Interview: The OSPREY Sailing Family Answers 12 Questions from WOMEN & CRUISING

1. What was the biggest challenge you faced in getting out there?

The kids cleaning out the lazarette prepping the boat for work (this was the time that every weekend was dedicated to working on the boat)

The biggest challenge was just going.

My husband used to say that he didn't care if we only went as far as Norfolk, Virginia; he just wanted to get off the dock. He was only half kidding. We had seen so many people talk for years about going, even getting the boat and kitting it out, but always finding a reason to stay.

Remember this:
There will always be a reason not to go.

It's the nature of our culture to not do something like this. Everything is geared to making you conform, and this is pretty non-conformist.

I don't think people realize what a huge emotional, personal commitment this has to be, especially if you are entrenched in a suburban life as we were. You have to become completely single-minded about it. For us, nearly every weekend in the year leading up to leaving was consumed with either working on the boat or preparing in some other way. We didn't do a lot of things our friends did; we said “no” very often, which didn't endear us to some people. But the clock was ticking, and we weren't going to let anyone, or anything, stop us.

Sometimes this hurts people who love you and whom you love and never wanted to hurt. And this, too, is part of the answer to this question.

As a mom, I think another challenge was convincing myself over and over that what I was asking my kids to do was the right thing.

This came up all the time (and still does, when things are difficult for whatever reason).

For instance, it's one thing to look through your house and decide what you can get rid of and what you simply have to keep—an heirloom from your mom's house, say.

It's another to ask an 8-year-old child to do the same thing.

My kids and I spent a full week in their bedrooms and playroom going through every single item. We had three groups: things to store, things to bring, things to give away. It helped them to give things away to friends, rather than just send them to Goodwill or a yard sale. But there were still many tears from our daughter, who is very attached to her “stuff.” Even before we did this, she had a hard time letting things go. This was a huge challenge for her, and for me.

How could it be right to ask her to shove her whole, big life into a space the size of your average walk-in closet, and then share that space with her brother? It was like I was breaking her heart every day based on promises about the future that even I wasn't sure were going to turn out to be true.

So this kind of living in uncertainty was hard.

Finally, saying goodbye became awful.

A frosty, misty morning on the Dismal Swamp Canal, just south of Norfolk. We're finally out of the goodbye zone!

I thought if I said goodbye to one more thing, one more place, one more person, I was going to go crazy. Even sailing out of the Chesapeake Bay, we stopped in a few favorite anchorages on the way, and that was still in what I came to call “the goodbye zone.”

We needed to get out of “the goodbye zone” and into new places, new experiences, new people.

I developed a new mantra that actually has continued to work even now:
"We will work it out".

No matter how much monkey s**t the situation was throwing at us, no matter how discouraged we sometimes became, I would just say that out loud. We will work it out. And we did. So after a while, you start to believe it.

2. How old were your kids when you left? Is there a best age to take children cruising?

Our daughter was 8 and our son was 11. She had just finished second grade and he had finished fifth.

Part of what drove our timing was our son's education. The public middle schools in Annapolis did not have our confidence, and we had never intended for him to attend there. We had always planned to go sailing and home school when he was entering middle school, which is what we did.

Going cruising is like having a baby, in my opinion; if you wait for the perfect time/age, you'll never do it. You just have to go. Our timing was linked around our son's school age, but we would have gone sooner or later, if we'd had to.

Older kids can participate more
in the daily running and operating of the boat.

People say it's easier to go when they're younger, and I can see that. They get more attached to friends and school the older they are. They also have more stuff when they're older, and schooling becomes a major aspect of your life on board, which can sometimes limit your freedom.

But one of the benefits to having older kids is that they can participate more in the daily running and operating of the boat.

They become key crew members, and that responsibility is one of the huge benefits of this kind of life for them. How many 12-year-olds are told, “OK, you've got the watch,” meaning you are basically responsible for the safety of you, your family, and your little floating world? This kind of faith we put in them gives them confidence, power, and strength.

Also, I think older children can truly appreciate the places we go and things we see.

Kaeo and Kailani atop Temple IV at Tikal, Guatemala

For instance, I don't think if my son was, say, 5 years old, he would begin to really understand a place like Tikal in Guatemala the way he can as a 13-year-old.

For a 5-year-old, it's a bunch of really cool big stone piles and when can we stop for a snack?
For a 13-year-old, climbing a 2,000-year-old Mayan temple is a mysterious, awesome, perhaps even spiritual experience.

And, as they link what they are reading about in schoolbooks to the places we go, these places come alive for them in a way that a younger child I doubt can fully comprehend.

3. Did you make modifications to the boat for your children? Any suggestions?

OSPREY anchored in our favorite cove on the Wye River, Chesapeake Bay,
for the last time before leaving

We rebuilt most of our boat's major systems after taking a six-week shakedown trip a year and a half before we planned to leave for good. These had mostly to do with things like energy generation (solar panels and wind generators—we wanted more than the boat came with), and electronics stuff, like a new SSB.

