The Bunkhouse Chronicle: Ruby Gates sails the world

Sometimes, when the gods are being generous, we cross paths with incredible people whose accomplishments stand apart, and whose ability to reflect the lessons of great physical and spiritual challenge encourage us to examine our own lives. So it is with Ruby Gates, 60, who is on a quest to circumnavigate the globe in her sailboat, single-handed.

I met Ruby at Black Butte Ranch, where she gave a presentation after completing the first leg of her adventure - sailing her 39-foot boat Makani from Mexico to Tahua-ta, in French Polynesia. In 2024, she was the only woman to accomplish that feat alone, crossing 3,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean in 30 days.

Photo courtesy Ruby Gates

Ruby Gates is sailing the world solo.

This was only the beginning of her voyage which, when she is finished, will put her in the rarified air of the world's great adventurers. On this leg, she encountered a de-masted ghost ship, the almost hallucinatory appearance of a sailing drone, onboarding squid, a great line of threatening squalls, whales that kept her up on constant watch for fear they would surface beneath her vessel and destroy the rudder, and a frightening brush with a mystery boat that might have been - and behaved like - pirates.

These are some of the raw facts of her adventure, beautifully recorded in her online blog, but I wanted to know what drives someone to embrace this kind of challenge, mindful that the world's oceans are still the last frontier, still full of incredible dangers but likewise incredible payoffs - an irresistible siren song for those with an ear to hear it.

At 50, having raised two daughters and built her own businesses, Ruby was invited to sail from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, to Australia. She knew nothing about sailing but was in a place in her life that the answer could only be "Yes."

"I didn't even know what to be scared of," she says, but over the next seven months she sailed over 8,500 miles across the North Pacific and into the South Pacific, from Kiribati to Samoa, Tonga to Fiji, from New Caledonia to Brisbane. The hook was set, and what followed was a sudden, thorough, and life-changing obsession. She sold her house. She sold her businesses. And for the next seven years she sailed the world, learning to be a sailor in the ancient waters of the Mediterranean, Mexico, and French Polynesia.

Photo courtesy Ruby Gates

Makani is a 39-foot sailboat.

It's probable that most of us, at one time or another, have considered such drastic changes in our own lives. But most of us won't act. Maybe it is a kind of divine conversion, a sudden awareness that there are alternatives to how we live, that a parallel universe still exists. It would be easy, and an enormous mistake, to underestimate the courage it takes to embrace the radical re-direction that Ruby chose. And maybe that was my answer. Maybe that thing, that courage and unwavering commitment, is what makes the difference between real adventurers and the rest of us, who throw foam bricks from the sofa and only wish we had the guts.

"Fear is a fantasy," Ruby told me. "It can define a vision of us" and so become crippling and preventative. She sees it sometimes in her students - she teaches five women a year to sail - who come to learn sailing with a limited vision of themselves. Ruby, like all great teachers, helps them defeat their fears by teaching them to concentrate on the task at hand, to master one thing at a time, like the complicated demands of properly anchoring a boat. Over time, she says, her students begin to realize that their own potential far outweighs their fears.

Out at sea, which is a lonely place on the very best of days, Ruby has routines to keep herself focused on the relentless nature of single-handed sailing - meditation and breathing techniques she learned from free divers. And it is precisely those demands, the life-affirming responsibilities, that motivate her. At sea, Ruby told me, "You don't worry about the color of your lipstick. There is too much to do, and the distractions are gone. You wake up to how stupid stuff is, how we are habituated to external noises. It's almost a reboot. You get to be alive in a certain way."

Which may be something the rest of us are missing. This "certain way" is demanding. It's physically engaged. It's both primal and mentally charged by the awesome responsibility of measuring risk, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day. But the reward is enormous.

Approaching land at the end of her journey, whose lushness she could smell before she could see, Ruby wrote: "My last night at sea invites all the squalls and seas and swells and rains into one final midnight party. We rage all night like teenagers whose parents are gone for the weekend. I kiss the wind and dance with the squalls. I'm grateful, I'm relieved, I'm happy with accomplishment and humbled by the fragility of my life."

Soon, Ruby will return to Tahiti, where Makani waits at anchorage, the sails stored safely belowdecks. It will be cyclone season. And then she will set sail again. For herself, certainly, but maybe also for the rest of us, who need someone like Ruby to remind us that life is much, much, larger than we sometimes think it is. And, as ever, for the living.

You can follow Ruby Gates on her website seanixie.com, and on Instagram #rubyatsea.