Wahine spotlight on: Chatham Wind and Time
Marietta Hitzemann, surfing wahine
March 11 , 2010
Time and tide may wait for no one, but you can keep track of both with a little help from Janice DiGioia and Jerry Evans of Chatham Wind and Time. Janice has been a wahine since the CCW’s beginning and Chatham Wind and Time has been a sponsor since the beginning, too.
Here’s the abridged version of how their paths brought them to the Cape, brought them together, and brought Chatham Wind and Time to life.
Spirit quest leads Janice to Cape CodJanice was an athletic kid from the Buffalo-Rochester (New York) area who put in a lot of time on the ski slopes. As an adult, she got a degree in nursing and a job as a labor and delivery nurse at Dartmouth Hitchcock in New Hampshire while she continued to ski. Eventually, though, she had that what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life moment.
“I thought about the Peace Corps, but I was chicken to go out of the country. I felt like I needed to do something significant and I was wondering what to do with my life.” She heard about the Indian Health Service and when she submitted a general application, she got a response in two weeks: would she relocate to the Navajo Nation?
“So I went and spent a year there working at a hospital birthing unit that was run by five midwives. That experience made me realize that that’s what I wanted to do: be a midwife.” After a year delivering babies for the Navajo Nation, Janice went back to school, earned a Masters degree in Nurse Midwifery from the University of Kentucky, and became a Certified Nurse Midwife.
Her new degree landed her a job at Cape Cod Hospital and that’s when Janice first tried windsurfing. “One of my patients was a windsurfer and she gave me lessons.” Those early attempts to sail drew her into the local windsurfing scene, where she met the owners of Chatham Pottery (Margaret and Gill), but she was still primarily a skier back then. She worked at Cape Cod Hospital for eight years before she quit to start her own business. But during those eight years, she spent most of her winter weekends driving to Killlington (Vermont) to ski.
Windsurfing leads Jerry to Chatham
While Janice was driving to Killington every winter weekend, Jerry was driving from New Hampshire to the Cape every weekend, year round.
Jerry grew up in New Hampshire, where he spent most of his summers swimming and canoeing. He would visit his grandparents in Harwich every summer and that’s where he saw windsurfing for the first time. He says he used to watch his grandparents’ neighbors windsurf, but he was too shy to join them, even after repeated invitations.
He finally started sailing on Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire during the summer of 1985. “I picked up a 12 foot board that summer and I was out there every day even when there wasn’t any wind. By the fall I bought a 140 liter Mistral Tarifa. Then the next spring, in May, I bought a short board, a Windsurfer Rocket 96.” (Yes back then that was short.)
In June of 1986, Jerry had his windsurfing epiphany. He spent two weeks at his grandparents’ place in Harwich that month and he had the luck of the wind. “There was this couple of days when it all came together. I went from just standing on the long board to getting in the foot straps and water starting on the Mistral. And as soon as I got on the Mistral, as soon as I got in the foot straps and could water start, then it was right to the 9’6’. There was wind and I was here, and it all came together for me.”
Jerry’s degree in machine tool technology landed him a job running a machine shop in Nashua, New Hampshire. So for the first ten years of his career, he lived in Nashua and drove to the Cape every weekend to windsurf. “In 10 years I never spent one weekend in Nashua. Not even one.”
As a regular part of the Chatham windsurfing scene, he also knew the owners of Chatham Pottery, Margaret and Gill. When they decided to expand their business in 1995, they hired Jerry to set up a RAM Process die press. At last, Jerry achieved his goal and moved to the Cape year round.
Brought together through puppies and pottery
By then, Janice was back on the Cape, too, after several years as a traveling midwife (Florida, New York, Colorado). She got a job in Quincy, reconnected with her friends from Chatham Pottery, and bought a cottage in Chatham. When her friends’ dog had puppies, she got one. Jerry got a puppy from the same litter.
“Jerry brought his puppy over for a play date with my puppy one afternoon, and he stayed for dinner, and he never left. He’s been here ever since.”
Janice and Jerry got married on Maui in January of 1998.
