Woman in The Wheelhouse (ePub)

Nancy Taylor Robson is one of the first women in the country to earn a US Coast Guard license. She grew up sailing and building boats with her father and worked as a housepainter, desk clerk and yacht maintenance person while in college, but never imagined working on an old WWII 85-foot DPC (Defense Plant Corporation) tugboat, slogging up and down the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico for a living. Then she met a man, whose ambition at the time was to own a run a coastal tugboat.

She earned a degree in history from University of Maryland, but instead of going to law school she married that man, a sailor and graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, who two weeks earlier had become captain on that tug.

A month later, she joined him on a short run on the upper Chesapeake Bay. Although she had been aboard tugs before, this was different, "like the first taste of a drug -- intoxicating, seemingly harmless, but the beginning of a slowly growing addiction." The book initiates the reader into the beauty and romance of life on the water combined with the exhausting, dangerous work. Robson relishes the incredible closeness to Nature: whales, porpoise so close she could nearly touch them and birds that come into the galley to watch her making bread, as well as the magnificent spectacle of a sunset on a clear winter's day as it glows behind a black network of bare-branched trees along the shore. She also endures the fear of being maimed or lost overboard, the male opposition, and the drudgery, collapsing more than once in icy, sodden clothes into an unmade bunk. On seagoing trips that ranged from the Chesapeake Bay to Cape Cod, from Maine to Florida, to Bermuda, New Orleans and Mexico, she felt the frustrations of failure but also the exhilaration of success and an appreciation for hard won accomplishment.. It's a world that many imagine what it would be like to share in all its adventurous, terrifying glory though few actually experience. Robson, one of a handful of women who paved the way for every intrepid woman who has followed, brings that world alive and takes you along for every hard-won but glorious nautical mile. This book is for anyone who every imagined running away to sea, for every woman who wonders what it would be like to live a real-life adventure romance, for every man who relishes the outdoors, and for everyone who loves a good yarn.