June 1999 SAIL

A WORKING SCHOOLHOUSE

Over the years I've met a lot of children cruising on boats. Some of them have been voyaging children, like Herb and Nancy Payson's and Steve and Linda Dashew's, who were being boat-schooled by their parents and who were as comfortable and effective on a boat as cats. Some of them have been vacationing cruisers, in Penobscot Bay or the San Juan Islands for a couple of weeks with their parents and maybe a school friend, having the biggest adventure of their lives, learning to steer, to row, to be patient. And some of them have been children on charterboats, out of suburbia for the first time, thrust into another culture and astonished by how free life can be. (I'm reminded of an incident that took place on a winter charter in the Bahamas. Knowles and I, his daughter, Lucia, and her two teenaged boys, Ben and Sam, were walking down a street on Man-O-War Cay, and we passed a baseball field. "A baseball field!" Sam shouted to Ben, as though he'd never seen one before. But this was not what the boys were used to — a "formal" field. Here there were no coaches and no umpires; it was just a field where local kids played ball. In fact, there were a bat and ball lying by home plate, and Ben started batting balls for Sam to catch. We had to drag them away-the field had the pull of summer without limits. Behind them we could see the windward reef and then the Atlantic, glittering in the distance. Baseball on island time.) (And then there was the little girl we met at Pulpit Harbor in Maine who was no older than eight or so and who was rowing her parents back to their boat. It was a slow row, but the kid eventually made it, and her parents were in no hurry.)

Children make wonderful shipmates if they are treated as part of the crew. We've all been aboard boats where the kids are told repeatedly to sit down and not touch anything. Or, even worse, they are allowed to run wild and touch everything. Either way, they eventually become bored and grumpy and are guaranteed to grow up to hate sailing. I've talked with a lot of short-term and long-term cruisers who take their children sailing, and they all agree — children want to be part of what's going on, and once they're old enough to go to school they can help run the boat. Preschoolers can "help'' too, but that's another subject.

A 6-year-old call help tail a line, help crank a winch, steer a course (sort of), help wash decks, read the cruising guide out loud to help choose anchorages, and spot markers. This last is truly useful because most children have sharp eyes, but the child has to be taught how to look. Start with high markers — lighthouses, sea buoys — and work down to channel buoys and markers you know where to spot. Tell the child that the buoy might be in the water or against trees and that, because buoys are often first spotted with peripheral vision, he should run his eyes slowly across the horizon — back and forth and up and down. Kids love to be first to sight a mark, and they get good at it fast.

Voyaging children look at the world through their naive eyes and help us to see in a new way. The story by Theresa Fort ("The Floating Classroom," page 64) addresses families learning together whether they're cruising for a weekend or a lifetime. You can "make the world your classroom," Fort says— and she proceeds to show us how. Hers is an unstructured curriculum broken into subjects — social studies, math, languages, science, art/music—with accompanying resources and activities. She believes that correspondence courses are too structured in the unstructured environment of cruising. Is she right? Sally Campbell at Calvert, the largest of the instruction-while-sailing schools, thinks not. "We have 17,000 courses being used by cruising children at any given time," she says, "and each of those courses can be customized to the child." Calvert provides a classical education—it is ''school" but "the pressure is off the parents," says Campbell, "because we provide all the materials."

Fort and Campbell agree that learning while cruising results in a truly educated child. Furthermore, a child is a natural crew and a boat is a working schoolhouse—physics, biology, history, literature—think of the potential. As adults we need to take the time to teach—and to learn from our students.

See you on the water.

June 1999 SAIL