The Colgates, the First Couple of Sailing
In 1967, Doris Buchanan started working as a secretary to Bob Bavier, the executive vice president of Yachting magazine and the winning skipper of the America’s Cup in 1964.
She had come from an advertising agency where Monday morning would usually be greeted by cranky co-workers to start the week. “(At Yachting) everybody was really happy on Monday mornings, and I didn’t know why,” she said. “I learned they were happy because they had been sailing all weekend, so I decided to learn to sail. The only place to go was Steve Colgate’s Sailing School.”
She went to his school in City Island, NY, for some initial training, but didn’t meet Colgate because he was competing in America’s Cup trials on American Eagle.
“In January, I went down to the Bahamas where Steve had a program called Sailing Symposiums, because I wanted to learn more and that’s where I met Steve,” Doris explained.
At the time, she was married and Steve had a girlfriend. The two would chat in the bar at the end of the day while waiting for their significant others, who were getting ready for the evening. “Both of those people were vain and spent hours primping,” said Doris. “I would meet Steve in the bar and we just connected.”
That was in 1968. Doris got a divorce and Steve left his girlfriend and Steve and Doris were married in December 1969.
Today, the two run the Offshore Sailing School, which has its headquarters in Fort Myers, Fla., a second location up the west coast of the Sunshine State in St. Petersburg, and two in the British Virgin Islands. Doris is the president and chief executive officer, while Steve is the founder, co-owner and chairman.
OV: What’s it like working together as husband and wife?
D&SC: “People don’t understand how a couple can work together, but we have separate roles,” said Doris. “Steve is the educational side, and I’m more of the management and marketing side. One advantage that Steve has is he can go home at the end of the day and forget about work for the evening. My mind, on the other hand, is still whirling from the day’s hustle and bustle. That makes me mad,” laughed Doris.
OV: What are most students looking for when they contact the school?
D&SC: Most people contact the Offshore Sailing School because they want to learn to cruise and get the certification to be able to charter a boat. Some still want to learn because they want to buy their own boat. Courses range from the basics, like Learning to Sail and Learning to Cruise to Advanced Sailing Cruising Weekends. Tips offered include anchoring, docking safety and more. Check out the full menu at offshoresailling.com.
The Offshore Sailing School is the only sailing instruction program with courses approved for continuing education by the American Council on Education. Offshore Sailing School graduates, many of whom never set foot on a sailboat before taking a course at Offshore Sailing School, number more than 160,000.
The school averages between 1,500 and 3,000 bookings in a year, depending on things like recessions or worldwide pandemics breaking out.
“That could mean twice as many people because you’ve got families,” said Doris. “After 9/11, we found that people always want their kids with them. We’ve been seeing more families with kids as young as 7.”
She continued, “It’s not ideal to have a 7-year-old on a 40- to 50-foot cruising boat, but it’s a bonding experience for the family — they all learn together.”
“Sailing is something you can do all your life. When I raced in the Olympics in a 5.5 meter boat, the class was won by a 66-year-old from Switzerland,” said Steve. “It’s quite different now.”
He was referring to the high-tech foiling boats competing in the America’s Cup races crewed by professional racers. It used to be that the America’s Cup would give sailing a shot in the arm because of all the media attention. Now Steve feels that the foiling, high-tech approach doesn’t appeal to casual sailors.
The Colgates were so dedicated to the school and students that they never had kids. “We had instructors and boats,” said Doris. “We ran 70 flotilla cruises for years together. We were able to see the world under sail by putting together flotilla cruises and leading them.”
Steve collaborated with naval architect Jim Taylor to create the concept for the Colgate 26, a sailboat that won Cruising World magazine’s Boat of the Year in 1997. The Offshore Sailing School has a fleet of 12 Colgates, a Lagoon 40 catamaran, and two Jeanneaus, as well as a leased Leopard 45 catamaran. The United States Naval Academy has 42 Colgate 26s and is planning to replace approximately 30 of them.
OV: What was one of your favorite sailing memories?
D&SC: A memorable trip was a cruise to the Whitsunday Islands in Australia where they sailed together by ourselve for about a week. “That was really special because most of our time cruising was with our graduates,” said Doris. “When you’re with your clients, they don’t like to make decisions for themselves.”
Steve also recalled a favorite moment, when he was watch captain during the Newport to Bermuda Race. “We used to navigate using dead-reckoning and celestial; one of the nice things about being a watch captain is you can go below and get out of the wind and check on the navigator,” said Steve. “He looked very concerned and all we had was the radio direction finder, and it was very unreliable.”
The crew was losing sunlight and then Steve looked at the depth sounder. “All of a sudden, it went to 12 feet and I rushed up on deck and said, tack, tack to starboard. We were about to run aground in the coral reefs.”
While Doris says she’s not much of a racer, she joined Steve on their 54-foot Frers, Sleuth, from 1978 to ’80, winning many trophies including the Antigua Race Week and 1979 Fastnet race.
“He took our boat in the ’79 Fastnet race, and his mother was with us in England. I had to take her to Plymouth, so I got to miss that horrible experience,” laughed Doris.
In 1972, the Colgates started a series of flotillas taking graduates of their school and other sailors to sail in exotic locations like the Caribbean, the Pacific Northwest, Maine, the French Riviera, the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Belize, Tonga and Tahiti on fleets of cruising boats.
“One of the biggest highlights was cruising in Tonga,” Doris recalled. “It’s like the BVI in terms of the weather with the islands and beautiful water, but the people were so simple. They didn’t have electricity. When the kids were hungry, they grabbed a mango off a tree.”
