Above: Melissa Carcone of Portsmouth takes the helm of the 65-foot Team SCA boat during a pro-am race in Newport Harbor last week. Skipper Sam Davies (at right) looks on.

PORTSMOUTH — On Thursday, Melissa Carcone briefly took the helm of a 65-foot monohull in Newport Harbor as she competed in a pro-am race with Team SCA, the all-female crew that’s competing in the Volvo Ocean Race.

The Portsmouth High School junior is hoping the race is a sign of things to come, as her ultimate goal is to sail around the world just as her heroes aboard the SCA boat are doing now.

“I know you need a lot of training,” said Melissa, a member of the high school sailing team who received a special invitation to get some hands-on experience with the SCA crew during its stopover in Newport. “You have to be one of the top sailors in the world to do that. I’m going to do everything I can and take every opportunity so I can be as good as I can. One day — I’m hoping.”

View photos here of the Volvo Ocean Race teams as they started Leg 7 and their voyage to Lisbon, Portugal on Sunday.

Speaking from the Team SCA pavilion at Fort Adams in Newport shortly before the race, Melissa said she first stumbled upon this golden opportunity last year, when Team SCA came to Newport for a practice leg. Only the female underclassmen members of the sailing team could go, and Melissa was the only one who fit that qualification.

Melissa took a tour of the boat while it was in port. “That’s when I started getting interested in the race because I didn’t know about it beforehand. When I started hearing about it, I thought it was really interesting because my dream is to be part of Olympic sailing, and I hadn’t heard about SCA.”

Fast forward to this year, when the Volvo race came to town. “I got really excited because I wanted to meet SCA again and wondered if they remembered me,” she said.

Little did Melissa know, however, that she’d actually be invited to take part in an actual pro-am race with Team SCA. Her sailing coach, Rick Fleig, is good friends with Brad Read of Sail Newport, who made the arrangements after contacting Amy Bellcourt, vice president of communications for SCA Americas.

“My coach sent me e-mails saying, ‘How would you like to go on a sail with SCA?’ I thought he was joking at first,” recalled Melissa.

Ms. Bellcourt said a pro-am race is just what it sounds like. “We have some of our SCA team members and then other people who are amateurs — your pros and your ‘ams,’” she said before the race.

“She’ll be grinding (using winches to control the hoisting and lowering of sails) and doing all the other things you have to do to make that 65-foot boat to go as fast as it possibly can,” said Ms. Bellcourt. “She’ll be doing hard work. She’ll have an experience to do pretty much everything. We won’t make her go all the way to the top of the mast, which is 100 feet high, but she’ll certainly take part in every aspect of sailing that she wants to take part in.”

Added Melissa, “They’re going to be giving me jobs to do, kind of giving me the experience of what it’s like to be sailing around the world.”

Welcome diversion

Besides being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that gave her valuable sailing experience, the race was also a welcome diversion for Melissa, whose family has been undergoing its own challenges recently as her mom, Debbie, has serious health issues.

“She had a bone marrow transplant about a year ago, and ever since then she’s been in and out of hospitals because of complications due to a low immune system,” said Melissa. “She gets sicknesses easily — she had pneumonia. It’s been really hard with that.”

Mr. Fleig noticed something was amiss when Melissa, a dedicated team member who never missed practice, suddenly wasn’t coming around anymore.

“I knew something was going on,” he said.

Melissa eventually reached out to her coach to let him know the situation. “I didn’t just want to ditch sailing practice,” she said. “He said, ‘Take your time; you don’t have to come to every practice.’ He said he’d help me out in any way possible. I visit my mom on the weekends and during the week I try to keep busy.”

Mr. Fleig remembers the conversation. “She said, ‘Coach I want you to know I’m so committed to the team, I’m so committed to sailing. You’ve been great, My dream is to someday sail around the world with team SCA.’ I was almost in tears,” he said.

Passion grew for sailing

Melissa said even though her father, John, owns a 37-foot Irwin sailboat, her passion for sailing didn’t really kick in until she joined the PHS team.

“I’ve always wanted to be on the water, but at first I was on motorboats,” she said. “We have a 13-foot Whaler and I got my license for driving motorboats when I was 13. But then my dad asked me to take a sail with him to Block Island. I always would take the ferry so I said, ‘No, it’s OK.’ I used to get seasick, but not anymore; I got my sea legs.”

Things changed when she learned about the sailing team, which is lesser known than the football or soccer squads.

“When I heard about it, I said that could be an experience to broaden my horizon, other than just a motorboat, which is much different from sailing. I started going to practice and having fun,” she said.

Mr. Fleig described Melissa as “sort of a neophyte to dinghy racing” when she first joined the team, but she ended up falling in love with the sport. “She’s a sweetheart of a kid who can’t get enough of sailing,” he said.

Her passion for sailing truly blossomed when Volvo came into town.

“The SCA really inspired me. Sailing is a male-dominated sport, but when I heard and read about SCA’s story, I was intrigued and thought, ‘This is a girls’ sport, too.’ Then I started really getting into it.”

Inspired by her dad, an engineer at Raytheon, Melissa hopes to study engineering in college after high school. But her ultimate goal is to keep getting better at sailing so that one day she’ll be on a yacht circumnavigating the glove.

“I was talking to my coach about it and I said that my dream is to be on the SCA when I get older, so I’m going to keep practicing sailing and try to get really good,” said Melissa who knows she has her work cut out for her. “I sail 420s, which are really small boats — and these are really big boats, obviously.”

No one’s rooting harder for Melissa than her coach.

“This could be an uplifting moment for her,” Mr Fleig said of the Volvo pro-am race. “She’s a sweetheart of a girl and she’s been going through so much. And this is a dream of hers.”