Phyllis was born in San Francisco in 1948 and attended high school and nursing school in Sacramento. Though she always wanted a career as an artist, her parents gave her only three choices: teacher, secretary or nurse.
After nursing school, Phyllis returned to San Francisco and landed her first job at St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission District, where she met her husband, Jeffrey Rapp, an intern who went on to become St. Luke’s director of ER for 13 years.
After moving to Sausalito in 1977, Phyllis and Jeffrey (still working at St. Luke’s) discovered boats. Their first big sojourn on an old wooden boat was to the Sea of Cortes, off Mexico, for five months – enough to give them the cruising bug for a long time to come.
Phyllis attended the San Francisco Academy of Art, getting a BFA in commercial art/illustration. In 1986 they sold their house and bought an Amel yacht in Maine. From Maine, they sailed down the East Coast to Cape Cod, the Hudson River, North Carolina, then took the Intracoastal Waterway down to Florida.
From Florida they cruised the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and across the notorious Anegada Passage (they don’t call it the “Oh-My-God-a” for nothing – it’s not uncommon for waves to slam against the hull from three different directions). Their journey continued through the entire Caribbean and on to Venezuela, navigating with charts and celestial navigation.
“We stayed in Venezuela six months,” Phyllis says, “seeing the Andes, Angel Falls and traveling. In the Dutch Antilles I thought I was sick from the jungle, but I was “roja” on a Spanish pregnancy test. ‘Not another mile!’ I said. We found a buyer who flew to Bonaire and bought the boat on location. We flew home to San Francisco.
“We named our son Lyle, thinking L’isle for island. We lived in a high rise near the Ferry Building while Jeff took a reentry residency at Children’s Hospital Oakland. He took a job in the ER in Ukiah, where we lived for three years. I was pretty miserable there until I hired a part time babysitter and began doing fine art. But the art group there reminded me of old ladies painting sunflowers and I said: we gotta get out of here.”
Phyllis and Jeff began driving down Highway 101, looking and finding nothing. Desperately they pulled off in Healdsburg, arriving at the Plaza where they saw the cutest houses and families and kids riding their bikes. “This is it,” they thought, even though half the stores were empty and Healdsburg Bar and Grill was a biker bar.
They quickly moved here, buying a home on Fairway Court, where they lived until Lyle graduated from Cardinal Newman.
“When Lyle turned 18, we put him into San Francisco State, sold our house and our belongings and bought a new boat,” Phyllis tells me. “This time we thought we might be gone forever.
“In our new 53-foot Amel we sailed a route similar to before, landing in Venezuela, which was completely different now with Hugo Chavez in control. We took trips to Peru and Argentina and then sailed to the lovely village of Cartagena, Columbia. We sailed the ‘world’s largest rollercoaster’ with 20-foot seas and winds of 40-45 knots. I celebrated my 60th birthday during our three months in Columbia.
“We went on to Panama and the San Blas Islands for another three months. We seriously considered the South Pacific and the 28-day journey to Tahiti. But right at the Panama Canal we turned around and continued home, doing Central America on the way.”
It was now 2009 and hurricane season in Guatemala. They docked on the Rio Dulce River in the jungle. The boat was pulled over on its side and dragged over a sandbar into the river for five months. Phyllis painted on the boat and wrote in her blog.
They returned through Belize, Mexico and Florida, then home to Healdsburg. When they sold this boat, they bought their present home on Sherman Street.
Phyllis shows me two published books of her blog, photos and paintings done while on the boat. She taught art students in town and co-founded the Upstairs Art Gallery about 16 years ago. She has resumed teaching watercolor and collage assemblage classes in her lovely studio.
Phyllis also teaches watercolor and/or mixed media in El Cardonal in Baja and at both Mendocino Center for the Arts and Healdsburg Center for the Arts. Her dream is to rent a couple of canal boats in France for a destination plein air workshop. Meanwhile, Phyllis and Jeff aren’t letting any grass grow under their feet.
“We love land cruising now,” she says, as Jeff busily packs their RV for a month-long trip to Sedona.
Shonnie Brown is a local author and memoirist who is interested in fostering connections between people and their community. Shonnie writes personal and family histories through her business, Sonoma LifeStories, and is also a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She can be reached by email at sh*****@so***.net or on the web at
www.sonomalifestories.com.
