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PERSONAL STYLES

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Dave G. Houser (2)
Cruising off Maui with friends and crew on the sloop Midnight Sun.

When her first effort capsized, Mary Crowley didn't give up the ship-- or the business.
BY SUSAN LICHTMAN

Smooth Sailing

First, Mary Crowley worked for 36 straight hours: A New York movie production company needed a schooner for a film about whales off Sri Lanka; a Costa Rican park service had to find boats in order to plan its tourist excursions; a major oil company wanted to set up a sail charter in the Mediterranean. Each of these clients had to be satisfied before Crowley could catch a little sleep and fly to Honolulu--where more work awaited her. 
But what work. An hour after her plane landed, Crowley was climbing aboard the 50-foot cutter Contessa and volunteering to stand watch during its fourteen-hour sail from moorings in Oahu's Kaneohe Bay to the neighboring island of Molokai.
The Contessa is one of a 100-ship fleet owned by Crowley's $1 million-a-year sailboat charter service, Ocean Voyages. Ranging in size from 40 feet to 300 feet, the ships are anchored all over the world, and they include two-masted brigantines, yawls, ketches, schooners, and sloops. 
Crowley runs the business from a houseboat office in Sausalito, California. She was in Hawaii to explore new sailing routes around the islands--and the Contessa cruise was a welcome diversion from the administrative details that occupy most of her work time. Crowley has encountered the usually catch-22 of successful entrepreneurs: She sailed for many years to learn her trade, then mobilized her skill and personal passion into a business venture--whose success has left her no time to take to the sea. That 

Susan Lichtman is a news reporter at KFMB-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Diego, California.

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will change, she hopes: Crowley plans to manage less and sail more. "When you develop a company that's solid enough to run without you," she says, "it's a work of art."
While "smooth sailing" is the obvious metaphor for this particular work of art, Crowley has, ironically, if predictably, encountered her roughest water not at sea but at the helm of the business.
A graduate of Chicago's Loyola University (degrees in philosophy and psychology), Crowley moved to San Francisco in 1967 with plans to teach. Instead, she crewed for a boat delivery service, a job that kept her at sea for up to a month at a time and took her throughout the South Pacific--to Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Panama.

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Crowley at the helm of the 50-foot cutter Contessa, one of over 100 ships in Ocean Voyages' fleet. Right: helping Peter Fox stow the jib sail.

Eventually, she was in fact offered a teaching position--as professor of philosophy and psychology aboard a 315-foot Norwegian square-rigger, where she alternated lectures on Plato and Freud with teaching passengers rudimentary navigation.
Back in Sausalito after that nine-month stint, Crowley met George Kiskaddon, shipping entrepreneur and found of the Oceanic Society, a marine conservation organization. Kiskaddon and Crowley created Oceanic Expeditions, a nonprofit sail-training and worldwide adventure program. "We wanted to create an alternative to Carribean charter boats, which were usually nothing more than floating gourmet restaurants and hotels," Crowley explains. "We wanted people to learn about helmsmanship, sail trim, and navigation. And we wanted to instill in them a respect for the sea."
Apparently a lot of people wanted exactly that. Oceanic Expeditions grew to 28 vessels based in the Aegean, the Carribean, and the South Pacific. In the meantime, Kiskaddon took over as publisher of Oceans, an eye-catching conservation magazine that won critical acclaim. 
When he realized that the Oceanic Society was becoming the maritime

68 Savvy/February 1984
February 1984/Savvy 69