But the basic layout of the boat was great for us from the get-go and one of the main selling points. It's a center-cockpit boat, so Johnny and I have our own cabin aft, and the kids share a cabin forward. For parents who want any kind of privacy at all—if even only to talk about stuff you don't want young ears to hear, let alone the other obvious reasons—having a cabin of your own with a door that closes is critical. (There can be such a thing as too much togetherness, you know!)

Our kids love to read, as do we. We bought an early version of the Kindle, thinking we would all love reading on it and it would solve the issue of too little bookshelf space. None of us much like it though. Turns out we are old-fashioned that way and love the feel of a good book in the hands.

But, space is a problem, always.

We came up with a cool idea for book storage after our shakedown cruise.

The hull sides in the kids' cabin were very pretty with the wood interior, but that was a lot of unused space. I had a canvas maker make heavy-duty mesh book bags that Johnny then hung on the hull sides, attaching them to the wood with multiple snaps top and bottom. These oversized bags can accommodate the big picture books my daughter loves, as well as the big books from Calvert School.

Because they're mesh, the books don't get moldy and damp as they would in a canvas bag.

Nearly everybody who comes on the boat and sees those bags comment on them as a great idea. They'd be easy to make yourself, too, if you have a heavy-duty sewing machine and are half decent at sewing, which I'm sad to say I'm not.

A good friend of ours who'd been cruising before us, who did not have kids, gave us a sound parameter for making a decision about whether a boat's layout would work. He said, “Imagine that you are stuck in an anchorage for several days with nothing but pouring rain. Does each member of the family/crew have a place that he or she can go to be alone and do what he or she wants?”

I thought that was great advice. And our boat fit that bill. I can go in the aft cabin. Our son can hang in his bunk forward. Our daughter can do artwork in the main cabin. And Johnny can work in the nav station or up in the fully enclosed cockpit.


Each member of the family has a place that he or she can go to be alone and do what he or she wants. Left: Kaeo in his bunk with his gecko hanging out on his head. Right: Kailani working on some drawing in the main cabin.

4. Anything you wish you had known before you got started? Any advice for families?

Is there anything we wish we had known?

No. I think we had reasonable expectations that it was going to be both wonderful and challenging.

Everyone said the first year would be the hardest, and they were absolutely right. You have to be patient with that first year, maybe even longer. You're learning so much, on so many levels, so fast. This is exhilarating and exhausting all at the same time, but not in balance. So when it's more the latter than the former, it can be hard to take. I don't think we truly got our feet under us until a year-and-a-half into it. And I have no illusions that they may slide out from under us again at any time, for who knows what reasons. You learn to be nimble, and that's a great thing.

The kids with their best cruising friends from CALYPSO

One thing I will say about this, though, is that we have not found as many other families out here as we'd hoped and thought we would. I don't know if that's a factor of the economy taking the dive it did right when we left (October 2008), or just weird timing in other ways. Mostly it's older retired couples. We've become great friends with some of them, too, but kids need kids, even kids who get along as well as ours do.

It is true that we were already a close family, and sailing together makes us even closer. Most of the time we are extremely content to just be us. But sometimes I need another mom to talk to, or dad needs another dad, or the kids need other kids—other cruisers who understand the particular challenges of this life.

Also, don't expect that just because there is another kid boat in the anchorage that you'll instantly all get along like peas and carrots. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes the kids like each other but the parents don't; sometimes it's the other way around. This can be disappointing, but it's the reality.

Our advice for families

Understand: Living on a boat and sailing full time is still just living.

It comes with all the same issues, daily and long-term, that so-called ordinary life does, and sometimes it piles on quite a few more. Just because you're out here doesn't mean you're in some kind of rarified air where everyone loves each other and everyone is good, and everything is beautiful and simple, and the usual rules of life and how it happens don't apply. Not so. There are good people and not so good people. And life throws curve balls at all of us out here, just as it does if we were living in a suburban split-level.

Wendy

If you can, start home school before you leave.

For both students and teachers, this was by far the hardest thing we faced in the first year, harder even than learning how to analyse weather and handle the boat in certain situations. As parents, it's the most important responsibility we have, and that can be a pretty daunting weight to carry for those of us who are not educators by profession. When you first set out you are dealing with so much other stuff that is also brand new and seems equally pressing; with the schooling added, we had so many learning curves going straight up we were starting to pull serious emotional and psychological Gs.

An unexpected failed engine wiped out our cruising kitty by the end of month 10.

We heard more than one story about cruisers who never made it through the first year out simply because home school buried them. Home school is one thing that can be tackled ahead of time, making that particular transition easier when it's time to go.

