By Letitia Baldwin, Globe Correspondent

The sea is still and the sky battleship gray. One summer morning, that's the scene from an old boathouse hugging the shore in a coastal Maine town.

Inside the boathouse - a shingled cottage - more than a dozen women of all ages are clustered around a table facing a massive, granite fireplace.

A model of a green-hulled Friendship sloop graces the mantel. Wooden oars and masts hang in the weathered rafters. A wood smell fills the air.

Clasping mugs of coffee, clad in shorts and jeans, the women are watching a toy-size sailboat glide across the table. As they hear how to land a craft, some are taking notes while others are tying nautical knots.

It's a little less forgiving when the mooring will move away. A dock won't, notes Jane Ahlfeld, one of two female instructors teaching Elements of Seamanship for Women Only. She maneuvers the boat up to a small cutting board serving as the dock.

In one intense week, these women ranging in age from 16 to 60 will learn the basics of seamanship at Maine's WoodenBoat School. By Day 7, they'll possess enough knowledge to take out a sailing dinghy alone. The all-women's seamanship class is one of a growing number offered in the United States.

For any sailor, the sea presents many perils. There are strong winds and tides to contend with and rocks and ledges to watch out for. There are the threats of capsizing, running aground, falling overboard, and other dangers.

But some women face their own particular hurdles. Some have sailed before but only under their father or spouse's command. Others have a deep fear of the water.

The one thing I hear the most is building confidence, sums up Ahlfeld, a deeply tanned woman with sun-bleached, blond hair, who looks as if she has been sailing all her life.

In fact, Ahlfeld only started sailing a decade ago. Then a first-grade teacher in Amherst, Mass., she had gone on two windjammer cruises in Maine and found she loved being on the water.

''I just felt really good. I liked sitting out on the bowsprit,'' the long spar sticking out on the schooner's bow, remembers the sailing instructor who signed up for a weeklong, women's seamanship class aboard a 42-foot ketch in the Caribbean. The course was taught by WoodenBoat School.

Like her students, Ahlfeld learned how the wind powers a sailboat. She learned how to tack, jibe, sail on a reach, and other maneuvers.

''I can remember someone telling me you're luffing and not having a clue of what that meant,'' she recalls, chuckling.

Drifts of fireweed, Queen Anne's lace, and other wildflowers line the cracked country road leading to WoodenBoat School in Brooklin. A three-hour drive from Portland, Brooklin is well off the beaten track. The tiny town, with its saltwater farms and fields flowing down to the sea, still has much of the charm that led writer E. B. White, author of the children's classic ''Charlotte's Web,'' and his wife, Katherine, to make it their permanent home in 1938.

Like many Maine towns, Brooklin has a seafaring, boat-building tradition going back more than a century to when the sea was the quickest mode of travel along the Eastern Seaboard. Schooners and brigs from Maine harbors fished the Grand Banks and ferried lumber, granite, and other cargo to Boston, Baltimore, and beyond.

A century later, Brooklin's maritime legacy continues. The hamlet, with only 600 year-round residents, boasts eight working boatyards and a small, vibrant lobster fleet. The proliferation of so many boat shops is due in part to the presence of WoodenBoat magazine and WoodenBoat School.

A quarter of a century ago, WoodenBoat magazine was founded when Fiberglas had all but replaced wood, and the fine craft of building wooden boats was dying out. The remains of once-majestic schooners rotted along the shore. Dusty boat models lay forgotten in lofts.

Jon Wilson, then a college dropout and fledgling boat builder who had migrated to Maine from Rhode island, launched WoodenBoat from a rustic cabin with no power or phone. He envisioned a magazine that would help rekindle interest in wooden boats and advance the craft and technology of building them.

The bimonthly magazine proved a success and evolved into a glossy newsstand staple with more than 100,000 readers worldwide. WoodenBoat School, a natural outgrowth of the magazine, was born in 1981.

Through the ages, women have had a rocky relationship with boats. Mariners refer to vessels in the feminine as she. Figureheads of women adorned schooners and square riggers. Vessels often are named after women, and they were, and often are still, considered bad luck to have on board.

Yet, from time immemorial, women have gone to sea. Some sea captains took their wives on long voyages, but women were confined to cleaning, washing, ironing, and sewing. Even in the '60s, a woman's place on board usually meant dispensing Dramamine and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Over the last 50 years, however, women sailors have come a long way. The last America's Cup race featured an all-women crew. Last year, a French woman, Isbelle Autissier, became an international celebrity during her bid in the Single-Handed, Round-the-World Race.

When WoodenBoat School opened, female students were a rarity. Now, the ratio is 80 percent men to 20 percent women in the seamanship, boat-building, and wood-working classes. More and more women are getting into shop-related courses. ''I think it's a reflection of the world,'' Rich Hilsinger, WoodenBoat School's director, says.

