Shirwin Smith: Open Water Therapy

By Steefenie Wicks

Sausalito’s waterfront history is rich with the different types of people who have come here and made it their home or place of business.   Most of these transplants themselves have a connected background of being on the water, sailing, rowing --  starting at the early age of 8 or 10. This is the background that fits Shirwin Smith, who learned her rowing skills at that age on Lake Champlain in Vermont.   In 1973, her life took a change that would bring her to California.

“My first job was for the GGNRA in San Francisco at the Maritime Museum.  It was while I was working there that I moved to Sausalito in 1979. One day while reading the Marinscope, I saw an ad about the forming of a new Sausalito Rowing Club. I remember thinking, that’s for me,” she said.  She remembers that their fist meeting was held at City Hall with five people, led by Gordy Nash.

Nash was a builder of small craft, well known in Sausalito.  It was through Nash that she started to become serious about the idea of rowing and sculling. She tells the story of how she was part of the race Nash put together from Catalina Island to Marina Del Ray, a 36-mile event.  The rowing shells would be taken out on a larger vessel.  You then boarded your vessel and raced back. She would participate in this racing event 5 different times.

Then in 1985 she quit her job with GGNRA and started her own business, Open Water Rowing, which is now a 30-year-old waterfront firm dedicated to the art of sculling.  She is the first to tell you that what she does is kind of like the “mountain bike” of this sport that is very different from kayaking or paddle boarding. She was the first to open this type of water sculling, using a form of rowing shell that only weighs around 38 pounds and travels lean and fast over the water’s surface.  In 1985 this was a very different type of business. “I never felt that I was treated differently because I was a woman,” she says, “for me it was more like shock factor when people would find out that the owner was the ‘little gal’ over there.”  She continues, “It is always the same no matter who I’m standing with and talking to, someone will eventually come up and say, ‘hey do you know how I can find the owner’ and I would speak up and say, that would be me.”

Shirwin feels that when you get about a quarter of a mile off shore the world changes and you seem to change with it.  She tells stories of only pleasant encounters with other waterfront dwellers who anchor out on their vessels, also of how many have gone out of their way to return boats to her when they have gotten lost in a storm.

“All waterfront areas are different,” she says, “but the thing that makes Sausalito so special is the atmosphere created by this incredible body of water that surrounds us, takes us to another world of experience, then lets us row back to shore.”

She continues, “My grandfather was a rower, he was with the Harlem River Rowing Club that was founded by returning civil war veterans, back in 1873.  I never got to meet him but my grandmother gave me all the medals he had won; maybe I get my talent for this sport from him, I have wondered about that.”

I asked her about her early days in the Onshore Marine building which was demolished so that the new Schoonmaker marina could be built.

“Oh, ‘’ she says,” those were the days.  There were all of theses local waterfront business that all seemed to fit together in that space.  We shared the space and became a small supportive community for each other.  I can remember one night I was on my way home and one of the fishermen had come, in tied his boat up and he, along with some of the guys from the building, were out grilling fish from his catch.  As I walked by I commented on how good it looked, he told me to stick out my hand, in it he handed me a nice filet that I had that night for dinner.”

She feels this laid back attitude is part of being on the water and being part of that close water existence.  She mentions that one of her mentors on the waterfront has long been Hank Easom; she admires him as a business owner, a person of character and an awesome sailor.  When he closed down his boat shop he offered her space for her shells on his property. “He never seems to get upset,” she continues, “he instead has this attitude of ‘let’s just get it fixed and move on’, I like that.

“For the past 30 years the Sausalito waterfront has been a wonderful place for me,” she continues. “When I’m offshore moving along with the birds and the seals, this is another world. I feel that with this sport of sculling, you are taught to experience the Bay in a most personal way.  It’s a way of taking one’s first breath of Sausalito’s fresh air.”

Shirwin Smith outside Open Water Rowing Center

Photo by Steefenie Wicks