By Frank Otto
Photo by Peggy Peterson
Almost three decades ago, Ann Huffenberger was at the start of her career as a full-time registered nurse.
Then she quit.
After following the familiar pipeline of high school to college to career, Huffenberger felt the desire to travel. She wanted to see different places, different people and different cultures. That’s when the sea called.
“I had gotten the invitation to volunteer as a medical officer aboard a tall ship that was sailing out of Philadelphia,” said Huffenberger, now the director of the Penn Center for Connected Care. “So I resigned my position as an RN. After my first summer aboard, I didn’t really look back.”
Her ship was the Gazela, a 177-foot, fully rigged Class A tall ship—the largest class. Built in Portugal in 1901, Gazela had been a fishing vessel that ran along the Grand Banks off of Canada catching cod, halibut, flounder and other fish typical to that area of the Atlantic. From the early 1900s until the late 1960s, the Gazela annually returned to Portugal overflowing with bacalao, salted, dried cod, which was a staple food of the times.
Huffenberger, then known by her maiden name, Ann Cleaver, came aboard in 1989, after the ship had been converted into a sail training vessel. She spent the next 10 years splitting time, going to sea for months at a time before returning to the hospital as a part-time nurse in between voyages.
“Every chance I could, I took trips. But I had to balance it between hospital demands and my bank account,” she reflected, laughing.
Huffenberger also poured her love of sailing into earning a captain’s license in the U.S. Merchant Marine through the Coast Guard. After that, she became the first female captain in the Gazela’s long history. As a captain, Huffenberger gained experience and insight into leading a team that would later benefit her as the leader of Penn Connected Care, where she oversees projects like the Penn E-lert® eICU telemedicine intensive care team and OnDemand, a service that arranges urgent-care digital video visits with primary care providers for Penn Medicine employees. Huffenberger has emphasized the need for these teams to be agile and versatile, ready to face any challenge that might come up out of the blue—attributes she prized in her crews on the water.
“The people on board, they’re all you have, that’s your universe,” Huffenberger said. “You don’t have the safety net of calling 911. You need to prepare to manage emergencies, so that’s what we did: We built the core competencies of the people on board. Any time you’re leading a team of people, it’s key to develop their skills and pull out their greatest potential.”
Strong teamwork was vital because Huffenberger was sailing a fully rigged ship, a traditional century-old style that is difficult to maneuver in today’s congested waterways. They navigated using the sun, the moon and the stars, with their radar system only being of use when they were close to land. Wind power was the chief method of conveyance, forcing the crew to tend to “hundreds of lines,” according to Huffenberger.
On top of all of that, they had to properly manage food and freshwater supplies, monitor the weather, and successfully maneuver through foreign ports and their customs processes.
Under Huffenberger, Gazela made trips all along the Eastern Seaboard, including its old ports of call in New England, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island.
“It was a privilege and an honor to sail these coastal communities who embrace Gazela for her long-standing maritime history,” Huffenberger said. “To meet and tell stories with the descendants of the fisherman from the Portuguese cod fishing fleet of the Grand Banks that Gazela was the last representative of was simply astounding.”
Huffenberger’s most eventful year at sea was 1993. They sailed Gazela out of the Fort McHenry Shipyard in Baltimore (located near the historic fort of “Star-Spangled Banner” fame), visited the ship’s traditional ports in New England and Canada, then sailed into the Gulf of Mexico in the fall to take part in filming scenes of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise’s “Interview with the Vampire.”
“They needed us to safely navigate the river, and climb the rig to manage sail, so they hired my shipmates and I as extras,” Huffenberger said of the film that is set in the late 1700s and early 1800s. “We got a taste of Hollywood with makeup, wardrobe and other special effects.”
The year’s voyage rounded out with layover in Key West to paint and rig the ship for its return to Philadelphia.
“We ended the year proud of the ship’s log entries, having had a sailing season that the ship’s original Portuguese fishermen might never have imagined,” Huffenberger said.
In 1999, Huffenberger left the Gazela after a decade with the ship. She met her husband and began working at a VA hospital in New York state as a full-time nurse again. Then, with her captain’s experience, Huffenberger realized she wanted to continue pursuing leadership roles. And like her time on the ship, she continues to build teams founded on responsibility to each other. Seeing how important it was to have crew members who could fill in multiple jobs and step up for each other, Huffenberger continues that tradition in her teams that do everything from monitor Penn’s ICU beds to handle patients calling in with eye injuries or the flu.
Reflecting back, although she may have left a nursing job to begin sailing, Huffenberger credits her nurse sensibilities for her success on the water.
“I used to say it all the time and I still believe it: my decision-making skills as a captain weren’t unique. They were nurse skills,” she said. “It’s all about prioritization, and we do that all the time as nurses.”
To learn more about Huffenberger's journey, read her Women of Penn interview at the Penn Medicine News blog.