AMERICA’S CUP ’92 : A Young Woman and the Sea : Sailing: America-3 crew member Dawn Riley has lived the life of a sailor--and made herself into one of the best.

Grant her the occasional moment of doubt, the intermittent twinge of jealousy that goes along with being a nomad of the sea.

Forsaking earthly treasures has given Dawn Riley, 26, the freedom to do what she wants, and what she wants to do is sail.

But there are fleeting moments when she wonders whether the sea is worth it.

Imagine her feelings when she talked recently to her younger sister, who has settled into a career, marriage and two-car garage back home in Michigan.

“She just bought a BMW,” said Riley, a native of Detroit. “I’m all, gee, I’ve never even owned a car in my life . . . and I’m a year and a half older than her.”

As the only female crew member among 38 in the America-3 syndicate, her credentials indicate this nomad does what she loves most rather well.

Credentials weren’t enough. According to America-3 skipper Gary Jobson, Riley had to translate what’s written on the resume into performance on the water.

“Putting this program together, we thought it would be great to have a woman on the team. But we just didn’t want one for window dressing. Once here, she had to cut it. We had a few, but there were reasons they didn’t make the team . . . Then Dawn showed up.”

Jobson had her in deck shoes and out on the boat in record time.

“An hour later, a couple of guys came back and said, ‘Hey, she’s really good. You should watch her,’ ” Jobson said.

He did, then signed her up. So, for the next 17 months, Riley will live in a regimented environment where time is “theirs” not “hers” and where relaxation turns to the realization that little she wears, uses, touches or even eats can be called her own.

Not that this is a new lifestyle. Since Riley graduated from with a degree in advertising from Michigan State in 1986, she has embraced the wanderlust that defines the true sailor.

“The longest I’ve ever been settled is two months at a time,” she said.

The sacrifice? “A normal life, when it comes down to it. I don’t have an apartment, a car, a steady boyfriend, anything. I’m totally single.”

Yet totally unavailable. The time constraints slapped on the crew of America-3 are demanding. When she’s not sailing, which takes about six hours a day, she’s running, biking, doing aerobics, weight training, giving lectures or addressing the dozens of memos--ranging from regulations to dress codes--sent to the crew.

“Everything’s organized for you,” she said. “There’s no time to relax. We train six days a week, but that doesn’t mean a day off. You just don’t have to work out that seventh day.”

Some Sabbath. Riley’s work ethic always has been tough where the sea is concerned. She started sailing with her family at one month old, cruised through the East Coast and Caribbean for a year when she was 13 and eventually paid her way through college by working in sailing-related jobs.

“Sail-making, working on boats, what have you. I worked on the boats and around the boats so I could go sailing,” she said.

Had she gone the desk job route, she too could have the advertising job and BMW her sister, also a sailor, has. Instead, she’s getting a small compensation--based on individual needs, marital status and age--working for Jobson.

“(Salary) depends on a lot of things,” he said. “She’s single, in her 20s, no kids. She’s not here for the money, but she’ll be able to pick up a copy of Time if she wants.”

Jobson likes to liken the positions on the boat to those on a football field. And he and Riley have an understanding on what her role on the crew is.

“As Gary would say, I’ve found my home in the pit,” she said. “It’s on the deck. I’ll tail the halyards, raise and lower the sails.”

The pit area is the nerve center, according to Jobson, and requires precise timing and understand of maneuvers, both of which Riley has.

“She anticipates the maneuvers and has a great sense of timing,” he said. “It’s either in you or it’s not. Some are wide receivers and some are tackles.”

As the link between the sail trimmer and the floor deck, working in the pit takes speed, finesse, and occasionally, strength.

Riley is rock-solid, and strong. She stands 5-feet-6 and weighs 156 pounds, has 11.7% body fat--well under the average for women--and lifts weights four times a week.

“Some people walk by the refrigerator and fat jumps on,” she said. “I walk by the weight room and muscles jump on.”

Almost from infancy Riley had an innate knowledge of the relationship between ship and sea. As a toddler she accompanied her father, Chuck, on the delivery of a new racing boat.

“It was very windy,” Chuck Riley recalled. “The men on the boat were trying out new sails . . . and the boat went out of control for a few minutes. A child her age normally would have been terrified. But she looked at me and said, ‘Are those guys going to race you Daddy? Because if they do, they’re going to win.’ ”

That’s what Riley always wanted to do. She never passed sailing off as passing time. It was always serious business.

