Boat Kids—Floating Brats or Expert Navigators of Life?
Recently, I stumbled across a YouTube video entitled “My Liveaboard Life as a 16-year-old.” This intrigued me. I thought to myself, another Laura Dekker.
Laura (not the YouTuber) made her first offshore solo passage at ten years of age. At 13, she decided to circumnavigate—and sailed alone, unannounced and without parental knowledge, from Holland to England.
The police were called. Her father had to fly in, rescue her from the land pirates with badges, and sail with her home.
The Dutch courts confiscated/impounded her boat—and she was ordered not to go offshore alone.
She flew to Sint Maarten to buy a different boat to circumnavigate aboard. But she was picked up by the local police and forcibly returned to Holland.
All this legal wrangling made her and her parents famous—in all the right or wrong ways, depending on viewpoint. At one point, she was put under ‘guardianship’ in Holland, whatever that means.
Regardless, Laura was determined. She set off (2010) at age fourteen to sail around the world single-handed on her beloved Guppy. It took her a year and a half—518 days, to be precise—to become the youngest person to sail single-handed around the world. And she wrote a book about it: One Girl, One Dream.
At first, it was the immensity of the challenge that called to her. But in the middle of her circumnavigation, while in the middle of the ocean, she realized that she truly loved being at sea. It spoke to her, it whispered sweet nothings into her ear. She had little interest in commercially exploiting her circ at the time. Soon afterwards, she went to sea again. She sailed away from the cameras and bright lights of civilization to spend more time in her happy place.
I met Laura in New Zealand, where she was living aboard at the Town Marina in Whangarei. I found her to be a very self-possessed, confident, knowledgeable, and admirable young lady who was holding the tiller of her life firmly in her own hand, despite being a teenager.
Anyway, I clicked on the YouTube video that had started my musing on Laura and watched a couple of minutes of a wealthy, typically-bored American teenager living aboard a posh catamaran with her family. Nice!
The truth is, there’s no ‘right way’ to become a sailor. Money and ease don’t disqualify you any more than being broke and suffering adversity does. Different strokes, different folks. And different generations.
And, mostly, it’s all good.
Okay, I’ll admit it—I’m interested in kids and boats. I was raised aboard (like Laura) and raised a family aboard (as Laura is currently doing as well), and, in some ways, we’ve both always earned salt-stained dollars.
Frankly, I’m not amazed at Laura’s story so much as surprised that more young people—boys and girls—aren’t following in her watery footsteps—or Robin Lee Graham’s of Dove—or mine, for that matter. (Note: all three were highly experienced sailors and had the full support of their parents.)
The thought that cruising might be considered an ‘old white rich folk’ thing hurts me.
I purchased my own boat for $200 at 15, with money I earned working after school. I rebuilt its engine and started living aboard at 16. I rerigged it and took off cruising at 17. I left safe harbor with my sweetheart (the same one I still have at 72) at 18 (because she was so freak’n middle class that she wanted to graduate from high school) and we have never looked back.
When I purchased my 22-foot wooden double-ender (Port Oxford cedar over oak, built in 1932) I was a penniless child. When I sailed away at 18, I was a semi-responsible, still penniless adult—well, as responsible as I am now (not very, truth be told). And, while I’m not quite so penniless at this point, I consider myself immensely rich in sea yarns, freedom, and love.
While I was working to earn the money to rebuild my first vessel and then actually doing the labor thereof, I believed that I was primarily learning about boats. And I did learn a little about boats, I guess. But what I really learned about was life—about responsibility, choice, and consequence.
What is an adult?
An adult is a human being who accepts responsibility for their own actions and decisions. An adult is a person who doesn’t blame others or society for their own shortcomings. By that measure, having the joys and sorrows of owning my own ocean-going home as a teenager was the perfect (if occasionally brutal) education, at least for me.
It also taught me the Power of the Dream. Before my boat, I had no dream. I just wasted away my aimless days getting wasted. Once I had my boat, everything changed.
I got a job—and I have supported myself continuously ever since. Let’s face it: there’s no such thing as freedom if you accept handouts from others, no matter how well-intentioned. If you take money from any organization or individual, there’s always a cost; you are always somebody’s boy or girl. I wanted total independence from my parents, Chicago, America, and The Man. You can’t have that while clinging to someone’s purse strings, no matter how benevolent.
Freedom, like all forms of power, must be taken.
It must be earned the old-fashioned way—by hard, sustained work.
Life is sink or swim.
A person must learn to be hard on themselves and soft on those around them.
