Lady Luck

An epic voyage immortalized Felicity Ann and her intrepid skipper. Now this pint-sized yacht is getting another lease on life.

- Dieter Loibner

It was a sparkling spring day in Port Hadlock, Washington, about two hours northwest of Seattle. This place is not exactly the epicenter of cool, but it’s good for retirees and people who are smitten with wooden boats.

The latter gravitate toward the town’s Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, where they learn to build, repair and restore such vessels. And where there are shipwrights, needy boats are not far off.

One of those needy boats — a diminutive but stout sloop with a long keel and canoe stern — is stripped to the bones on jack stands in the school’s boat shed, undergoing restorative surgery. Jon Ferguson and Gordon McGill, two middle-aged students, are fitting new planks with Tatyana Faledo-Nolan and Jo Abeli, two young women intent on pursuing careers in boatbuilding. “The kids don’t know how cool all this is,” Ferguson says with mock desperation.

But, of course, they do know how cool it is because this 23-footer is the reincarnation of Felicity Ann, the boat with which British sailor Ann Davison became the first woman to single-hand across the Atlantic, in 1952. The daring voyage from Plymouth, England, to New York — via France, Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco, the Canary Islands and the Caribbean — secured Davison’s place in history.

She lived outside the norm. Davison was uneasy and courageous, and lucky and resourceful enough to get out of trouble that often was of her own making. She was one of the first licensed female pilots in England, so she knew aerodynamics, but sailing? Not really. However, what might have deterred timid souls was but a bump in the road to her.