There aren’t many 24-year-olds who will tell you their second home is at the helm of a replica of an 1810 merchant vessel on the Great Lakes. But Amanda Northrup will.
As a teenager, the Kalamazoo native spent her summers volunteering at the Michigan Maritime Museum, in South Haven, after her father, Ron Northrup, who works for the display manufacturer Do-It Corp. in South Haven, insisted she do something with her time during the summer.
“I’ve been with the museum in various roles since I was 12,” Amanda Northrup says. “I started off as a middle school student, just needing something to do in the summer. My dad’s company works pretty closely with the museum, so he talked with the director and the volunteer coordinator at the time and arranged for me to come volunteer here in the summers.
“The original plan was that I’d work in the gift shop, but no 12-year-old sees a really cool-looking ship and says, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna work in the gift shop.’ So, most of my summers were spent out on Friends Good Will, bugging the crew, trying to learn all of the stuff that I could.”
Now Northrup, who is also a physics and chemistry teacher at Battle Creek Central High School, is one of two captains for the vessel, which takes passengers sailing on Lake Michigan during the summer. “It’s where I grew up,” she says of the boat. “It’s like my second home.”
How did you become a captain?
When I turned 14, I started volunteering on the boat as a deckhand. When I turned 16, the captain at that time needed crew and offered me a position as a paid deckhand. When I was hired as paid crew, I didn’t know where it was going. But when I got to college, I knew I couldn’t live without it and set my career path towards something that I could do while also incorporating boats.
I decided to become a teacher — I mean I love teaching, don’t get me wrong (she laughs) — so I could continue working on the boat in the summers. Once I graduated from college, I turned my attention to studying for my captain’s exam and took a class for three months to really get prepared for the test. I took the test and passed and now have my Merchant Mariner’s license.
Toward the end of the summer last year, they needed a captain to help cover some weekends. I was asked, and now I’m the relief captain this year.
What is involved in being a captain?
There’s all the stuff everybody can see: driving the boat, making sure we get off the dock and get on the dock on time, keeping the time schedule. But there’s also the responsibility for 34 other people’s lives in your hands at any given time. There’s managing passenger and crew interactions, making sure that everyone is comfortable. There’s tracking weather phenomena, making sure we’re not going to go out in conditions that could cause issues for the boat or put people in an unsafe situation. There’s watching all of the other boats and making sure nobody runs out in front of you and gets hurt. You’re constantly monitoring everything around you. You have a 360 view on the situation.
As a deckhand, there’s more physical labor, like hauling lines, climbing the rigging and doing all of the work to make the boat go. Switching from the deckhand to captain role is a shift from the physical to the mental.
What do you like so much about sailing?
It’s the sense of freedom from the everyday grind. And it’s never the same twice. Even if the wind is the same, you have a different group of people or you have different crew. You have so many variables and factors that you can never have the same sail twice. I like that variability a lot.
It’s also challenging. As captain, there’s a lot that you have to think about. Some of the challenge comes from just being as young as I am — 24 is pretty young to be running an entire boat. And there’s always new things getting thrown at you, whether it’s a jet ski running in front of you or a drone hitting the rigging, which has happened a couple of times.
To me, a lot of the charm of sailing a boat comes from the hands-on aspect. You become part of the boat. You can feel when the boat is happy. When you get the sails right, there are times where she will literally sing. You can listen to the lines, and they are humming. That’s when you know you found where she’s happy and it’s going to be a wonderful, amazing sail.
– Interview by Encore Editor Marie Lee, edited for length and clarity