To the best of your ability, stop buying stuff that won't fit on the boat long before you move aboard and leave. Start thinking in cruising terms: Do I really need this, and will it work on the boat? Start paring your life and all of its accoutrements early. It doesn't matter if your favorite store is having the best sale ever. If it won't be useful on the boat, don't buy it.
Nobody wants to think that money is a limiting factor, but it is. To the best of your ability, have twice as much stashed in your cruising kitty than you think you will need. Our first year, even though we thought we had sussed everything out on the boat well beforehand, things happened. An unexpected tax bill and an unexpected failed engine wiped out our cruising kitty by the end of month 10. We applied the mantra: We will work this out, and we did. But it was still a lesson learned. Save as much as you can. You will probably need it.
If you're lucky, like me, you will marry a man who knows boats inside and out and can fix anything, and solve anything. If not, do your best to know your boat as well as you can. It's no fun to feel out of control, because that leads to fear. Knowledge really is power in this context.

Kaeo (13)

Be patient, because there are times you will have to go
without some things, in my case, Goldfish crackers.
(Kaeo hoarding a surprise bag of Goldfish)

You have to learn to keep your temper, to be patient, calm, and basically get a lot of emotional control.

In scary places you have to keep calm, because if you panic people can get hurt.

You have to keep your temper if you're frustrated and you have to be patient, because there are times you will have to go without some things, in my case, Goldfish crackers.

My advice would be when you're still on land, to try and go without as many books or games as long as you can, and then you can figure out which ones you really want to take.

Kailani (10)

Brace yourself: It isn't easy getting used to another environment, and especially a moving one.

You have to find out what you really want to keep, what you have to take with you, and make sure there's enough space to have it, and that you're going to have it close to you.

5. A typical day aboard?

A typical day at anchor

A typical day at anchor starts with the weather. Because we are in the Caribbean right now we tune into Chris Parker's 0630 SSB broadcast to get his take on the weather, and sometimes to check in with friends who are also listening in beforehand (we do this wearing headphones so as not to wake up the kids).

Then coffee for Johnny and me, when we will hang out on deck and take in the morning, talk about what we have to do that day. If we're about to make a passage we talk about how the weather may change our plans in some way.

The biggest part of our day is school, because our kids are now in fifth and seventh grades which require a lot of work in many subjects. We try to have everyone up and moving by 0830 for breakfast, then school starts by 0900. We will do school until anywhere between 1 and 3 p.m., depending on the day, everyone's mood, and what else might be going on.

Flexibility is the key. For example, if we have to make a big grocery run, we might set out the kids' subjects to complete in school and then Johnny and I will go to the store instead of hands-on teach that day.

But generally, school dominates this early portion of the day. This is also the time when I'll bake bread or start a soup for dinner or throw together cookies or dessert. Since the classroom is right next to the galley, it's easy enough to teach and cook at the same time.

They never met a hike they did not like.
(Long Island, eastern shore, Bahamas)

After school and lunch we might go swimming, hiking, snorkeling, or exploring in some other way. Depends on where we are. We all want to get some exercise at that point, so whatever is available to do, we try and do it.

If I have a writing assignment I have to get done, or Johnny has some boat work that has to be accomplished, one of us might stay back and do whatever it is we have to do, and the other three take off.

But generally, afternoons are for getting out and doing stuff, whether with each other or friends.

By late afternoon (5:30 or so) we try and stop whatever work we are doing and grab showers and relax.

Kailani usually likes to take this time to paint or read, Kaeo likes to get his computer time playing his favorite game, Spore. Johnny and I will have a cocktail and talk about whatever's on our minds.

If there's some social gathering going on, we may or may not participate. Sometimes these can become overwhelming, there can be so many of them.

Most nights we will have this downtime, and then we'll start dinner. I'd like to adopt the Latin tradition of having the larger meal at lunchtime and a lighter one at dinner, but so far I haven't made the transition with any kind of consistency. So we have a good sit-down dinner as family, which has always been important to me. We usually have a lively debate about who does the dishes.

Afterward we often read aloud to each other, unless we decide we want to have a movie night, when we all watch a movie together on the computer. Reading is far more the norm than a movie.

By 8:30 or 9 p.m. we're getting ready to crash. I might steal a little time when everyone else hits the hay to write in the quiet. Or the kids and I might go up and stargaze for a little while.

The days are very full for us, and we are very comfortable just being homebodies. I find I am far busier in some ways than I was on land.

A typical day on passage

I don't think there is one.

All depends on the weather, the passage itself. If it's calm enough, we will do a shortened school day, incorporated into the watch system. Food and sleep seem to dominate on passages. That and chocolate… Johnny and I stand the night watches and let the kids take over part of the daytime, weather permitting. We all share galley duties, although I am usually responsible for the meal planning and prep.