{"id":49851,"date":"2023-03-06T16:57:11","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T21:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/?p=49851"},"modified":"2023-05-06T18:21:34","modified_gmt":"2023-05-06T22:21:34","slug":"this-ol-boat-sailing-with-a-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/people\/this-ol-boat-sailing-with-a-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"This Ol’ Boat: Sailing With a Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\"Growltiger <\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n
\n Growltiger<\/i> beats past Bequia en route to Saint Vincent, with mate Josh Conover on lookout. <\/span>\n Courtesy Joan Conover<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\t <\/figcaption>\n <\/section>\n\t\t\n\n\n\n\n

When Joan Conover arrives at Fiddler\u2019s Green, the promised land for departed mariners, she\u2019ll look back on an Earth better for having sailed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long before she took the helm of the Seven Seas Cruising Association<\/a>, Conover was practicing one of SSCA\u2019s founding principles: Leave a clean wake. On board, on land and on the airwaves, few have done as much as Conover to marshal the better angels of our privileged fleet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On her first trans-Atlantic in 2005, she and her daughter, Christina, took daily dips of marine life\u2014160 samples\u2014all the way to Portugal. They froze and shipped them to Old Dominion University to establish an oceanwide baseline to gauge signs of degradation. Christina, a high school graduate at the time, became an oceanographer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the years since, amid 35,000 cruising miles, Joan and her husband, Greg, have helped organize sailors to improve lives, harbors, and communities in Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and Dominica, all tropical destinations that suffer from storms, flooding, bad sanitation, poverty, poor health, and the social and environmental impacts of yachts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2007, some 11 years after joining SSCA, Joan took over administering Clean Wake, a program that SSCA\u2019s founding sailors created to promote environmental and social stewardship. Joan has made the program a core focus of her presidency. \u201cI liked their philosophy, written before many of the green or climate-change issues were raised,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was obvious you need to protect the Earth because we have a tendency to mess things up.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joan first went to sea as a 12-year-old girl, crewing on her Norwegian grandfather\u2019s salmon fishing boat in Puget Sound. \u201cI\u2019m not afraid of big seas\u2014not if you\u2019ve been in an old leaky wooden trawler,\u201d she says. After marrying Greg, a US Army tank officer, they adopted Josh, a \u00adspecial-\u00adneeds child who found water comforting. When Greg was assigned to Fort Hood, she told him, \u201cI\u2019d like to get a sailboat because it would be a family activity we could all do\u2014in the middle of Texas,\u201d she recalls. \u201cGreg, who had not sailed before, called it \u2018the craziest thing.\u2019 Two weeks later, we had a sailboat. Josh loved it.\u201d Stillhouse Hollow Lake, a reservoir that borders the base, was ideal for their 22-foot daysailer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Greg was reassigned to the East Coast, they bought a used Morgan 41 and got their sea legs on Chesapeake Bay. In 1989, they used $50,000 in cash to trade up for a 1976 Morgan Out Island 51 that Hurricane Hugo had tossed around in the Isle of Palms Marina in Charleston, South Carolina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\"The <\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n
\n Joan and Greg Conover and their three Havanese show dogs, Taffy, Kady and Ace, in the US Virgin Islands.<\/span>\n Courtesy Joan Conover<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\t <\/figcaption>\n <\/section>\n\t\t\n\n\n

