“… for there are three thousand light-stepping daughters of Okeanos scattered far and wide, bright children among the goddesses, and all alike look after the earth and the depths of the standing water.”

– Hesiod, Theogony 346 ff (trans. Evelyn-White)

According to Greek Legend, the Titans Oceanus and his sister-consort Tethys bore, among other offspring, three thousand daughters and three thousand sons. The sons, the Potamoi, became river gods. The daughters, the Oceanids, became, depending on which authority you rely, nymphs or patron spirits of the world’s oceans or, more broadly, all waterways – lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, even clouds.

Like the Three Thousand Sisters, women who boat are far-flung and difficult to classify. Some are captains of their own craft; some have taken to the ocean as crew or stowaway or solo circumnavigator; some prefer the quiet of a lake or the risk of a river; some never take the helm at all, eclipsed by- or simply preferring to support- a spouse’s interest.

Like many women who find themselves involved by choice or circumstance with boats, I came to the water as an adjunct to a man – first as a passenger in my father’s sailboat, when I was very young, and later as witness and enabler to my husband’s serial powerboat obsessions. I was not fortunate enough to have spent enough time with my father on his Cal 22 to learn anything about sailing; a siren called him and he vanished before I was old enough to learn the difference between a jib and a jibe. My husband’s passion instilled a love of boats in me but I felt, still, a watcher. A boat has only one captain, after all, leaving a resident female, especially on a powerboat, with not much to do but handle dock lines and passively…. enjoy.

Recently, in an act so utterly unlike me that I am at a loss to explain, I found myself as if in a dream, standing on a windy dock placing an envelope of cash in the palm of a woman who sold me my own vessel- a little sailboat, a Santana 22. She is, simultaneously, desperately in need of a great deal of attention and the single most beautiful thing I have ever possessed.

Consider the girl in the header image. Does she own that boat, or does it belong to the boy? Is she just holding it for him while he fixes it, or is it hers, the look on her face disclosing a dream of adventures to come once her mainsail is set aright? I am no longer certain which girl I am. Neither. Both.

There is room among the Three Thousand for each of these Sisters – the watcher and the sailor, the captain and the crew member, the pirate and the mate – and room inside each one of us, for all of these. Must we choose?