Standing Tall on the Water : 64-Year-Old Windsurfer Lydia Jewell Doesn’t Let Age Take the Wind Out of Her Sails

She skims over the water with the grace, strength and agility of someone half--or even a third--her age. Although at 64 Lydia Jewell isn’t exactly “old,” she is more advanced in years than just about anybody else who does what she does.

Lydia Jewell is a windsurfer. She’s also a mother, a retired sail maker and a one-time deckhand on an around-the-world sailing voyage. But first and foremost these days, she’s a windsurfer--so much so that the message on her telephone answering machine says simply: “Wind’s up!”--which means that most likely Jewell is out on the water in Los Angeles Harbor and will return your call when she’s had enough windsurfing for the day.

“It’s the most fun sailing I’ve had,” says Jewell, a tall, slim woman with salt-and-pepper hair and muscles that would shame many a younger woman, or younger man. “The thrill is that you get to go right to the edge. It’s scary sometimes, but it’s fun scary.”

But isn’t windsurfing--that is, riding a surfboard with a sail mounted on it--a pretty strenuous, even dangerous sport for someone as, well, mature as she is?

“I guess, at a year away from Medicare, I am a little older than most windsurfers,” Jewell admits. “But I can handle it.”

The reference to Medicare is appropriate, given her history with the sport. Since she started windsurfing 12 years ago, Jewell has broken her nose and her right arm while on the board, both of which put her out of commission for a while. On the other hand, she points out, she broke an ankle coming down the stairs in her San Pedro condominium, so it’s not just windsurfing that can be dangerous.

Even without the potential for accidents, windsurfing is a physically demanding sport. When the wind fails, or when the windsurfer makes a mistake, the sail and the 15-foot mast dip over into the water and have to be hauled back upright by brute strength. Good balance is of course important, but even a good windsurfer can expect to spend some time in the water.

“I get tired sometimes,” Jewell acknowledges. “Sometimes I have to just drop sail and sit on the board and rest. Several times I’ve had young people come by and see me and start looking all concerned and say, ‘Do you need any help?’ I have to tell them I’m just resting.”

Jewell first tried windsurfing while on a camping trip at a mountain lake. It wasn’t easy to learn, but from that first time she was hooked.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is for me!’ ” she says. Now she goes windsurfing at least two or three times a week during the summer.

A native of Massachusetts, Jewell has been a sailor ever since she got her first sailboat at age 12. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1950, she signed on as a crew member aboard the square-rigged sailing ship Brigantine Yankee and spent the next 1 1/2 years sailing around the world. After the voyage she got married, to another “Yankee” crew member, and with “Yankee” captain Irving Johnson and his wife Exy she co-wrote a book about the voyage called “Yankee’s People and Places.” She and her husband moved to Southern California in 1956 and bought a home in the San Fernando Valley.

An accomplished sailor who has won two Southern California women’s sailing championships in Sabot boats, Jewell worked for 10 years as a supervisor in the sail-making loft at Catalina Yachts in Woodland Hills. She retired five years ago and moved to San Pedro, naturally, to be closer to the water.

Divorced since 1978, Jewell has three children and, she says, “two and eight-ninths grandchildren.” Daughter Lynne Jewell Shore, 33, who has provided two of the grandchildren, won an Olympic gold medal in sailing in the 1988 Olympics in Korea. Son Bill Jewell, also 33--he and Lynne are twins--is a former motorcycle racer and is now a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in North Carolina. Youngest daughter Beth Jewell Faulkner, 29, of Rochester, N.Y., is playing host to the “eight-ninths grandchild”; the baby is due next month.

What do the children think of their mother’s windsurfing mania?

“We all think it’s great,” Lynne said from her home in Rhode Island. “We’re all very proud of her. She’s had a few spills and crashes, but I don’t worry about her. She’s very seaworthy.”

And how good a windsurfer is she?

“I wouldn’t go up against her,” says Lynne, who also is a windsurfer. Jewell agrees that she would be tough competition for her 33-year-old daughter.

“Windsurfing is the one thing I can still do better than my children,” she says, laughing. But she isn’t sure how much longer she’ll be able to say that.

“I get tired sooner than I used to,” she says. “I’ve definitely slowed down a little in the last year or so. An hour out there will just about finish me. I dread the time when I won’t be able to do it any more.”

“But,” she adds, “that time isn’t in sight yet.”