THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Mast Transit : Costa Mesa’s Lu Dale Sails Yachts for a Living, but the Ocean’s Lure Makes It a Calling, Not Just a Job

Lu Dale sails safely into port after weeks at sea. The sadness descends like soft rain.

It’s not a serious affliction, merely a longing for the sea. Dale, a professional skipper, is hit with it at the close of every voyage. Adventure ends, civilization looms. But Dale, of Costa Mesa, desires only the deep blue.

As a yacht delivery captain, Dale, 52, is paid to sail others’ boats over long, sometimes treacherous passages. A client calls, and within hours Dale can be on a plane, flying to a distant port to sail a yacht from Tonga to Tahiti. The work can be fun, tedious, exhausting. Even fatal.

Dale sees it as her calling. The ocean has led her to exotic lands, wonderful friends, even love. Years ago, it shattered her spirit, then taught her to survive. The ocean has long possessed her soul.

Imagine a workplace where dolphins frolic. Where dressing down means working in the buff. Where at night a billion stars twinkle like diamonds on black velvet. This has been Dale’s place of employment for nearly 30 years.

In the days when female sailors knew their place--down in the galley preparing sandwiches--Dale was already taking the helm. Today, she is one of only a handful of women making their living as delivery captains. There have been sacrifices, including three failed marriages, but she wouldn’t change a thing.

“It’s just fun,” says Dale, who’s at sea about half the year. “And I think that’s what life should be all about. It shouldn’t be drudgery.”

It’s not likely to be if Dale is involved. This is a woman who once performed a marriage ceremony at sea--as her captain’s license allows--wearing a red, rubber clown nose. And just for grins, she has hauled a minivan up a mast and ridden a bicycle on deck.

Years ago, she sailed across the Atlantic through seven separate gales in a 37-foot boat that wasn’t equipped for the high seas (something she learned en route). The boat was knocked over countless times; its electricity failed. Dale slept in soaking wet clothes for 26 straight days.

Drudgery?

“Actually,” Dale says wistfully, “I kind of enjoyed it.”

*

Dale grew up in Tacoma, Wash., the second of seven children. Few of her siblings were surprised at her chosen path.

“You could see when she was quite young,” sister Toni says, “that Tacoma wasn’t going to be big enough for her.”

Her father, a former Navy man, often took the family out in his small powerboat. When the weather got nasty, most of the family huddled in the back of the boat, bracing for the worst. Lu and her father laughed and screamed, loving every second.

She would listen, wide-eyed, as her grandfather told stories of his Swedish navy days. Tales of sailing around Africa, battling storms, surviving the treacherous turn off Cape Horn.

Lu was duly inspired. At 14, she rigged a sail on an old, 6-foot dinghy and began making solo ventures across the Puget Sound.

“She didn’t know how to tack. She didn’t even know how to sail, really,” said her brother Bryan. “She’d eventually have to flag someone down to tow her back.”

At 19, she made a home aboard a small sailboat in Seattle. Nothing dried in those cramped, damp quarters, inspiring Dale to come up with a battle plan for mold and mildew:

1) Wear ample amounts of perfume to drown out the smell.

2) Practice saying, “Fuzzy green? You betcha. I buy all my shoes in this color.”

But moldy shoes couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm for sailing. Dale gained experience crewing aboard racing yachts, then discovered yacht delivery.

In theory, it works like this: A boat owner sails from, say, Newport Beach to Hawaii. After tooling around the islands for a month or two, he flies home. Why? Because the return trip is upwind--a far less comfortable sail.

The owner calls a delivery captain, works out a fee (usually $2 to $3 a nautical mile) and flies the skipper to Honolulu. The skipper sails the boat safe and sound back to Newport.

That’s the idea, anyway. Each skipper adds his or her own touch. Dale--who charges about $10,000 for a delivery from Tahiti to L.A., not including air fare, fuel or food--hangs a sign as soon as she and her crew board a client’s boat: The Boat Comes First, The Crew Comes Second.

“It’s pretty cold, I guess,” she says. “But that’s what you’re paid for.”

*

Not everyone has Dale’s touch.

Consider the story of We Made It, the 42-foot boat that sailed out of Newport Harbor to circle the world in record time.

The voyage--undertaken by a Las Vegas man, his wife and mother-in-law, all of limited sailing experience--was billed as “an adventure of monumental importance to America.”

“The route is simple,” the would-be skipper said. “Leave Newport, go south to the Horn and hang a left.”

But after 16 days at sea, the adventure of monumental importance came to a sudden, inglorious end. The crew of We Made It was too seasick to go on.

Stories such as these make Dale chuckle. Sailing the world isn’t always what people make it out to be. For many, the romance rarely lives up to its billing.

Would you mind sleeping in a damp, cramped bunk? Eating all your meals from boil-in-a-bag? Not washing your hair for days at a time? Taking cold, saltwater showers?