The Colgates also liked sailing in Greece before the area became overrun with cruise ships. They’ve written many books on sailing instruction and author Herb McCormick, executive editor of Cruising World magazine, wrote the Colgates’ biography, OFFSHORE High.
OV: Tell us about other endeavors you have been involved in over the years.
D&SC: Steve grew up in New York City. He learned to sail at the family’s summer home in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., starting at age 9. He sailed Atlantic Class sailboats and Lightnings on Long Island Sound. He graduated from Yale University in 1957 and served two years as an officer in the United States Air Force. After spending four years at a boat-supply store in New York, he launched the Offshore Sailing School in 1964.
His racing career spans seven decades and includes almost every significant race in the offshore sailing realm. In 1955, he crewed aboard the Spanish yacht, Mare Nostrum, that won the Trans-Atlantic Race from Cuba to Spain. In 1968, Steve joined the U.S. Olympic team, racing on the 5.5-meter, Cadenza, in Mexico, spending several years racing in the class. He followed this with stints in two America’s Cup trials. In 1967, he was foredeck chief on American Eagle, and in 1970, Steve was tactician and helmsman on Heritage.
From the America’s Cup, Steve moved up to the 81-foot Maxi-yacht, Nirvana, where he was principal helmsman. Highlights of his time in the class include a visit from King Olaf in Norway, encountering gale-force winds in the Sydney Hobart Race in Australia and sailing up the Pearl River from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, China, in 1982.
Steve served as president of the International Sailing School Association from 1997 to 2006. The Colgates have served on the board of Sail America (the official sailing industry association), and Doris was a member of that organization’s marketing committee for many years. As members of US Sailing, Steve and Doris have each headed the Commercial Sailing School Committee. Steve led the US Sailing Training Committee that established the US Sailing certification system, served on its National Faculty for many years, and was a longtime U.S. Sailing delegate to the International Sailing Federation, now called World Sailing, where he was a member of that organization’s Youth and Development Committee. In the past, the Colgates provided free use of their Captiva Island Colgate 26 fleet for those attending US Sailing’s Annual Meeting.
Focusing on Women
Making her own indelible mark on the sailing community in 1990, Doris gathered 12 women from across the country to form the National Women’s Advisory Board on Sailing to focus on getting more women involved in sailing. Within a year, she had changed the organization’s name to the National Women’s Sailing Association (NWSA), and its mission was to raise awareness of sailing among women and to help women build confidence in their sailing skills and enhance their lives through sailing. She added “You Can Sail Escapes,” providing all-female training programs in conjunction with the Offshore Sailing School.
For eight years, Doris conducted multi-day NWSA seminars for women, primarily at boat shows. They were called Take The Helm and the events featured presentations by panels of women who had sailed long distances with their families. At their peak the seminars had as many as 800 attendees.
In 1991, Doris and the NWSA board launched AdventureSail, a mentoring program for at-risk girls. In 1997, she established the Women’s Sailing Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to educating women and girls and providing access to sailing. After 10 years at the helm of the NWSA and AdventureSail, Doris turned them over to a board of women who continue to run the programs.
From 2004 to 2019 the Colgates supported The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Leukemia Cup Regattas. To date, Offshore Sailing School has donated more than $175,000 and hundreds of in-kind sailing courses that are auctioned off at Leukemia Cup Regattas across the U.S. The school has hosted five Fantasy Sail Weekend events for top Leukemia Cup Regatta fundraisers.
Additionally, the Colgates have supported the American Heart Association (AHA), Golisano Children’s Hospital of Southwest Florida, and numerous arts and cultural organizations. Doris has been on the board of the Florida Repertory Theatre in Ft. Myers, Florida for more than 10 years.
Deserved Accolades
During an NWSA event at a 1996 boat show, one of the Offshore Sailing Schools staff found Doris and dragged her into an auditorium where she and Steve were announced as the recipients of the SAIL magazine Industry Award for leadership. “That was a big surprise to us,” said Doris.
In 1994, Doris received the Betty Cook Memorial Lifetime Achievement award from Boating magazine and International Women in Boating for her work in the recreational boating industry. Ironically, Cook was a world champion offshore powerboat racer.
Both Colgates were inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame separately with Steve joining in 2015 and Doris entering in 2022. “Even though we work together, we were inducted for different reasons and we’re the only couple to have been separately inducted,” said Doris
Among all the memories of his students, Steve recalled one who was an amateur archaeologist. He bought a catamaran in Key West and was about to sail it down to the Yucatan Peninsula. Steve contacted a meteorologist who said the student would have a 90-percent chance of encountering a northerly gale in January.
“I said, ‘Joe when you get back from the Yucatan, give me a call and let me know how it went,’” said Steve. “Months and months later, he called and said, ‘Your weather guy was right.’”
To escape the weather, the student had to go near the tip of Cuba into a deserted bay and drop anchor. He woke up to a militia member on the on the beach shooting at him. “Bullets were buzzing around and I had to go forward and pull the anchor and get out of there,” he told Steve.
OV: What does the future hold?
D&SC: We have made a lifelong commitment to sailing, racing and our sailing school. Steve will turn 90 in June and Doris will be 84 in May. Doris said the couple would love to retire, but the right offer needs to come along. “We would love to sell the company, but it’s a strange business,” she said. “You dedicate your life to it.”
Despite his thoughts on the high-tech disconnect of the America’s Cup, Steve thinks that cruising sailing is in a good place. “You can charter boats all over the world and have a vacation where you only pack and unpack once,” he said. And you’ll go back to work on Monday with a smile on your face. ν