Motivated by her love for sailing, Phoebe Rogers has carved out an adventurous career that’s only just getting started

Phoebe Rogers will never forget her introduction to sailing. She was 14 years old and competing with her stepdad in the Tahoe Yacht Club’s Wednesday night race series when the boat caught a strong gust of wind and tilted to its side, accelerating in silence as it knifed through the choppy surface.  

Phoebe Rogers and Dan Hauserman on Personal Puff in 2023, courtesy photo

A thrilling sensation washed over her, and right then and there, she was hooked for life.

“My first memories were the feeling of absolute exhilaration when the boat powered up for the first time and heeled over … just feeling the sheer power of its response to the wind,” recalls Rogers, now 28. “And also, looking at my stepdad (Dan Hauserman), thinking he was an absolute hero. It was like watching Top Gun and seeing the badass fighter pilots and thinking, “Oh my God, I want to be that competent someday.” 

That day has arrived, as Rogers has grown from a friendly and energetic teen on her stepfather’s boat to a focused and knowledgeable adult with sailing skills beyond her years. Given her dream of becoming an ocean skipper, it helps that she remains as cordial and upbeat as ever, with an infectiously positive personality that lifts the spirits of those around her. 

“Phoebe is an amazing person. … She has the best attitude of anyone I’ve worked with,” says Tim Haber, a captain with Tahoe Sailing Charters, which hired Rogers to join the crew of the Tahoe Cruz in 2023. “She has been working for us three seasons. She came with the most experience of anyone we have ever had.”

Sailor in the Making

After graduating from Truckee High School in 2015, Rogers left home for Mills College in Oakland, where she spent two years before transferring to UC Santa Barbara. She earned a degree in psychology in 2020—a “bad year for college grads,” she says—and returned to the familiarity of the mountains.

Phoebe Rogers and Alex Blue on a whale-watching tour while cruising in Baja in March 2023, courtesy photo

All along, she spent her summer breaks sailing with her stepdad in the Wednesday night races on Lake Tahoe. She then caught a glimpse of what a sailing career could look like when she met Alex Blue, who owns Cruisers Academy with her partner Brady Trautman. 

“We were looking to connect female sailors, and she came out and sailed and we quickly connected and became friends forever,” says Blue. “She is a joy to have around, always up for everything.” 

“I latched onto Blue as my first real female sailing mentor,” says Rogers, explaining how the Cruisers Academy crew took her under their wings after learning how serious she was about sailing. 

Although Cruisers Academy is based at Lake Tahoe, the sailing school also provides an offshore program in Baja California and offered Rogers an apprenticeship opportunity to join the staff as a mate in March 2023. 

“It was my first international trip and when I first got the taste of sailing as a means to travel and as a job,” says Rogers. “It really helped me see that if I could get advanced credentials, I could live on boats and see the world.”

While in Baja she received a text from Tyler Salvo of Tahoe Sailing Charters, who said he had a job for her on the Tahoe Cruz that summer.

“It was a really good introduction on how to work on a boat,” Rogers says of the Tahoe Cruz, a 50-foot monohull that offers daily public tours out of Tahoe City. “Lead captain Tim Haber and co-owner Tyler Salvo really encouraged me and created a space to grow into a captain. As much as I wanted to learn, they were willing to teach me.”

Rogers was driven to learn it all. She had fallen in love with the life of a sailor, and her next step was to figure out how to get the necessary experience and training to become a captain.  

Phoebe Rogers on the Sea Dragon in the Caribbean in March 2024, courtesy photo

Aboard the Sea Dragon

In late 2023, Rogers applied to join the crew of the Sea Dragon, a 72-foot-long sailing vessel owned by Pangea Exploration. It carries nine passengers and a crew of three, including a captain, first mate and Rogers’ position, the deckhand, working as an apprentice to learn the ropes and get those important offshore miles on her résumé.

She was on board Sea Dragon from November 2023 to April 2024, first sailing with passengers from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas before spending two months in the bowels of the boat doing all the necessary nitty-gritty maintenance and repairs. Next they sailed across the Pacific to the Galapagos, through the Panama Canal, then across the Caribbean to Grand Cayman. Finally, they journeyed across the Gulf Stream to Key West.

All told, they sailed over 5,500 miles, sometimes encountering 5-meter-high waves and 35-knot winds.