None of it fazes Dale. This is a woman more at ease with a mizzen mast than a microwave, more in tune with weather patterns than what’s happening on “ER.”

Her senses at sea are so acute, she can identify ports by their smell.

That dusty, desert smell? That’s San Diego. That whiff of coral? You’re closing in on Hawaii. Rich, sensuous vanilla? Ooo-la-la, Tahiti.

And Hong Kong?

“Never mind what Hong Kong smells like,” she says.

Port smells aren’t the only thing Dale has gathered over the years. She is, by all accounts, a fine sailor, perhaps an even better skipper. Dale, they say, reacts in any situation with poise, leadership and skill.

Her reflexes aren’t too shabby either.

She was bringing a sailboat up from Cabo San Lucas a few years back with a two-man crew. When Dale finished her watch around 2 a.m., another crew member took over. She woke up to the words: “Um, there’s a freighter . . .”

Dale scrambled to the deck and dived for the wheel. The freighter, all 1,000 tons of it, Dale remembers, was about 20 feet from their bow. Dale made a sharp turn that probably saved their lives.

“I didn’t even start shaking for a half an hour,” she says. “I mean, we were dead.”

As it turned out, neither crew member had an understanding of the night lighting system vessels use to determine right of way.

*

When Dale goes to sea, she packs a first-aid kit (antibiotics aplenty), a selection of jazz tapes and a hodgepodge of tools in a case held together by duct tape.

Preparation, Dale says, is the key to any successful delivery. But no one can plan for everything. Consider:

* A British couple once drifted in a life raft for 117 days after their yacht was hit, and sunk, by an injured sperm whale off the Galapagos Islands. The couple survived by catching sea turtles, fish and seabirds . . . and eating them raw.

* Bob Dickson of Corona del Mar got the scare of his life while helping deliver a 61-foot yacht from Tokyo to Los Angeles. A thousand miles from land, a 60-foot wave struck in the middle of the night, and rolled the boat 360 degrees. One crew member broke her leg in three places. One was thrown overboard, but his harness saved him. At least one never sailed again.

* A Santa Clarita man and his two children were killed off New Zealand when a large ship struck their 47-foot yacht Melinda Lee at night. The wife and mother, Judith Sleavin, was the only survivor.

Local sailors are quick to point out that driving on Southern California freeways is a far more lethal activity. But they also acknowledge that more people are lost at sea than often goes reported.

Dale agrees. She knows of many instances where people sailed away never to be seen or heard from again.

“I’ve seen things floating out there that could put a hole in your boat in a minute,” she says. “Big stainless steel refrigerators, weather buoys. . . . Even when you know what you’re doing, things go wrong.”

Dale pauses. For her, things went terribly wrong on a voyage 15 years ago, and reliving the experience is never easy.

His name was Hank Hanna. He was a Sausalito businessman. Several times he asked Dale to marry him.

“I told him no. I have to go to England, I have to go to Hawaii, I have to go to Mexico,” Dale recalls. “I just thought he would always be there.”

Dale invited him to join her for a delivery. They were sailing from Tahiti to Hawaii. During the crossing, on Dale’s birthday, Hank made her a candlelight spaghetti dinner. Late that night, Dale finished her watch, and Hank took over. The next morning, Dale woke up to a banging noise against the hull.

It was the lifeline, the cable that circles the perimeter of every boat to keep sailors from falling over board. It had come loose. Hank was gone.

Dale guesses he left the cockpit, leaned against the lifelines and fell. Dale had warned both Hank and the other crew member, Sven, about this potential danger only a day earlier. Never leave the cockpit when you’re the only one on deck, she said.

Dale searched the seas for two days, pleading with the Coast Guard in Honolulu for help. They told her no search planes were available.

Dale wanted only to end her life. She started going over the side, Sven, in his 70s, pulled her back. Look lady, Sven said, if you don’t come with me, I won’t make it to Honolulu either.

The words shook her. Dale crawled back into the boat and set sail for Honolulu. Some say she has been sailing with a vengeance ever since.

Dale shrugs, says it’s just her way. She is a sailor.

“If it’s time for me to go, it’s time for me to go.”

The risks are worth it. The ocean is her place.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Lu Dale

Background: Age 52. Born Tacoma, Wash., lives in Costa Mesa.

Family: Divorced three times, no children.

Passions: Agatha Christie novels, playing chess, watching whales surface at sunset.

On being a yacht-delivery captain: “You have to be a little crazy. You have to love the ocean. A lot of people do it for a period of time, then do something else. Those are the smart ones.”

On returning to sea after her boyfriend was lost overboard: “I sailed again right away. You have to because I think you can get lost in self-pity.”

On career ambitions: “Someone said the other day, ‘Why don’t you go out and get a real job?’ But I’m the only one in the delivery business I know who owns their own house. . . . I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”