OUR FIRST DATE WAS SAILING (SAN FRANCISCO)
“Our first date was sailing and the second date was varnishing!” That’s what we 
tell people anD however unromantic it sounds, it is the truth. When Whitey asked me on a date to go sailing with him in May, 1988, I thought it would just be a fun day with an obviously fun guy. As a single girl living in San Francisco, the opportunity to go sailing on the bay was naturally on my wish list. As a girl from Utah, I had lived three years in the Bay Area and had yet to be invited on a boating trip on the Bay.
It was 1978, I had hitchhiked across the South Pacific on other peoples boats and was living in San Francisco. I met some backpackers from Denmark who were on their way to Peru, South America. They had heard from other backpackers that the Incas have a Sun Festival called Inti Raymi that only happens every 300 years. It sounded so cool and what an opportunity if it only happened every 300 years! I was working and saving to continue my trip to England.
Being a ‘Gourmet Chef’ was an evolution for me. An evolution that took a while. When Whitey and I first started working on charter boats I was very much a novice in the galley, kitchen, whatever you want to call it. Luckily our first jobs as crew were in the British Virgin Islands, which is charter boat center in the Caribbean, which meant there were many chef’s to network with, swap recipes and get lots of ideas. All the networking provided all of the newby chef’s valuable assistance as we planned meals and cooked for our charter guests.
