Buying a hair dryer seems like such a simple task.

But for Kaci Cronkhite in August 2001, just the thought was debilitating to the point of psychic fracture. If you'd known her then – or now, for that matter – you might not believe it. After all, she'd just sailed some 51,000 nautical miles, outsmarted about 30 pirates while single-handing a 46-foot sloop on the Thailand-Malaysia border, and survived a 22-foot beam wave off the southeast coast of Africa.

And yet there she stood with dripping blonde curls, just off Seattle's coast, overwhelmed by the prospect of purchasing this handheld machine to keep her head warm.

Kaci Cronkhite, a distant relative of newsman Walter, was born a fifth-generation cattle rancher."I tried looking on the Internet, but there were so many choices," she recalls in a tone so soft it's as if each word lands on a feather pillow. "There weren't any Targets or stores like that when I'd left to go sailing, so I didn't know what they were. And all those years of sailing, I'd never used a hair dryer. I finally called a friend who told me, 'Go to this store. Go to the customer service counter. Ask them what aisle has the hair dryers. Buy the cheapest one, and immediately walk out. Call me when you're done.'"

"It made me angry," Cronkhite recalls. "I just wanted a hair dryer. Why was it so complicated and busy? Who needs all this?"

As it turns out, she does – or at least she needs some part of her adopted hometown of Port Townsend, Wash. Having survived not just her circumnavigation but also her re-entry into civilization, Cronkhite is now managing director of the Northwest Maritime Center and director of the Wooden Boat Festival that draws some 25,000 visitors, tripling the town's population each year. The festival's proceeds fund local programs that teach kids and adults about boating. Simply putting the festival on means Cronkhite must manage more than 400 paid workers and volunteers at a time.

How this place became her final waypoint and what she learned in getting here is a study in just how powerful an effect sailing can have on the human existence.

FARM GIRL TO SAILOR

Cronkhite (a distant relative of newsman Walter) was born a fifth-generation cattle and wheat rancher in a Western Oklahoma town of 1,500 souls. Normally, a firstborn son would inherit the farm, but she was the oldest of four children when her father died of a heart attack at 42. Cronkhite was just 15. She had to help her mother, who was 34, take over day-to-day operations. "I had been the kid who my dad taught how to do everything," she recalls. "We lived 10 miles from the nearest store. When something broke, we fixed it."

From the base of those windswept horizons, Cronkhite looked toward her future. She could marry a farm boy or an oil worker, become a secretary in Oklahoma City, or get out altogether – which sounded best to her. She enrolled at the only college her religious mother would allow: Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. There, she became the only Oklahoman in an international dorm of 90 young women, and her ability to get along led to her first job, as a recruiter for her alma mater.

"That job put me in 32 major U.S. cities, plus provinces of Canada, inside of 10 months," she recalls. "It was my exposure to the idea of other kinds of life."

Cronkhite with old friends in Kaua'i.She followed her wandering spirit into several other jobs, including one at a consulting firm guiding research for banks about community relations in Anchorage, Alaska. By then she had earned a master's degree in social sciences, and she was working regularly with teams that included Ph.D.s. One, a cultural anthropologist, invited Cronkhite for a cruise on her 32-foot sailboat in Port Townsend. Cronkhite was 31 and had never been on a boat, and Port Townsend was warmer than Anchorage. So she went. It was 1992.

The Ph.D.'s husband, not too long into the afternoon's sail, looked at Cronkhite and said, "Take the tiller and head for that point."

"So I take the tiller, and the boat starts shaking, and they start yelling, 'Fall off! Fall off!'" she recalls. "Now, I grew up on horses. Falling off was the last thing I wanted to do"¦"

Other things, though, came naturally. A clevis pin came loose, so she fixed it, just as she'd hooked up tractors in years past. The do-it-yourself part of sailing was a lot like farming. "And the wind," Cronkhite says. "The thing that was common was the wind. All the pictures of me as a kid, my hair is blowing in the wind."

She took to the woman's husband as a mentor. As it turns out, he was Dr. David Henry Lewis, author of We, The Navigators, about Pacific Islanders' traditional navigation methods. He had single-handed the first transatlantic race in a 25-footer. He also was credited with completing the world's first circumnavigation by multihull.

The Lewises encouraged Cronkhite to get her own Ph.D., a study of women sailors, and about a year into her research they called to offer practical experience: helping them sail to Hawaii from Australia. The passage – against the current and wind – would be Cronkhite's second time off dry land.

