My 14-year-old daughter Doortje doesn't have to think long to remember what her scariest moment at sea was: "That time I had to look straight up to see the top of the waves behind us," she recalls.
My daughter is a lot like Laura Dekker. I can imagine my daughter having the same sailing experience as Laura: the lakes in
We had left IJmuiden harbour that particular morning in sunny weather for a trip along the North Sea coast. But the sunshine soon turned to lashing rain, and the wind speed went from a fresh breeze to near gale force. There are no harbours on the 60-kilometres coast line between IJmuiden and Den Helder and turning back was not an option. So we sailed on, main sail down, under jib only.
Excitement
With the dunes of North Holland somewhere to our right, and the sand banks on the port side, the Schulpengat is a notorious channel where a strong southwest wind whips up the sea to waves of up to three meters. Sailing downwind, we were surfing one moment, and caught up by waves trying to climb aboard the next. We had to steer with all we had to avoid a broach. I felt we were going to be alright in the end, but I remember that day just as vividly as my daughter does.
My family and I have taken up sailing fairly recently. We mainly sail along the North Sea coast, during the day and with moderate winds. Every year we put the bar just a bit higher. But the excitement of our trip to Den Helder was nothing compared to what more ambitious sailors experience routinely: both seasoned offshore competition sailors and the so-called 'leavers', the growing legion of people who exchange their semi-detached suburban house for a sailboat and a trip around the world.
The latter is perfectly doable, given extensive preparations, sufficient experience and a bit of luck with the weather. There are alternatives to the route around the dangerous Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, the Roaring Forties or the southern Atlantic, with its icebergs, its permanent storms and its 10-metre high walls of water.
Those seas, where the helmsmen on 19th-century clippers were forbidden to look over their shoulders, are the domain of a select group of extreme sportsmen. Robin Knox-Johnston, the Briton who was the first to sail single-handed and non-stop around the world in 1969, wrote in his journal that he was happy when the wind dropped to a force seven beaufort.
Besides the storms, Knox-Johnston had to deal with days without wind, hallucinations, technical breakdowns, loneliness and sadness. Sailors like
Not a risk-free passtime
What all these sailors - from fair weather sailors to the record setters - have in common is the awareness that sailing is not a risk-free passtime. If something break downs, or if you do something stupid - which can easily happen when you haven't had a good night's sleep or a decent meal in weeks, soaked to the bone, the sails are torn and the boat is making water, and you haven't spoken to a living soul for days - things can go very wrong indeed.
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Knox-Johnston was a grown man, an officer in the merchant navy and an experienced sailor when he started on what he called "the yachting equivalent of climbing
When I first read about Laura, I briefly thought it was a hoax. But Laura means business. She has gotten it into her head that she wants to make it into the
That's scary. As if a voyage around the world requires only willpower. It is absurd to think that Laura, with her limited sailing experience, is ready to sail around the world single-handedly. It's as if you had just learnt how to swim and decided to swim the Channel and back - with the support of your parents.
Laura likes to compare herself to other young sailors: Sebastian Clover, the British 15-year-old who crossed the Atlantic on his own in 2003, or Mike Perham, the 17-year-old Briton who on Thursday became the youngest person ever to sail around the world solo, and who was already the youngest person to cross the Atlantic.
Boneheaded stubbornness
What Laura forgets is that both these boys are substantially more experienced than she is. They had both sailed thousands of miles, both as crew and single-handed, before they embarked on their record-breaking endeavours. Sebastian and Mike also had wealthy sponsors backing them - not just an obstinate father.
I think 13-year-old girls should be in school. The Dutch child protection services are right in wanting to stop Laura from going on this trip by invoking the
Laura's case makes me both angry and sad. This is a girl who crossed the North Sea once, and whose father chose not to meet her on the other side, or even when she arrived back in the Netherlands. "I had a party by myself," she wrote about that trip in a Dutch sailing magazine.
Perhaps Laura thinks this is normal. But does she really want to spend the next two years alone on the water? Does she even know what it's like to make new friends, fight with them and make up again? Has she experienced the pleasure of learning, reading, making music? Has she been in love? And if she hasn't, isn't it about time?
What kind of parents would let their daughter be by herself at such a crucial stage in her life? There is a good chance that Laura will have her first period at sea. Who will she talk to about that? Over a satellite phone? On her blog?
13-year-old girls think they're invincible and they sometimes make reckless plans. Parents of 13-year-old girls should protect them against this recklessness, however hard this may be. Children are, however not delicate flowers, and life is always a calculated risk to some extent, but a sailing trip through the wilderness of the oceans at such a young age is a step too far.
Extreme sailing and a certain unworldliness have always gone hand in hand. Robin Knox-Johnston had a 5-year-old daughter when he set sail in 1968 on his record-breaking trip around the world. In his journal there is only a brief mention of her, after some fifty pages. He described how his daughter came to wave him goodbye. She didn't know if she was ever going to see him again and neither did he. The rest of the journal is an account of ten months of reflection about his emotions, his parents, God - there is not another word about his daughter. It is not clear why, but it doesn't seem right.
I can't get the image of Knox-Johnston's departure out of my head. Laura has something of the tough sailor embarking on a long voyage, but at the same time she also resembles the little girl being left behind on the quay without a father.
I ask my daughter how she feels about Laura. "She's tough, but a little deranged," she says. "I don't think they should let her go."
Sometimes, 13-year-old girls can make a lot of sense.
