Sharon Sites Adams

Sharon Sites Adams was an American sailor and author who became the first woman to sail alone across the Pacific Ocean. In the summer of 1969, aboard the 31-foot ketch Sea Sharp II, she sailed single-handed from Japan to San Diego in 74 days, 17 hours and 15 minutes, sighting the California coast on July 20, 1969, the same day Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Four years earlier, in June 1965, she had already become the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii, a 39-day passage in a 25-foot Danish Folkboat named Sea Sharp. She did it all with less than a year of sailing experience when she began.

She was born on May 29, 1930, in Battle Ground, Washington, with the given names Phyllis Mae. Her parents died when she was young, and she was looked after by different relatives, who gave her the new name Sharon. She grew up on the high desert of Central Oregon in Prineville, where she preferred woodshop and architectural drafting to home economics and once imagined becoming an architect. She graduated from Crook County High School in 1948.

Straight out of high school she married, and she and her first husband ran a cherry orchard in The Dalles, Oregon. The marriage ended in divorce, and in her memoir she wrote frankly about leaving her first husband and their two children. She later reconciled with her family. She trained as a dental nurse in San Francisco and moved to Los Angeles, where she managed a dental office for about 12 years. She married again, but her second husband died of cancer just short of his 42nd birthday, leaving her a widow at 34.

In October 1964, driving home from church in West Los Angeles, she decided on a whim to look at the new Marina del Rey that her patients kept talking about. She enrolled in a sailing class, bought a 21-foot fiberglass cruiser six weeks after her first lesson, raced and cruised local waters, and within months set her sights on Hawaii. Friends and the Coast Guard tried to talk her out of it. She then bought a 25-foot wooden Danish Folkboat and named it Sea Sharp, after practicing a crisp C sharp on the cello.

She left Marina del Rey in June 1965, aged 35 and weighing 117 pounds. A storm two weeks out cost her five days. Thirty-nine days after departure she reached Hawaii, injuring her hand when a flare gun malfunctioned as she signaled her arrival. A Honolulu paper quoted a boater calling the voyage a silly stunt, and another California paper called her irresponsible, but she had become the first woman to make the crossing alone.

The following years took her far beyond California. She joined an ill-fated world voyage, crewed on a 92-foot ketch in the South Pacific, and in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) hiked into the rain forest of Malekula to meet a Nambas community. She climbed an erupting volcano, sailed across Lake Titicaca high in the Andes, and in 1967 was the only civilian other than the captain's wife on the bridge of the Queen Mary as the liner rounded Cape Horn on its final voyage to Long Beach.

For her Pacific crossing she persuaded boatbuilder Clair Oberly of Mariner Yachts to lend her a Mariner 31 ketch, hull number 27, modified for single-handing and fitted with a Plexiglas observation bubble made by a salad bowl company so she could check her rigging without going on deck. The boat had pink decks and a hot pink stripe. She cast off from Japan in May 1969. Storms and the doldrums tested her, and at sea she sewed a pink dress and baking a stovetop cake for her 39th birthday, which she shared with the gooney birds. She then sailed on to San Diego, where she was welcomed as the first woman to single-hand across the Pacific. The Los Angeles Times named her its Woman of the Year for 1969. For about six months she was a celebrity, appearing on the Today Show, What's My Line, I've Got a Secret, the Art Linkletter Show and David Frost's program.

In all she logged about 30,000 miles of blue water sailing, including 8,600 miles and 114 days alone at sea, and visited 71 islands in the South Pacific. She lived for a year on the west coast of Australia, traveled New Zealand, and was mostly self-employed until retirement. She insisted she was never a feminist and never meant to be an example for anyone. She said she sailed because she dared and because she could, and that she did not see what there was about it that she could not do.

Almost four decades later she told her story, with journalist Karen J. Coates, in the memoir Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo across the World's Largest Ocean, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2008 in its Outdoor Lives series. The book brought her back into the sailing world. She reunited with her first boat Sea Sharp on Vashon Island, Washington, where owner John Jannetty had kept it for decades, and in 2020 friends surprised her with the helm of the wrecked Sea Sharp II, salvaged by a diver from an estuary in Oakland, California. She gave talks to sailing clubs and museums, including the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival and the Barbey Maritime Center in Astoria, and the Oregon Women's Sailing Association made her an honorary member and named its award, the Crystal Sail, after her, using a crystal sail sculpture she donated.

On September 28, 2024, the Bowman Museum in Prineville dedicated the Pacific Lady Memorial Gazebo in her honor, and she attended and spoke at the ceremony at age 94. Sea Sharp was donated to the People's Boat Project in Port Townsend, Washington, which planned to restore it while teaching boatbuilding and sailing to women and gender-marginalized sailors, and in 2025 director Zada Clarke released Pacific Lady, a short documentary weaving present-day interviews with the 16mm film Adams shot at sea.

Sharon Sites Adams lived in Portland, Oregon, still driving herself around the city in her mid-nineties. She died on October 16, 2026, at the age of 96. Arrangements were handled by Neptune Cremation Service, and no services had been announced at the time of her obituary. Her cause of death has not been made public.