President

Captain Cheryl Duvall

USCG 100-ton Master Inland with Sailing Endorsement

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Captain Cheryl Duvall is a USCG Licensed Master, Inland 100 gross tons with auxiliary sail, and holds an RYA Inland Waterways Helmsman’s Certificate for barges up to 65 feet in Europe. She resides in Annapolis MD, where she enjoys working as a tour boat captain for Watermark’s Miss Anne, a Crosby Tug.

Cheryl is a native and lifelong resident of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Her background in sailing began innocently when she was 8 years old and her dad bought an 11’ Snark to sail on small lakes near their Baltimore County home. As an adult, Cheryl learned to sail keelboats and cruising boats by attending several sailing schools in the Chesapeake Bay region and becoming a skipper at Baltimore’s Downtown Sailing Center (DSC). She made several lifelong friends at the DSC, including her future husband, Captain Dudley Whitney.

After several years of exploring the Chesapeake Bay on their first boat, a Hunter 420 Passage, Cheryl and her husband bought a Gozzard 44, S/V Belle Bateau. Since 2014, they have logged more than 5,000 nautical miles on Belle Bateau, from Maine to Florida as well as throughout the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.

Cheryl also enjoys blue water adventures with friends or on bareboat charters in the Bahamas and the Caribbean. In 2019, she sailed from Bermuda to Newport, RI with Captain Tania Aebi http://www.taniaaebi.com/about/. Cheryl also enjoys chartering canal boats in France, and has explored rivers and canals in the Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Burgundy regions.

Many of her Cheryl’s water adventures are chronicled in SpinSheet magazine, for which she is a monthly contributor, often covering idyllic gunkholes and charming towns along the Chesapeake Bay. Cheryl is a frequent speaker at the Annapolis Boat Shows as well as local yacht clubs.

Cheryl joined CAPCA in 2021, just prior to retirement from 40+ years of leading workplace strategy and change management for the corporate interior design industry. After her retirement in 2022, she began writing for The Log as its Meet the Captain Editor. She joined the CAPCA board as Program Director from 2024-2025 and is looking forward to serving as President in 2026.