Lessons in cruising from two small boys and their stuff

In a column entitled “Sailing is About Taking the Time” I wrote about the need to seize the time from our ridiculously busy lives to enjoy sailing. Then I admitted that I failed miserably at practicing what I preached, and wrote: “What passes for a cruise nowadays for me and my sailing companion is a long delivery home from a race. It’s supposed to be a leisurely affair, but there always seems to be a schedule, never the luxury of dawdling.”

Now I am pleased to report some progress. I’ve improved. I had no choice—we took the grandboys cruising.

Will, 6, and and his 11/2-year-old brother Jack came aboard with their parents in tow. Also in tow were the contents of the family minivan, a sprawling pile of stuff that was decidedly not mini. We passed it below bucket-brigade style—duffel bags, backpacks, boxes, coolers, fishing rods, bags of toys, a stroller, a high-tech playpen, a mysterious piece of electronic equipment.

This on a boat where we flog crewmembers who report for a long-distance race with anything more than a personal gear bag the size of a four-slice toaster.

The boys took over the boat as though it were a backyard fort. Jack commandeered the forepeak, a space usually used only for sail stowage. The playpen in a nest of sails became his bunk. Will converted a pilot berth to a private cabin by rigging the weather cloth and completing the enclosure with a SpongeBob SquarePants blanket and copious amounts of duct tape. After moving his most precious possessions into the cozy space, he posted the names of personnel authorized to enter. It was a relief to find I was on the list.

I was not, however, authorized to enter the navigation suite. The boys set up shop there, moving in so much equipment that I didn’t see the cherrywood top of the nav desk for the duration of the cruise. It was covered by Will’s Legos and books, Jack’s wooden train set and portable farm, crayons, markers, notebooks, juice boxes, water bottles, Pokémon cards, fearsome looking figures called Yu-Gi-Ohs and that mysterious piece of electronic equipment, which turned out to be a DVD player. Yes, a DVD player, on a sailboat where electronic entertainment is such a low priority that a television has yet to take the spot designed for it over the starboard settee.

Only kids (no, only my grandkids) could get away with this. The navigation station is sacred territory, where even adults fear to tread without the written permission of the captain. This, after all, is the place where the master of the ship performs the arcane calculations that reveal the position of the vessel and other mysteries.

Yeah, right. The boys’ takeover of the hallowed nook just proved what old navigators hate to admit—navigation today is child’s play. We found our way fine with Will, who like any kid his age is better adapted to deal with computerized gizmos than people of my digitally challenged generation, calling out information from the chartplotter screen, which he managed to watch simultaneously with “Shrek” on the DVD machine.

We left the dock for the first day’s passage at noon, all things considered an early start. Not that anyone cared whether it was early or late. Our destination wasn’t far away and it didn’t matter when we got there. As we sailed along in the sweetest of breezes with the autopilot at the helm, I may have started to relate to laid-back cruising.

The pace of cruising with kids is regulated by the inertia involved in getting a complex, heavily equipped shipboard society organized and moving and two other factors—swimming and fishing. Hours must be set aside each day for S&F.

The anchor had no sooner pricked the bottom than Will, without so much as a “captain may I,” jumped off the transom. While Jack “swam” in an inflatable pool in the cockpit, his brother summoned a succession of crewmembers into the water for races around the boat and swinging on the anchor rode. The 6-year-old took to the swimming-off-the-boat culture so enthusiastically that by the second day he was joining his grandfather in morning ablutions on the transom followed by a cold plunge. I was delighted by this evidence that the marina shower-resistant gene is so strong.

The only good reason to stop swimming on a kids’ cruise is to go fishing. I didn’t have high hopes for this, however. The problem in fishing with children is that gratification is not nearly instant enough. But the angling gods smiled on us. Fish were pulled up regularly within a first-grader’s attention span. Notably, this included an athletic smallmouth bass whose dimensions grow in substantial increments each time Will recounts the drama of landing him.

The boy proved himself not only a good fisherman, but a persuasive salesman. He sold me on the idea that, given my (self-proclaimed) status as an expert angler, I should be in charge of baiting hooks. I can report that pushing slimy night crawlers onto fish hooks is fully as nasty a chore today as it was when I did it for our children. At least Will is a confirmed catch-and-release guy—I didn’t have to clean any fish.

Swimming and fishing were so time consuming that one day we didn’t sail anywhere. Jean, the other grandparent on board, thought I’d be a nervous wreck. Oddly, I wasn’t. Nothing wrong with an occasional day of S&F, I said. The next day we made a passage of all of nine miles. Just right for me—we needed time for S&F in a new locale. I was closing in on “the luxury of dawdling.”

My biggest test came on the day after a weather front brought a strong northerly breeze with clear skies. The wind had a hard edge, gusting well over 25 knots, and the seas were growing apace. A glorious sailing day, if you didn’t mind working a bit, a day to make miles at sea. On the other hand, it was a rather rough day for kids at sea. With a tinge of regret, I signed on to the consensus that this day should be spent where we were, nestled behind a seawall in a tiny harbor.

What a fine day it turned out to be, filled with things that had to be done—S&F, of course, some beachcombing and, for hours, racing sailboats built of water bottles and duct tape, with found materials from the beach for spars and ballast, all to the accompaniment of the wind whistling in the rigging and waves breaking on the seawall. Occasionally a wave would send a mist of spray our way to add verisimilitude to our little race course.

Too soon it was over. The boys’ stuff was off-loaded into the minivan. Goodbyes were said, and the grandparents were left to sail the boat home. A neat, tidy and pathetically empty boat.

The cruise had been one of the best—because two small boys taught me how to take the time.

So, yes, I’ve made progress, but I know I’m not all the way there. It’s a many-step process and there’s sure to be backsliding.

Shortly after we parted from our cruising mates, we picked up a surprisingly brisk breeze on the beam, rode it for most of the day, reeled off 100 miles and were tied up by cocktail hour.