Sea People sat down with the two skippers running our Balance 502 Tiger Lily in the Outer Passage programme.
Sea People’s latest newsletter led with a story we were delighted to see. Sea People CEO Logan Rowell spent the best part of an hour aboard Tiger Lily, our Balance 502, anchored in Penobscot Bay, Maine, in conversation with Captain Phoebe Whitbeck and First Mate Perrine Louvet.
Meet the Crew Behind The Balance 502 Tiger Lily
Tiger Lily runs with Outer Passage, our sail training and adventure passage partner, carrying guests, owners, and prospective owners on real offshore miles. Phoebe and Perrine are the two people who make that happen, week after week.
Phoebe earned her captain’s licence at twenty and is twenty five now. Perrine has logged some thirteen thousand miles across sixteen boats in two years, holds an RYA Yachtmaster Offshore, and has two Atlantic crossings behind her with a third coming. Both of them arrived here by routes worth hearing about, and neither of them started at the ocean.
A Few Things You Will Hear
- How a public logbook became a career. Outer Passage found Phoebe through her Sea People tracks. On their first call, Darren and Amanda brought up a specific day she had tacked eighteen times up the Sir Francis Drake Channel rather than reaching for the throttle, and told her she would not need eighteen tacks on a Balance. Perrine puts it best: a logbook is a live resume, and you cannot fake miles.
Maine with daggerboards down. Threading a performance catamaran through down east lobster pot country, including a spinnaker run at ten knots with Perrine steering blind while Phoebe called five degrees at a time from the bow.
- Docking as a young female captain. Arriving at a new marina to find half the dock sent out to catch her lines, and the shift from dreading the manoeuvre to treating it as a puzzle worth looking forward to.
- Two decision makers aboard. Why Perrine chose to step back from a captain’s seat into a first mate role, and what Phoebe says a second competent judgement actually buys you. Relevant to anyone sailing as a couple.
What they would tell their younger selves.
"You earned it, and you will keep earning it."
"Harder than you imagined, and better than you imagined."
Try Before You Buy, In Practice
Phoebe’s own description of the Try Before You Buy programme is the clearest one we could offer: sail training adventures with guests, with prospective buyers of these boats, and with owners.
That is rather the point. Plenty of builders will tell you their boats are capable offshore. Fewer will hand you the helm for a week and let you find out. By the time anyone who has sailed Tiger Lily signs, they have felt how a 502 behaves when the breeze fills in. Working with Darren, Amanda and the Outer Passage team has always been a pleasure, and these two are a large part of the reason why.
Connected by the Sea: A Small Cruising World
Sea People was built by sailors, among them Jean-Michel Lemieux, co-founder and CTO of the app and formerly CTO of Shopify. He is also a Balance 580 owner.
So a Balance owner built the platform, that platform is where Outer Passage found their captain, a Balance 502 hosted the conversation, and two Balance skippers told the story. The cruising world is smaller than it looks.
Come and Find Them at Annapolis
Phoebe and Perrine will both be at the Annapolis Sailboat Show in October, and so will Tiger Lily. If the episode leaves you with questions, that is your chance to ask them in person, and they are far better company than any brochure.
Offshore sailing has been slow to share its helms. That is changing, and it is changing because of skippers like these two, who get on with the work at a standard nobody can argue with. We are proud to have Tiger Lily in our fleet and prouder still of the pair running her.
Fair winds to everyone out there this season, and to the ones still deciding whether they can.