''More and more women want to go sailing and do everything that the guys do.''

Ellisha White, great-granddaughter of E. B. White, comes from Brooklin. Her late grandfather Joel White, who died of cancer in recent years, was a marine architect and boat builder. With an expert sailor in the family, she never really needed to know how to sail.

''He would be the one to get us back to the mooring,'' says White, who enrolled in the all-women's class to build up her confidence and skills. ''I think, being a woman, you tend to put yourself more in a passive role.''

At 16, she's the youngest member in the class. She aims to be able to take out the 24-foot maroon day sailer her granddad named after her. ''Maybe, by next summer, I'll be going out by myself,'' she says.

White and the other women taking the course spend the first day getting to know each other, their instructors and surroundings. Under a blue, cloudless sky, they row out to a small, uninhabited island. They secure their skiffs, hike through a field of lush-green ferns, and picnic along the shore.

WoodenBoat is an ideal setting for learning how to sail. The school has Eggemoggin Reach, a passage protected from the open ocean, as its sailing grounds. Summer winds usually blow from the southwest so boats can comfortably sail in either direction. The reach is never clogged with sailboats, power boats, jet skis, and other craft the way Cape Cod Canal is.

The reach, though, does present challenges. There are islands, ledges, and sandbars to navigate around; strong tides to be mindful of; and the fog can roll in at a moment's notice. Even in summer, the water temperature is frigid, and hypothermia is a real danger.

''I think Maine's image of a rocky, fog-bound coast has been to our advantage,'' says Hilsinger. ''Cape Cod has very beautiful sailing grounds, but it's very crowded.''

Sara Shed knows Maine waters. She has sailed up Eggemoggin Reach and other parts, but her husband has always been at the helm of their Bristol sloop. Sailing is his passion while she enjoys land-based sports like hiking, biking, and mountain climbing.

''My husband has always been the sailor. It's his boat,'' she says.

Now, the 50-year-old mother of three wants her turn at the tiller. She chose the all-women course, hoping it would be less pressured. ''It really solidified the knowledge I had acquired and made me realize I knew more than I thought I did,'' she says. ''It's been a confidence booster.''

Sara and the other women divide their days between the classroom and water. Ashore, they learn the theory of sailing and words and terms like bow and coming about. They're taught how to tell a bell buoy on a chart and what to do if a sailboat capsizes or someone falls out. Like knitting or rosary beads, they always have a piece of rope in hand for practicing the bowline, clove hitch, and other nautical knots.

On the water, the women put theory to practice in WoodenBoat's fleet of sailing dinghies. Clad in yellow life preservers, they are grouped with an instructor in one of the small, seaworthy nutshells and shellbacks. Each woman has a turn at the tiller, mainsail, and jib. They learn to sail before, with, and against the wind. They learn how to come about and jibe.

By day six, it's time to solo. A slight breeze is blowing as they file out of the boathouse and down a flight of stone steps speckled with orange lichen. Trundling rudders and other gear, they make their way down to the shore bound by fragrant banks of bayberry and pink rosa rugosa. A lobster boat rumbles in the distance.

On the dock, where a 12-foot sailing dinghy is tied up, no one pipes up when Ahlfeld calls for volunteers. The women seem leery of venturing out alone. Some stare at the seemingly still waters and spruce-clad islands clustered in the reach.

Finally, Nancy Kahan steps forward. The divorced mother of one is ready for this moment. She gave herself the seamanship course as a present for her 54th birthday. Before coming to Brooklin, she had only watched sailboats from the porch of her home overlooking Woonoscopic Lake in Lakeville, Conn.

For the past five days, she has camped out in a tent alone on the WoodenBoat School grounds. A trim woman with short, streaked hair, Kahan clambers into a sailboat smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. She hauls up the tea-colored mainsail, grips the tiller, and shoves off. She noses the craft out past a Concordia yawl and other expensive yachts moored in the harbor.

''Don't go too far down wind or you'll never get home!'' Ahlfeld yells from the dock.

Half an hour later, after tacking around the cove dotted with brightly colored lobster buoys, Kahan heads back. The craft sails up to the dock just like the toy boat that drew up to the cutting board back in the classroom.

Tying up to the float with a bowline, Kahan furls the mainsail and secures the rest of the boat before stepping onto the dock. She looks energized after her first sail and says she plans to buy a sunfish so she can enjoy being on the water back home.

It was the most exciting feeling, she muses. ''I have always been fascinated with watching the sails go and feeling you could become at one with the wind.''

Letitia Baldwin is a freelance writer from Maine.

Published 09/05/99 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section.