It was January 2010. Julie Stewart and Jamie Stanley were “in irons” in their respective lives.
“In irons” is a sailing term describing a sailboat that’s stopped in the water, unable to move forward.
There’s no better metaphor for where the couple found themselves, and the new course they would chart together.
Stewart is an actor and director known for her roles in Cold Squad, North of 60 and Still Mine. Stanley had been working in audio recording since the 1980s. They had a house in Toronto which they shared with their dog, Emma.
Life was good. Except it wasn’t.
“I was starting to have kind of ambivalent feelings about continuing being an actor,” Stewart recalls. “Jamie had owned a recording studio for some time, but was moving away from that because he was not enjoying it anymore. We both had sort of an open expanse in front of us.”
The goal of becoming a competitive sailing team emerged from that.
It happened during a ferry trip from Morocco to Spain. A storm caused the ferry to pitch wildly in the water. Stanley, who was out on the deck, was suddenly reminded of his childhood sailing experiences in Montreal. He had not sailed for 35 years, and found himself missing it.
Stewart, who is originally from Kingston, Ont., had no prior sailing experience.
First they bought a keelboat, which they named Emma. But Stanley found it too slow and cumbersome to satisfy him.
An Albacore is a small, two-person dinghy designed for racing. Stanley had discovered that Toronto had one of the largest Albacore fleets in the world. In September 2010, he bought a used Albacore, affectionately nicknamed Pug.
He and Stewart set their sights on the International Albacore Championship, to be held a year later in Toronto. They didn’t know then that their journey would last four more years . . . and beyond.
Using GoPro cameras, they documented their five-year journey through the world of competitive sailing. They edited the footage into a documemoir, We Are Sailor People, that premiered at the 39th annual FIN Atlantic International Film Festival in Halifax on Sept. 14.
The film reveals how the journey started out as a bit of a lark, then descended into an obsession that took its toll on their marriage.
“At the time, it didn’t seem to matter that I’d not been in a dinghy for 35 years, or that Julie had never sailed before,” Stanley says in the film. “We didn’t think about it too much, which is probably a good thing.”
The couple moved to Shelburne in November 2015. Sitting together in their home in Shelburne’s historic district, they took a moment to reflect.
“It was a slow process,” Stanley says. “We got sucked in big eventually, to where it was this radical, crazy pursuit, but it took a while for us to get there. We just happened to be primed for an adventure at that point in our lives, where our personal and working lives coincided to take us on this wild trip.”
Stewart agrees. “One of the things we try to convey in the movie is that neither of us . . . knew it was going to end up completely consuming us. That we would be living on a boat instead of at home. That we would be travelling everywhere to do this year-round. There was never really a point where we decided this, either. It was like a snowball rolling downhill, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.”
Two days after they bought the Pug, they entered their first Albacore race. Surrounded by other Albacores, they had no idea what to do.
That’s when they found themselves in irons.
With their sailboat frozen in the water, Stanley – the experienced sailor – froze. Stewart looked to him for guidance, but he had none. Minutes passed. Then a 35-year-old memory rose to the surface. Stanley realized what was happening, and he remembered how to fix it.
But it wasn’t enough. The boat capsized, again and again and again. They never even made it to the starting line and finally had to beach their boat on one of the Toronto Islands.
Deeply discouraged, Stanley realized he would have to start all over again and learn competitive sailing. And Stewart would have to learn not only how to sail, but how to be an effective crew member.
They bought a third dinghy, a Laser, and Stanley travelled to Cabarete, in the Dominican Republic, to train.
They worked together for a year and believed they’d made good progress. But when their goal, the International Albacore Championship, rolled around in September 2011, they were disappointed in their performance.
So, instead of that being the ending, it marked the beginning.
The couple returned to Cabarete to get Stewart grounded in essential sailing techniques. But Cabarete, a mecca for many of the world’s top sailors, is an odd place for a beginner.
Stewart laughs now, admitting that her ignorance protected her from fear. “I didn’t even know how extreme it could be. I was nervous . . . and then I found out that I was not nearly nervous enough. And I’m glad, because I did get up to speed very quickly.”
At the 2013 International Albacore Championship in Wales, the couple finished fifth overall.
They sold their house in Toronto and began living aboard the Emma. They chased the sun, travelling to Florida and around the world so that they could train year-round. In 2014, they replaced the Pug with a new Albacore.
Things were looking up, or so they thought.
But the nomadic existence they’d been leading, coupled with competitive burnout, were psychologically and physically draining. A scene in We Are Sailor People shows exhaustion etched into their faces as they drive from a midwinter regatta in Miami across Florida to another race in Sarasota.
The strain on their relationship was apparent, and audiences picked up on it at the film festival screening in Halifax.
“It was the first time we’d seen it on the big screen, in the (Park Lane) Cineplex,” Stanley recalls. “There were laughs, but there were also some gasps at what we show, like when we were swearing. It was relationship stuff. I think people related to the fact that they were seeing things that they recognized. They’re things we all do. We were in windy conditions and very stressful conditions, and we were showing our true feelings and the stress of that.”
“The head programmer (in Halifax) said . . . that one of the things that made it special is that we make it so personal,” Stewart adds. “We knew we didn’t want to make it a straight-ahead documentary about Albacore racing. We wanted to tell a story, our story, and make it personal.”