The librarian and the monster cat: a true story of sailing adventure

If this old newspaper editor turned magazine publisher hadn’t known Susie, I would have broken into a cold sweat of anticipation over the man-bites-dog story of the year, a tale of such unlikely human endeavor that it might have rivaled that of space tourist Tito being launched into orbit with the Russians.

This is the story: A 50-year-old female librarian at a middle school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sails across the Atlantic Ocean on one of the monster catamarans that competed in The Race, as a crewmember on one of the biggest, fastest, most complex and dangerous sailboats in the world!

But I do know Susie, so the story isn’t quite as sensational as it sounds. On the other hand, it may be a better story because it’s about Susie.

See, Susie Rieck is the librarian, a veteran of 28 years working to enrich the intellects of kids in a Rust Belt city’s besieged public schools. She happens to be one of the few librarians on the planet who could be in her element on the 110-foot catamaran Team Adventure.

This librarian is a sailor. What’s more, she’s a multihull sailor. She had never before been aboard anything like Team Adventure—who has?—but her experience on the high-performance trimarans she sailed with her husband eased her adjustment to the magnified idiosyncrasies of the mega-cat.

This librarian has done most of her sailing on the Great Lakes, which proved to be an advantage sailing out of Mallorca, Spain, into steep seas that looked and felt to Susie a lot like the infamous square waves of her home waters. "There were a lot of green faces aboard, but my Lake Michigan stomach was fine," said Susie, who has never known the exquisite agony of seasickness.

Good thing, because her job on the cat, besides pitching in with other shipboard duties during her 16-day voyage, was to spend three to four hours a day in an airless 3- by 8-foot "office" in one of the hulls, writing lessons. Which brings us to how the librarian came to be aboard the great catamaran shortly after it finished its race around the world.

Team Adventure, skippered by Cam Lewis of Lincolnville, Maine, is set up as an educational foundation. After The Race (the boat finished third) it was time for some education, so the organization came up with the idea of sending one the fastest sailboats ever built across the Atlantic on the same route Christopher Columbus sailed with three of the slowest ships ever to cross an ocean. For the education part, two teachers would be invited along to send back reports to students.

From the scores of teachers who responded to the invitation on the Team Adventure Web site, Susie and Janet Bradley, a South African working in England, were chosen, though not quite by the luck of the draw. According to Brian Hancock of Team Adventure, the two were picked for their sailing experience as well as their professional credentials.

"Heck, when the boat stopped in Cape Town (during The Race), two crew guys ran off and said it was just too dangerous to continue," Hancock said. "I didn’t want teachers to freak out in the middle of the Atlantic and demand to get off the boat."

If these two were going to freak out, it probably would have happened at the dock when they first stepped aboard and saw the sleeping accommodations, which consisted of 18-inch-wide berths stacked three high in the 7-foot-wide hulls. Once inserted in a berth, there was 4 inches of clearance between the occupant and the next berth. After the first wave came aboard, they dubbed their quarters "the swamp."

As Team Adventure beat out of Spanish waters on long, bumpy tacks—"We’d visit Africa, we’d visit Europe, slam bang, slam bang"—Susie concocted lessons combining Columbus lore with her experiences aboard the catamaran. These were posted on the Web site and e-mailed to students at the John Burroughs Middle School in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, Susie was learning lessons of her own. She had sailed on Steve Fossett’s Stars and Stripes, the big America’s Cup cat, and survived its near pitchpoling experience on Lake Huron, but nothing prepared for the otherworldly forces of Adventure. "Cam warned us, if you don’t respect the enormous loads on this boat, you’re likely to lose fingers, a hand, your face. It was six wraps on a winch, and never take a wrap off without extreme caution, or you’re going to do damage to yourself or the boat."

She said Lewis sailed the boat hard the entire voyage from Mallorca to San Salvador: "Reef in, reef out; sail up, sail down."

His rigid rule was—never cleat the traveler, mainsheet or headsail sheet. "We kept those lines in our hands and were told, if a hull comes up, blow them in that order."

Every sail change at night was an all-hands-on-deck affair. Roller-furling one of the gennakers required the full crew of 15, with gangs of people pulling the furling line tug-of-war style to help the grinders.

In spite of the effort, changing down to smaller sails was usually welcomed by the crew. "When the breeze built at night, it could be disconcerting. The helmsman would sail down with every gust. This was exciting during the day, and there would be a lot of cheering and yelling as the speedometer climbed. But at night it was edgy."

At night, everything was an adventure, even crossing the trampoline to get a hot drink from the galley for the on-watch. "We’d ask the driver to slow down, but with all of the control lines crossing the tramp, you’d end up on your nose nine times out of 10."

And what was it like sailing at 30 knots? "You get used to it."

Susie took it all in stride. Said one crewmate, "She did a fantastic job, writing the school reports, then spending a lot of time on deck. She seemed to thrive on grinding. She was as happy as I’ve seen her for a long time."

You would have to know Susie, as the crewmate, an old friend, did, to understand the significance of the last comment, for she lives with a sailing memory that is far removed from happy. In the summer of 1998, she and her husband Marty, a big, sweet man who had turned his formidable sailing skills to multihulls after years of successful MORC racing, were anchored on their 38-foot Dick Newick-designed trimaran in the remote Les Cheneaux Islands at the top of Lake Huron. At a tragically young age, far from emergency services, Marty had a heart attack. He died, Susie notes, in a place that was both ironic and prophetic—on St. Martin Bay, near Lone Susan Point.

With a collection of new, happy memories, Susie left Team Adventure at Columbus’ landfall, San Salvador. Duty called back at the middle school, where the students Susie describes as "tough inner city kids" were waiting to be enthralled with her tales of a world some of them could barely imagine.

"The kids were very proud of me," she said. "When they knew I was tough enough to do something like this, I got a lot more respect, not with approved inner city activities, but with a sailing adventure."

If you knew Susie, you’d know she gets plenty of respect, and not just from those inner city kids.