It was a challenging but fulfilling experience for Rogers, who came away with another female mentor in Mary Vaughan Jones, captain of the Sea Dragon.  

“That was my first example of a female captain,” says Rogers. “She was so graceful and such a great leader. I saw what was possible and that the door was going to be open for me someday. She knew how to balance the serious technical aspects of sailing with levity. She made intimidating moments less stressful.”  

The grand adventure reconfirmed Rogers’ desire to become a captain, but it also presented a dilemma: She needed official certification to make the leap to captaining sailboats on the ocean. 

Yachtmaster

The most prestigious sailing certification is a Yachtmaster license from the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) in England. The trick was figuring out how to pay for it, as Rogers needed to come up with $17,000 for a four-month class in Southern England. 

Her first step was to return to Tahoe and obtain her U.S. captain’s license. This required her to have sailed over 360 days and complete a written course and exam. It also allowed her to begin captaining the Tahoe Cruz in the summer of 2024. 

Phoebe Rogers and crew during their Yachtmaster exam in England, courtesy photo

But to sail the world, she needed the much bigger commitment that was earning her RYA license.  

Rogers spent the summer of 2024 sailing and looking for scholarships for the RYA program. Finally, her research led to the Women Offshore Foundation, a nonprofit that helps women join the maritime industry. 

After talking to Rogers, Christine MacMillan, the foundation’s director of career support, decided she had the character and determination to warrant support. 

“She has a real capacity and is intuitive about the feeling of the boat, and is calm under pressure,” says MacMillan. “We decided to do full support for the Yachtmaster course. Every dollar we spent with her is well worth it.”

Rogers discovered the Yachtmaster  course to be cold, wet and gray. It was also intense. 

They sailed almost every day, often in high winds, while living in tight quarters. She was joined by sailors from all over the world with different backgrounds and skill levels. 

“We did this crazy passage across the English Channel, then turned around without coming to port. We were sailing through a tidal current with a chokehold between two land masses, incredibly bouncy with 20 knots of wind,” says Rogers. “It was super rough and challenging conditions.”   

They were seasick, hungry and sleep-deprived. It was baptism by fire, all of which led to a final exam that included 48 hours of testing on practical skills—including rescue, navigation onto an “X” on a chart, troubleshooting, weather prediction, tidal calculations, and how to lead and take care of your crew.

Each candidate was examined for eight to 12 hours total in a quickly moving tide. 

“When it was my turn, we woke up to thick fog and I had to use radar and a GPS chart plotter with our position alone through this busy shipping channel,” says Rogers. “It felt like a great opportunity to show myself what I’d learned. I was grateful that I had taken the time to work that hard.”

Rogers passed with flying colors to earn her Yachtmaster Offshore license—sailing’s version of a master’s degree, she says (Yachtmaster Ocean is the highest certification). She realized, “I can do this!” 

Pursuing Her Passion

Rogers is heading out for four months on the Sea Dragon this fall. She is back on the ship that helped her fall in love with sailing across the ocean, but this time as a first mate. 

From here, Rogers says her goal is to get as much professional commercial experience as possible while also pursuing her original goal of using sailing to travel the world and grow as a person.

Phoebe Rogers captaining the Tahoe Cruz this past summer, photo by Stuart Hatlen

“I’m not in a rush to become an ocean skipper because the responsibility multiplies when you go to that level,” she says. “So for the next couple years I’m excited to become a really well-seasoned and experienced, competent mate on a range of different boats and programs—and then, when I’m ready, make the step to being an ocean skipper.”

As Rogers transitions from student to more of a leadership role, she’s also found that she enjoys passing on her knowledge to others. She’s currently helping the Ebb and Flow Organization launch their Tahoe women’s program. The nonprofit organization was founded in 2025 by Blue and Trautman from Cruisers Academy to provide sailing experiences to those who might not otherwise have the opportunity. They cater specifically to cancer survivors, first responders, women and underserved youth.

“It has been incredibly gratifying and is really important to me, so I look forward to continuing to fundraise for that and help get more women out on the water,” says Rogers. 

Meanwhile, Rogers will continue to hone her sailing talents, propelled by the same Tahoe winds that first set her course. 

Tahoe-based writer Tim Hauserman recently spent one fine summer evening on the Tahoe Cruz with Phoebe Rogers, who impressed him with her confidence and comforting demeanor as captain. She seemed like a woman who was ready to fulfill her dreams and take on the seas.