Chatham Wind and Time is born
After several years, the set up for the pottery studio was completed and there wasn’t much left for Jerry to do. A windsurfing buddy, Bob Lacy, had a CNC router for his business, the Chatham Sign Shop, that still wasn’t set up years after he’d gotten it. So in a Gear Heads Unite move, Jerry said “Bob, let’s get that router going.”
“I’d go over there at night and helped him get it running. Eventually I thought, why don’t I get my own router and make carved clocks?” Why clocks? “Because everyone has at least one. Bob (Chatham Sign Shop) does signs exclusively and he does gold leaf, which I don’t do, so by starting with clocks we weren’t in competition.”
Jerry and Janice started Chatham Wind and Time during the winter of 2003-2004. It quickly became obvious that clocks alone couldn’t sustain a business, so they started offering personal weather systems, too.
By now (2010), the majority of Chatham Wind and Time’s business is in weather systems: Jerry both installs and repairs them. The next time you’re driving around, take a look at the rooflines. You’ll find you’re seeing personal weather systems all over the Cape.
“It’s not just windsurfers and kiters who want weather systems – it’s more of a nautical thing. People in general on the Cape have an interest in the weather. Even if you don’t have a sailboat, the weather is just so dramatic here.”
Jerry says many people upload the data from their systems to the Weather Underground web site. Here’s the page for Chatham:
Weather Underground Chatham, MA
Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the entry for Chatham Wind and Time. Just think: your new weather system could be uploading to this site too!
Back to windsurfingSo when did Janice transition from primarily a skier to primarily a windsurfer?
“I was around 37 when I finally started working on windsurfing for real. This was well after Jerry and I got together. But everyone we were hanging out with was windsurfing and so I got back into it. I got the crap kicked out of me over and over but I was determined to do it. I took a lesson on (Cape) Hatteras, which is a great place to learn. And Jerry found my gear – he found my first board, a used Comet.
“It took me three full years to actually get there – to get in the foot straps and get everything just right. But then I got it and started getting better and my gear got better as I got better…”
Janice currently sails a JP Freestyle Wave 84 but no matter what board Jerry is on, he’ll be using Ezzy Sails. He got hooked on them the first time he tried a friend’s – so much so that Janice got him an Ezzy Wave as a wedding present.
Then, not long after he started using Ezzys, he met Tim Ortlieb, the distributer, on Hatteras. “He gave me this team rider deal. I use the sails and blog about them now and get them at a discounted rate.” Jerry has been a Team Rider for Ezzy Sails for 12 years.
What about SUP?
Jerry kites when the conditions are right but Janice never really embraced the sport. However, a couple of years ago, they rented stand up paddle (SUP) boards during a vacation on Hatteras and both became instant converts. “It’s so much fun,” Janice says. “We got a used one and shared it at first. It was so much easier for me than surfing. You just get on the wave and go.”
For Jerry, stand up paddling felt familiar right away. “When I was a kid, canoeing on our lake, I was always looking for turtles. In order to look down in the water I had to stand up in the canoe so most of the time I was standing in the canoe paddling around. I didn’t realize that I was stand up paddling! The first time we tried paddling on Hatteras, we were on Pamlico Sound and, you know, I saw turtles!”
For their SUP boards, Jerry has an Amundson Aquaglide and Janice is on a Southpoint Timpone.
Chatham Wind and Time and the Cape Cod Wahines
Janice and Jerry met Desiree (Moyer) while windsurfing back in 1998. In a happy coincidence, Jerry and Janice started Chatham Wind and Time right around the same time that Desiree and Kay (Slater) and the rest of the crew were starting the Cape Cod Wahines. So Chatham Wind and Time became one of the original sponsors and Jerry even designed a Wahine Time and Tide clock just for us.
A tide clock really is a useful piece of equipment, Wahines, so if you think you might want one, check out the ones from Chatham Wind and Time. Or, whenever you decide it’s time to seriously stay on top of wind conditions, check out their weather stations, wind speed indicators, wind direction indicators, barometers, and weathervanes.
And happy sails to you!