\u201cLet me tell you: A 1970s shag carpet is not good on a boat,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was orange and green. You\u2019d get seasick when you came in.\u201d They renamed that boat after a colorful, disheveled character in the musical Cats<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it was built like a tank, and so roomy that it had a tub. Growltiger<\/em> underwent a major refit<\/a>: a 700-gallon-a-day watermaker, a washer-dryer, an autopilot, a generator, big house batteries, an electrical system and running rigging. Then, in 2005, they set out on a trans-Atlantic with their two college-age children and a mate. Over the years, they\u2019ve rebuilt the engine, replaced ports with stainless steel, and replaced the hatches, sails, standing rigging and, more recently, the entire deck. The tub, Joan hastens to add, is used to stow stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a home port in Hampton, Virginia, and healthy retirement and savings accounts, the Conovers have been sailing back and forth seasonally to the Caribbean for 15 years. Josh and their Havanese show dogs go with them. But unlike most cruising conversations that focus on Caribbean delights, a talk with Joan is peppered with good deeds they\u2019ve had a hand in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are the moorings in Dominica\u2019s Prince Rupert Bay to reduce coral destruction. And the water filters, paint, shovels, stoves and a braille keyboard for a blind boy in Rio Dulce, Guatemala. The boat acted as a \u201cpickup truck\u201d to ferry supplies from Antigua to Dominica after Hurricane Maria. When a 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, Joan used the internet, cellphones and her ham radio to coordinate sailors who traveled there to help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joan is a plain-spoken \u00adwoman with a broad smile who describes poor children as kindred souls. \u201cThey should be in advanced-degree programs,\u201d she says, \u201cand you know that\u2019s not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back home, her tall SSB \u00adradio antenna behind the house beams communications with SSCA\u2019s port hosts worldwide. And every fall, as cruisers gather around Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, before heading south, she becomes a mother hen\/drill instructor\/tech expert to keep them safe. As a patent-holding systems engineer who is facile with radios, weather and terrain, she briefs rallies and then stands by to respond to inevitable calls for help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every year, boats set sail with new-to-them \u00adequipment\u2014what she calls \u201cwonderful little toys from a boat show\u201d\u2014that she helps troubleshoot from her radio room. \u201cI decided my give-back was to help people stay connected, if that meant the best satellite or tracking system, be it Iridium, \u00adinReach, Zoleo, Starlink, SSB, PredictWind\u2014whatever they had\u2014to make sure they could stay in touch. I don\u2019t think people realize how important it is from Hatteras down to the Virgin Islands to at least be in touch, or be tracked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 74, Joan says she\u2019s \u00adgetting to the end of her \u00adsailing years, and she\u2019s \u00adworking to pass the Clean Wake philosophy to a new generation of cruisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI guess it\u2019s the human drive,\u201d she says. \u201cA lot of us have it. Some don\u2019t. If we didn\u2019t have a focus of going in and finding what we might do when we arrived in port, I don\u2019t know that I would be interested in going. I don\u2019t go just for the passage. I go for the experience after you get there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a list of sanctioned SSCA Clean Wake projects, visit ssca.org<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joan Conover, head of the Seven Seas Cruising Association, lives the Clean Wake philosophy aboard her 1976 Morgan Out Island 51.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":49853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"BS_author_type":"BS_author_is_guest","BS_guest_author_name":"Jim Carrier","BS_guest_author_url":"","hydra_display_date":"","hydra_display_updated":false,"_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":"165","_yoast_wpseo_metadesc":"The head of the Seven Seas Cruising Association, Joan Conover, lives the Clean Wake philosophy aboard her 1976 Morgan Out Island 51.","_yoast_wpseo_title":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","arc_story_id":"","arc_website_url":"","custom_permalink":"","arc_subtype":"","arc_exclude_from_feeds":false,"sponsored":false,"sponsored_label":"Sponsored Content","sponsored_display_label":false,"sponsored_image":false,"post_right_rail":true,"post_right_rail_ad_1":true,"post_right_rail_ad_2":true,"post_right_rail_ad_3":false,"post_right_rail_ad_4":false,"post_right_rail_recirc":true,"fixed_anchor_ad":true,"post_top_ad":true,"post_off_ramp":true,"post_taboola":false,"labels":true,"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":"","ad_settings_ads_on_this_page":true,"ad_settings_automatic_ad_injection_into_the_content":true,"ad_targeting":"","sponsored_url":"","social_share":true},"categories":[165],"tags":[202,197,1948,1949],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49851"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cruisingworld.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}