“I don’t remember it ever just being a fun thing to do,” said Riley, who started racing at age 13 and has worked in and around the sport since. “It’s always been a real active, aware thing. It’s never been just go out and relax. But I enjoy it, for sure, not only the serious racing cups, but there is a lot of fun racing out there. It’s fun to just go out and tear up a course.”

Like she and an all-female crew--a first--did in sailing a yacht called Maiden in the grueling Whitbread Around the World race last year. Some course. Try 33,000 miles that start in England, hit the Indian Ocean, Cape Horn, South America (twice), Australia, New Zealand, Ft. Lauderdale and finish nine months later in England.

It was an experience Riley, the only American on the Maiden, won’t soon forget and one she stumbled upon quite by accident. She was set to sail the 1989-90 winter circuit when the crew disbanded and left her without a ride.

“In the period of two days, I was out of a job,” she said. “Two weeks later, I was out sailing the Whitbread. (Skipper) Tracy Edwards put the project together and I got lucky and jumped on with three months to go.”

The longest Riley had been out to sea before the Whitbread was seven days. So here she was committed to a project that lasted as long as a pregnancy.

“You do get worn down,” said Riley, who didn’t even have a passport before the race. “About halfway through, we were in New Zealand. It was gorgeous country and we had our longest stopoff, seven days. That was the only time I really didn’t want to get back on the boat. I was tired. I just wanted to stay in one place.”

She resisted the temptation.

“A lot of people drop off after a round or what have you,” Riley said. “But that’s admitting defeat. So you go at it again. You don’t want to be a failure. You just keep going.”

Pause. Suddenly she’s back talking in the first person: “I’ve never dropped out of anything . . . not that I can remember.”

Chuck Riley said Dawn did her best to quell his reservations about the trip.

“I knew she was aggressive and competitive,” he said, “and I knew she felt comfortable doing it, and she assured me the boat was bullet-proof.. . . but still you hesitate.”

Riley was a watch captain and engineer on the Maiden, which finished second in its class and won two legs on the six-leg voyage.

What most impressed Jobson, who did commentary for ESPN on the race, was Riley’s calm amid potential disaster.

“They got into trouble near the Falklands,” he said. “There were a lot of electrical problems. There was three feet of water in the boat and everything shorted out. She fixed it all, kept the spirit alive when the boat was in grave danger and saved the day. Now that’s real stuff.”

She received a special award for her efforts, a fact supplied by Jobson, not Riley.

“In the beginning people were skeptical,” she said. “We went from people telling us we were crazy, that we were all going to die and, by the time we got back to England, we were heroes.”

One of the more spectacular phases of the trip was when an abundance of wildlife surrounded the boat near Antarctica.

“We’d sometimes have 300 birds at a time following us,” she said. “There were penguins, whales, you name it, we saw it. We had to avoid a couple of whales that swam up.”

Since she’s been in San Diego, Riley hasn’t avoided publicity. As one of a handful of females on America’s Cup class crews--Dory Vogel raced in the trials in Fremantle in 1987 and Annie Nelson is currently sailing with Team Dennis Conner--she still is surprised at the media circus her presence generates.

“(Being a woman) is a big deal, it seems like,” she said. “But in terms of sailing and the sailing world, it’s not unusual.”

Riley’s theory is that many women sailors don’t reach higher levels of achievement because they lack tenacity. When she’s down, Riley picks herself up, dusts herself off and tackles the next obstacle.

“I think there are a lot of women that you never hear about because they might get discouraged,” she said. “They get sick and tired of being turned down.”

Maternal instincts can sometimes take women out of the business as well.

“There are always babies,” she said. “Women get married and have kids. That takes out a huge chunk of anyone who is 27 or 28 or so. And it has always been male-dominated because of tradition.”

Any chance of the hype going to her head? Hardly.

“I never get to see the end result,” Riley said. “Maybe a magazine is doing something on another coast, or we’re on TV, but I’m not home to see it. Besides, if I was paying attention to that, I wouldn’t be doing my job. Hopefully, my mom is keeping a scrapbook.”

Included in her memoirs would be an array of programs from the lectures she gives to yacht clubs, girls’ clubs, high schools and college athletic teams. Riley has a two-hour slide show and a motivational video, both based on the Whitbread.

For someone who never had to overcome seasickness, Riley has to deal with the queasiness she felt in her stomach when she began public speaking.

“I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “It took me awhile to get used to it. But the response was tremendous. In Cleveland, one of my first stops, I got a standing ovation.”