Sailing With Tahoe’s Blue
In When an ocean surge pushed through the cave, Alex Blue gripped her underwater camera with one hand and the cave’s wall with the other, cutting her fingers in the process. As blood bloomed around her, she thought of the Galapagos sharks she encountered on earlier dives.
“We made horrible decisions,” Blue told Moonshine Ink. “This is not smart to do, but a lot of living on the boat is like that; you are pushing the limits already.”
Blue, who lives in Tahoe Donner, was scuba diving off Ascension Island, located in the middle of the southern Atlantic between South America and Africa.
“When we were there, there had been some shark attacks with Galapagos sharks, which isn’t really common,” she said. She made it safely back to the boat, avoiding a shark encounter.
With a passionate but laid-back disposition, Blue doesn’t do anything halfway. When she moved to Kings Beach from San Francisco in 2015, she got back into horses, a hobby she enjoyed during her youth in Petaluma.
“I just got really obsessed with mustangs and decided that I wanted a challenge,” she said. “So, I wanted to get a baby mustang and train it myself, which is just a perfect analogy for how I do things in life. I just have to go to the full extreme, and it’s super ridiculous.”
Blue owns and operates Cruisers Academy, a sailing school in Tahoe City’s Boatworks Mall, with her partner, Brady Trautman. She is a photographer, content creator, world traveler, and sailing instructor — a career path that wasn’t planned; it was laid out for her through a series of fateful events that unfolded while traveling.
In her early 20s, Blue was living in San Francisco, running her photo and video business, putting her degree in media communications from Sonoma State to good use. She juggled wedding photography with travel, making trips to Costa Rica and Nicaragua, where she traded promotional videos for lodging.
She also made frequent winter trips to Tahoe with her mother to ski and snowboard and fell in love with the area, aspiring to live there someday.
Her hopes turned into reality in 2015 when she settled in Kings Beach and worked at Northstar California as a photographer. But Blue wasn’t finished traveling. When friends she had met in Nicaragua asked her to document their bicycle trip from Canada to Patagonia, she agreed. By the time she arrived, however, they had already crossed the Darien Gap, a dangerous, cartel-controlled landmass connecting Central and South America.
“It’s basically impassable,” Blue said. “In order to go between Central and South America, what backpackers do is either get on a plane and fly or get on a boat and go from Panama to Columbia.”
When the captain of one of these boats offered Blue a job filming backpackers on 5-day trips between Panama and Colombia to create a TV show pilot, Blue again agreed to the adventure. She spent that summer living on the boat, sleeping outside, filming, and gaining sailing experience.
She loved being on the water and, in 2016, responded to a YouTube channel’s call for crew members on the sailing vessel Delos via email. She learned later that they thought she was male, which she found funny.
“The older brother on the boat, Brian, read my email and was like, oh, this guy, Alex, sounds cool,” she said. So, she flew to South Africa to join the crew. “They had been sailing around the world for about 7 years at that point. It was two brothers, and they started one of the first sailing YouTube channels.”
Blue sailed with Brian and Brady Trautman across the Atlantic Ocean for over 3 months, learning extensively about sailing. They traveled up the coast of Brazil and through the Caribbean. Blue and Brady hit it off, forming a relationship that recently marked its seventh anniversary.
When it was time to return to Tahoe to photograph the weddings she had booked, Brady convinced her to stay. “So, I got other people to shoot my weddings and then ended up staying on that boat for 3 years.” She counted about 50 days of open ocean sailing within 6 months.
In 2019, Blue returned to Tahoe with Brady and sailed on the big lake, a first for both. They hatched plans to start an international sailing school but were thwarted by Covid-19. Instead, they began teaching people in Tahoe, responding to inquiries from locals who learned about them from the YouTube channel.
“Now we have three boats on Tahoe, and as of this year, we just got accepted into the Tahoe City Marina,” she said.
Today, Cruisers Academy offers sailing fundamentals and offshore courses, sailing charters, and all-women courses in the Sea of Cortez. They also partner with nonprofits to provide therapy sailing for cancer survivors, people in recovery, survivors of PTSD, and more.
“We take cancer survivors sailing every summer through the Send It Foundation. We’ve worked with the High Fives Foundation. We’re trying to get something going with the SOS Outreach program,” she said.
Blue says that sailing is a conduit for learning about life.
“When you’re out there, of course, there’s the technical aspects where you’re trimming the sails or steering or tacking, but it’s really challenging emotionally,” she said. “It pushes you because you are out of your comfort zone; you’re at the whim of weather, in a small space with other people who maybe you don’t get along with. It teaches you so much about life, and so there’s definitely a therapeutic aspect to it.”
As Blue looks to the future, she reflects on the high cost of sailing and is keenly aware that sailing isn’t accessible to all. In an effort to grow the sailing community in Tahoe and create more opportunities, she is working on starting a nonprofit organization.
“It’s so expensive to get out on the water in a boat, for sure. And so we want to try and change that,” she said.
