FAMILY Matters
The moment recreational vessels were allowed to sail post-lockdown in Singaporean waters, we loaded our daughter, her husband, and our two grandkids aboard our 43-foot ketch Ganesh and went for a well-deserved four-day cruise.
“Dunk’n chair, dunk’n chair,” 6-year-old Tessa and 9-year-old Sokù chanted as I picked them up from the beach at Changi and brought them out in the dinghy.
We used the same timeless technique to keep our grandkids interested in sailing as we do ourselves: We make a conscious effort to keep it fun. For instance, from an early age, we’ve dunked ’em. We just strap them into our bosun’s chair that we hang on the spinnaker pole, hoist ’em up, and let the halyard fly—splash!
This has provided our family with endless hours of fun. And to the kids, it is pure carefree joy. Grandpa is a totally crazy guy, always willing to go with the flow, always in the moment. What they don’t realize, of course, is that I’m also a captain, and I’m constantly balancing their safety with their fun because I’m an adult as well. And they are neither, because they don’t need to be. It is my job to provide a carefree space to be an unabashed child, which is something only a responsible adult can do.
Kids and boats fascinate me. I have a 100-year-old picture of my father as a child holding a sailing model of a lofty sloop. I have hundreds of pictures of myself growing up aboard our family’s schooner, Elizabeth, plus thousands of pics of raising our daughter, Roma Orion, aboard the ketch Carlotta and the
Sparkman & Stephens sloop Wild Card. And now we have an entire hard drive of iphone and Gopro videos of cruising with Sokù Orion and Tessa Maria.
Why is sailing such a good mix for adult and child alike? Because there’s work involved. Not make-work, but real work; work that needs to be done as a family to stop the sail from luffing, the sandbar from being struck, the underwater rock from being met.
“Mind the rudder or meet the rock,” is our family motto, and even 6-year-olds can instinctively grasp such a concept. “Boats don’t like boo-boos either,” I explained to Tessa.
Yesterday we tacked through a thousand anchored freighters in the lee of Singapore (literally, not figuratively), with me calling the tacks, their 39-year-old mother, Roma Orion, grinding the sheet winch, and Sokù Orion tailing, while her younger sister, Tessa Maria, ate spicy noodles, something she is extremely good at, regardless of angle of heel. What’s so cool about it? Everything! First off, these freighters weren’t theoretical. They weren’t on Youtube; they were the real deal: belching smoke, maneuvering to anchor, clankclank-clanking their chain rodes to steam majestically out into the South China Sea. They utterly fascinate, these 440,000-ton, 1,200-foot-long steel toys. Their sheer scale stagger young and old alike. Does tacking within feet of a super-container-ship carrying some 12,000 40-foot containers inspire? It certainly does. Especially when I explained to Tessa that all the differentcolored containers contained different-colored M&M’S candy. (Sokù howled with delight to her younger sister that I was fibbing, which, of course, I was. But I was also teaching about the economy of scale as well as container ships.)
“Pipes,” Tessa yelled. Even she knows pipes on deck indicate a tanker.
“Cranes, buckets and sliding hatches,” countered Sokù, who now can spot a bulk carrier a mile away.
Grandma Carolyn—my wife, lover, and first mate for 50 years and four circumnavigations—came up on deck, wiping her hands with a dishrag. She asked the cockpit at large, “What’s that slab-sided boat with the ramp aft?” “Car carrier,” we shouted out in unison. “Why the baby boats alongside?” Tessa asked.
“Grandpa just said they’re bunkering: bringing out all the fuels, food and junk they need to head back out to sea,”