become commodore at the Tyee Yacht Club. She thought about doing the Great Loop and traded up to a Ranger Tugs 31, MoonShadow.

MoonShadow was slower than the Wellcraft, which meant she couldn’t outrun the weather anymore. It also lacked a generator, which she realized she wanted as she spent six months living and working on board while cruising the coast during the pandemic.

“That’s the point where you learn that every boat has advantages and disadvantages,” she says. “I wanted places to eat that were not the same as the other places. My entire life for six months was pretty much in that same hallway.”

She also realized that she wanted a single engine, to save on costs and maintenance, as she thought about a cruise up to Alaska.

“I probably looked at 15 boats before I found my Nordhavn,” she says of the 2000 build Laughing Loon. She rechristened it Symphony because she loves music. Then, she once again had to settle her nerves: Symphony is a 60,000-pound behemoth compared to a 12,000-pound Ranger Tugs.

“Of course, the first thing that ended up happening was getting a slip where I had to back it in,” she says. “The first time I docked in Anacortes, it was crab season and there were all these crab traps and boats. I just went really, really slow.”

Now in her early 50s, Greer is still thinking about doing the Great Loop—“I’ll do what everybody does: buy a boat from Curtis Stokes, take it around the Loop and sell it back”—but her next big cruise will likely be a circumnavigation of Vancouver Island.

“This is my good forever boat. This is the boat a lot of people buy 10 or 20 years older than I am,” she says. “I do a lot
of the engine stuff, oil changes and all of that. There’s a lot of systems, and I’m increasing my knowledge.”

And honestly, she’s over the fact that people sometimes seem surprised when she brings Symphony into the dock on her own. She’s now having fun watching them try to figure out whether she’s retired.

“Once they get past the woman part, they try to figure out how old I am,” she says. “Some people just directly ask me.”

Carine Bullock Downshifting

The paperwork for Carine Bullock’s two Bahamian potcake mutts was driving her nuts. Her plan was to leave Panama City and cruise with the pups to French Polynesia this past spring, but officials in the islands were concerned that the 6-year-old dogs’ recent rabies shots were a different brand than their previous shots.

“They said you can go get a shot, but then you have to wait six months and 21 days before the dogs can leave the boat,” she says. “That’s just cruel.”

Even still, the thought of giving up on the South Pacific dream never entered her mind. She and her husband bought the 2006 Nordhavn Downshifting in 2009 and used it to cruise from their South Florida home down to the Keys, up to Jacksonville, and over to the Bahamas. They always talked about cruising to the South Pacific someday, but the cancer took him before they could make it happen. In 2018, when she retired as an engineer with Florida Power & Light, he had already been gone for five years. She still couldn’t let the dream go. 

He had always handled the wheel, so she had to practice that. Maintenance, though, was her domain. “Driving the Nordhavn intimidated me,” she says, “but working on it didn’t.”

This past February, Bullock finally set off from Florida, cruised through the Bahamas and made her way to Panama, ultimately bound not just for French Polynesia, but also beyond as far as Tonga. After that, she envisioned heading to Hawaii for about six months, then up to Alaska, back down to Mexico, and a return trip to Florida through the Panama Canal. 

But—the rabies shots. So, instead of heading west to Tahiti this past spring, she set a course north.

“I decided to go enjoy Mexico,” she says. “There’s plenty to do and plenty of stops to make. My goal is to go all the way to Ensenada, which is right near San Diego. I can stay there for hurricane season and then leave after that for French Polynesia. That’s how we’ll do our time.”

So far, she hasn’t experienced anything aboard Downshifting that’s given her reason to stop. There was a small issue with the watermaker, and a problem with the alternator, but everything else is holding up.

“Some people think I’m crazy. My mother thinks I am,” says Bullock, who is 60. “Don’t get me wrong—it would be a hell of a lot easier to be traveling with a permanent partner—but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.” 

This article was originally published in the July/August 2024 issue.