Once I owned a boat, a guy named George followed me to it after school—and said, “Far out! Like a floating clubhouse, right? Want some help sanding?”
I did. George Zamiar and I have sailed many miles together since, and are still dear friends. I’m currently attempting to talk him into joining us while we complete our fourth circumnavigation.
My wife and I raised each other as we explored the world, both within and without. She helped support me while I learned how to make money leak out of my pen—and I’ve fully supported her ever since.
We still love living aboard—54 continuous years in my wife’s case, 64 years in mine. We raised our daughter Roma Orion aboard. We now sail with our grandkids almost every weekend. Life is more than merely good—it is as perfect as I can imagine any 72-year-old life to be.
In many ways, my wife and I are as happy in each other’s sensuous arms now as we were as teenagers.
Everyone’s different, of course. Laura Dekker is now a mother as well as a wife, sailor, and entrepreneur. She owns a 72-foot Bob Perry design ketch and founded Laura Dekker World Sailing Foundation.
Basically, she charters to teenagers and teaches them the life-lessons she learned from the sea. Yes, her husband and two young sons serve as deck swabbies as well.
Is she getting rich? I have no idea. And, frankly, I find money a poor yardstick to measure success. She loves what she’s doing. She marches to her own drummer. She loves the man she shares her life with. They have two delightful children. And they earn the food on their plates without anyone holding their hands—what could be richer and more meaningful than all that?
Of course, it is easy to look at people like Laura Dekker or Robin Graham of Dove as malcontents who can’t fit in ashore—or to disparage them as high school drop-outs.
Both have fulfilling, wonderful lives. Why shouldn’t Robin take all the lessons he learned from the sea at sixteen years of age and apply them to his rural life in a log cabin in Kalispell, Montana?
Which is more profitable—to get a B minus in geography or sail the world and visit Madagascar and Borneo firsthand?
What do Laura, Robin, Tania Aebi, Brian Aldwell, David Dicks, Jesse Martin, Zac Sunderland, Michael Perham, and Jessica Watson have in common? Are they all lay-abouts? Complainers? Moochers? Drug addicts? Violent criminals? No. They tend to be, at least from my limited perspective and research, active and effective people who accomplish their goals both afloat and ashore.
Laura Dekker has an ambitious business plan. Two of her trips this year (in Scotland and Norway) are already sold out: one for 8-11 year olds, the other for teenagers up to 16 years of age. Ditto, numerous Caribbean-based adventures as well. Next year, she will offer teen-agers the opportunity to live aboard and sail the major oceans of the world for three-month periods at a time. Wow, that’s ambitious.
…count me out, but my hat is off to her. And her husband. And her two kids.
Plus, Deutsche Bank and Iridium are two of her long-term sponsors—along with twenty other companies.
I mean, what other company trying to directly attract kids today promises that there will be no Wi-Fi or internet the entire time?
Will she ultimately be successful? I dunno because I think that she, like I, has different ideas of success than most. She’s organized her company as a Trust so that it is, under law, prohibited from making a profit (although she appears to be a long way from that.)
One thing that I am sure of is that running a 72-foot, 53-ton vessel that sleeps 16 and has all the safety gear required to go offshore internationally—well, that’s not cheap. No wonder she hustles tee-shirts on her website for 29 euros—get ‘em while they last.
Tim, her six-year-old son, has sailed about 12,000 nautical miles. Alex, born in 2022, has sailed the same amount, but 10,000 of them were in his mother’s belly.
Laura relaxes by playing guitar and scratching at a fiddle.
I, personally, have learned much from the sea. Boats and Mother Ocean have made me who and what I am. As a husband, it has allowed my wife and I to travel the world in the most intimate, delightful way possible—for mere pennies.
At six years old, I collected pens and knives because I knew I wanted to be a sailing inkslinger, to share my passion for Mother Ocean with the world.
I’ve done that in my newspaper articles, marine columns, and books.
As a father, I made a promise to my wife and my daughter as she crowned—that I would never measure our daughter either by her writing or sailing. That I would not attempt to make her a mini-me, but rather I’d give her tools to accomplish her own dreams, not mine.
Yes, I wanted her to learn the lessons of the sea—but only to apply as she desired.
I’m happy to say that she has done that—using her MBA (Brandeis) with Singapore Management University to finance her true calling—being an emergency foster mother to children in immediate need. (She currently has six children at her house, of all races, colors, and religions.)
And the president of Singapore just awarded her a special national honor for doing exactly that.
The bottom line—as a boat kid, I tend to like other boat kids and their kids as well. And I wish all of them the best of luck—and a steady breeze—in all their endeavors.
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