AROUND THE WORLD

The trip took six months, including one stretch near New Zealand's Bay of Islands when the 32-footer was hove-to for 10 days of a 19-day passage. While Cronkhite was learning by doing, one of the women she'd been talking with about her dissertation, Nancy Erley, was looking for help teaching women to sail the Pacific Ocean onboard the 46-footer Tethys, named for the goddess of nurturing.

By June 1995, Cronkhite's had become first mate onboard Tethys. The plan was to make a loop including Hawaii, Tahiti and the Marquesas, teaching women to sail on various legs. She and Erley had just completed the first loop, including stops in Nicaragua, Galapagos and French Polynesia, when the epiphany came.

"We were sitting in Moorea, looking at heading back up toward Hawaii, and Nancy said, 'You know, I hate to go upwind.' So I said, 'Well, you could go around the world again.'"

And so they did, expanding their learn-to-sail-the-Pacific business into a learn-to-sail-the-world operation. They started in Moorea in 1995 and ended in 2001 in the same harbor where Cronkhite had first gone sailing with her Ph.D. friends.

"Right there, actually" she says, pointing out her window at the Wooden Boat Foundation. She has trouble containing the urge to smile.

The all-woman circumnavigation, while mostly exhilarating, was not without its trials. Off the coast of Ecuador, for instance, two men in a small boat came alongside Tethys, hollering in Spanish. They eventually left, frustrated by the language barrier, and Cronkhite went below to nap. She later heard their engine again, and when she looked out, the same boat was full of men. She went below, put on a stocking cap to hide her blonde curls, and hid in fear.

A few minutes later, she recognized that they were speaking Spanish – and simply trying to get a position fix. "They were just mariners asking help from other mariners," she recalls, still with an air of relief.

A similar instance befell Cronkhite while she was single-handing a leg on the Thailand-Malaysia border. She saw two fishing boats up ahead, and she watched as they threw their nets between each other – directly in her path – just as she prepared to pass between them. "I knew they were messing with me, but I didn't realize at the time that they were actual pirates," she recalls. She put on her stocking cap, fell off at the last minute and went around them as the men yelled in her wake.

The all-women crew onboard Tethys also made an impression in friendlier locales. "Pretty much everywhere we pulled in, some harbormaster would say, 'Are you girls sailing alone?' And we'd answer, 'Well, no. There are four of us.'

"Then women from other boats would come and hang out with us," she continues. "Some would vent about their husbands. Some would ask us how we learned about the engines. It was really fascinating because the funny thing was, while the same women were in town doing the shopping, their husbands would come over and ask us the same questions about their engines."

Perhaps just as interesting was Cronkhite's realization that the coolest people circumnavigating are in the Indian Ocean. "The people who made it there, it meant that divorce, money or booze hadn't stopped them at Australia. It's so international there, big world views, people who had figured out their relationships and how to really live on a boat. They'd gotten far enough without our material culture that they didn't need every little thing."

BACK ON DRY LAND

Such was Cronkhite's own frame of mind when Tethys landed at Port Townsend in 2001 and she rejoined civilization, hair dryers and all. She was about 30 pounds heavier than when she'd left – most of it muscle – and was the proud holder of a U.S. Coast Guard Master 100-ton license.

"I was living day to day for about six months, just working on Tethys' repairs and easing back in," she recalls. She heard about the Wooden Boat Foundation and its effort to build a maritime center. She wanted to contribute by buying a bronze plate for the dock, one that read, simply, Tethys.

"So I went to ask about that, and it turned out the Wooden Boat Foundation had some openings," she recalls. The man in charge explained that the festival director had eight lieutenants, one of whom coordinated the festival's speakers. Cronkhite walked around the harbor with him as she inquired about that role, and when their stroll was done, he offered her the director's job itself.

WOMEN OF THE WIND

Since then, the Wooden Boat Foundation, which puts on the festival, has merged with the Northwest Maritime Center, which uses the festival's proceeds to fund local boating programs and promote the community's international reputation as a wooden boat center. Cronkhite, now 46, says her roles with both let her leave a personal legacy in a town that is 65 percent dependent on the marine trades.

She never did finish her doctorate, but she's working on a book titled Women of the Wind – a sorority of which she is now a member, not just a student. When she talks about the women she's met or learned about during her cruising, she speaks of them as sisters who have shared experiences over time.

Her place, she has learned, is in the shadow of Mount Rainier, which looms outside her office window, just past the harbor. It's a lovely view, almost as mesmerizing of the one she recalls seeing the first time she took that tiller and headed for what she now knows was Marrowstone Island, on the corner of Port Townsend Bay.

It's the same view she now sees every day from her home and her 28-foot Danish spidsgatter Pax. And she still doesn't know of any place more inspiring, or more beautiful.