Sailing/Cruising With Kids

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This is a subject that comes up frequently, and rightly so.  Bringing kids up on a boat, and sharing sailing as a family pursuit is one of the greatest gifts you can give your kids.  One of the biggest mistakes is thinking you need to wait until they are a certain age before they get underway. Our daughter was the youngest in our clan to sail.  She came home from the hospital one day, and was out sailing the next morning===age four days.  Our youngest son was the oldest at 5 weeks.  For anyone trying to recover from shock, yes you have to consider their safety. I'd counter, assuming you're a responsible skipper and your boat is sound, taking them on the boat is undoubtedly safer than taking them in the car.

Kids are incredibly adaptable.  We found they got alone better on the boat with only a few toys they had to share than they did at home buried in toys.  They seemed not to fight over toys, but learned to use their imaginations more and invented their own diversions.  From the youngest age they need to learn that a PFD and a tether when in the cockpit are as natural as wearing a diaper.  When really young, we had them sleep in the forepeak with a cargo net between the bulkheads, so they didn't accidentally crawl or fall out. 

The boat (16' Comet, 30' Atlantic open class racer, and 29' Columbia) was part of, and participated in, nearly all family events.  For Easter, we'd anchor in a cove and hide eggs and candy along the beach and foliage along the shore for their Easter Egg hunt.  Thanksgiving dinner was packed and carried off to the boat.  One year we had a blustery wind from the north for several days that emptied a lot of water out of the Chesapeake, and we ran HARD aground trying to get out of the marina.  We had Thanksgiving dinner at a 30-degree heel while waiting for the tide to rise a bit.  Cruising the coast, we'd come into a new harbor and the kids would be off in the dinghy.  They'd be with kids on the beach, another boat, or have brought kids to our boat within an hour of the anchor being down.  They can learn boating safety at an early age, and the dinghy (under oars, not power) becomes their bike.  In this environment kids mature much quicker and become much more responsible.  When the kids showed an interest in the dinghy, we'd put them out on a hundred or so foot of line.  When they could row back to the boat against the wind and current, we'd let them start taking us to shore and back to perfect their rowing, let them row around the boat or to adjacent boats, and then in appropriate conditions, take the dinghy ashore. By the time he was eight, our youngest had started his own business in St. Thomas, hired five other kids about his same age, and did provisioning for boats in the charter fleet.  Once the provisions were on board, they polished brass, bronze, stainless, etc.  They took their schooling through Calvert School in Baltimore, MD, which I cannot recommend too highly.  They took the kids through grade 8, and highschool was through the University of Nebraska.  The kids were always ahead of their shorebound peers. 

Well, that's enough to get the thread going.  Share your experiences for the benefit of those just starting down this path.