She went on to say that earlier that morning, someone had been telling her about so-called “steps to knowledge,” and that the first one was called “blissful incompetence.” “That's when you don't realize you're incompetent because you have no idea of the body of knowledge that's out there and I was clearly there.” She then described going out once a week sailing with her husband, and for several years taking a class each summer at the Yacht Club. “For three solid years I had no idea what he was talking about but at some point I got the bug and started reading sailing and doing sailing and I just sort of started doing it all the time. The third time I took his class I was like, ‘Oh, I know exactly what he's talking about,' I understood everything that he said. I don't think he was saying anything differently I think it was just finally making sense to me.”

She then began to realize that although she thought the junior sailing program at the Yacht Club where she was based was really good, the reason her kids were doing so much better than she was, was because they were going out five days a week, compared to her one. “My sailing had never improved [not only] because I went once a week but because I sailed with my husband,” her implication clear — she was never making independent decisions. Once that became clear to her, she decided she wanted to “catch up. I'll sail seven days a week and I'll never sail with my husband,” who she thought, “has a much better boat sense that I do,” and yes, they're still happily married. “He's very supportive, he does repairs for my boat, (a double handed boat) when I come up with ideas as to how to change the rigging so I can better sail it by myself, he's very helpful.”

She sails completely alone now, having tried unsuccessfully to find someone with a compatible schedule. “If you have a plan that you're going to sail every day and you're trying to fit that into your own family's timetable and then you join up with someone else, and they don't follow through time-wise, you figure out you have to do it by yourself.”

So she began her seven-day-week adventure, keeping her boat in the water from Mother's Day until Thanksgiving. “Greg Nissen, the director at Camp Quinipet, whom I didn't know, noticed that I was going out and sailing every day from the Yacht Club. After a certain point, Labor Day or Columbus Day, there are no other boats on the water and if you see one boat going out hours by itself and it has a clear number on the side, I think he probably started asking around who it was that was out there. So Greg approached me and asked me to become a sailing instructor and teach the adult sailing program at Quinipet. I think it was for me life-changing in a positive way. Initially it was a stretch, to teach the course, to use a boat that capsizes easily —  I sail on a very stable boat.”

But she did it and is now almost through her second season. She teaches the adult sailing course at Quinipet, which is three days a week, three hours a day and then once a season, a one-week intensive sail course, going on there now, “And that's like the highlight of the summer.” She thinks she does the job well — “I tell people I've made every mistake in the book and continue to, and I think I'm a good instructor because I learned the hard way. Generally speaking, sailing instructors are much younger than I am, especially in a camp situation, and there are strengths to that but I think a lot of times, because they've sailed from such an early age, they don't know what it is to really get it.”

When she was growing up in Manhattan, one of four children with mom at home and dad an attorney, a family friend was a frequent visitor to the Island. “So I was lucky enough to be invited as a kid and when I met my husband, he had just bought a home here and that was one of the things we had in common. We met in the city but he was excited that I knew the Island, and so almost on our first date we came here.

They have two children now, a 17-year-old daughter, Reilly Bergin-Pugh, who, having achieved her sailing certification, is working at Quinipet as well and York, now 25, the assistant offshore racing coach at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London.

So a slow road leads to a new beginning. “When you're sailing, you see the Island from a totally different perspective,” she said, “from a new vantage point.” And it would seem, one's self as well.

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3 comments found

Reilly : 8/17/2010
Hi, I am Reilly's friend from China, and I haven't been able to get in touch with her. If you know her, could you please ask her to send me an email? thanks very much!
Becca Winters

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Dona Bergin : 8/4/2009
I, too, took Dona Bergin's week-long class at Quinpet. Our families have been friends for many years. I took the class as a lark to see friends and because I recently moved next to a yacht club in Perth Amboy, N.J. and thought I could start crewing. I frankly thought Dona had become obsessed with sailing over recent years. But now I understand. The difference sometimes between a 'Champion' and an athelete is one day, one week, one month more of training! My friend, Donna, the quintessential 'Sailor and Instructor'. What a thoroughly exciting, spiritual and instruction-packed week at the charming Methodist camp, Quinipet. The 'other' Donna

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dona bergin...sailing instructor! : 8/2/2009
Dona is a clear,insightful, patient and kind instructor! She truly gives her all to bring out the sailor in people with vastly varied starting points. I agree that her own adult learning experience gives her the extra ability to help the rest of us. The week at women's sailing camp was greatly enhanced by her presence and teaching style- not to mention good humor!!!!!! Thanks for the article!

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