Teresa began her sailing life with her head filled with dreams of
undersea exploration as she sat on the bottom of her family's
backyard pool in Southern California. Fate would change the
course of her nautical career as she met Dudley and together
they began sailing San Francisco Bay and California mountain
lakes.
Teresa and Dudley set off in their inflatable boat from the Palo Alto launch ramp, row upwind toward the Dumbarton Bridge, set an Indian bedspread from one oar while using the other as a rudder to sail back downwind to Palo Alto.
Other days found Teresa and Dudley with a picnic lunch rowing back into the local sloughs to enjoy the solitude. Those romantic days soon led to motherhood with demands for a larger boat.
With their youngest still in diapers, Teresa and Dudley took a big step up and bought their first keelboat, the Hunter 25 sloop, Treefort.
The boat served Teresa well through the Muddy days in Redwood City. Teresa and Dudley began to spend nights at Bay Area anchorages with the kids. It was during these trips that Teresa became a master at boat provisioning by developing the ability to stow 3 bags of groceries in a space equivalent to the size of one bag.
Eventually, the growing family again needed to move up. They found the Catalina 27 sloop, Invictus and were soon sailing out of Pete's Harbor in Redwood City, home of The Sea of Anarchy.
These were the early years of the Internet and Teresa and Dudley were soon in touch with other Bay Area sailors discussing a local on-the-water get togethers. From these discussions, the CyberCruises began in 1993 with a raftup in Clipper Cove at Treasure Island.
The CyberCruise raftups led to offshore sails, short at first, to Drakes Bay, Half Moon Bay, and out to the Farallon Islands. In 1999, Teresa did her first long-distance sail as crew on La Adriana for the Coastal Cup in 1999.
Teresa was beginning to hunger for more. Having already decided that she had endured the hardships of life on a 27-footer long enough, and with enough foresight to know when to bail out of the dot.com boom, it didn't take many sleepless nights to know that a Catalina 36 was what was needed.
A short search uncovered Kia Orana in San Francisco. For the first year aboard Kia Orana, they stayed within The Bay, but by 2000, Teresa and Dudley were venturing to Drakes Bay. In 2001, they sailed down the California coast to The Channel Islands. The voyage was so successful, Teresa and Dudley returned in 2002, this time with a family-only crew. In 2003, she again crewed down the coast and back (as a double-handed crew), this time for some time in and around Monterey Bay.
Get Back Aboard Kia Orana.
