Would You?

The sea is a big huge space, adn it can gobble anyone up and noone would ever know.

In defense of abby. I was 8 years older then Abby when I set out on my quest on the sea. We were a lot porer equipt but we had the benefit of more then one person. I admire her courage and feel that had she the benefit of a little more expierence she would have been successful. her problem was a lack of knowledge.
 
I sent my daughter away to college, not far away, 500 miles away.
she wanted a car, I said no.
I knew where she was going was the snow capital, lake effects now all winter long, and I didnt care how experienced a driver she was, I was the parent and I made a decision based on the hardships Ive face in my 50 plus years of life dealing with snowstorms. I look up at the sky, I see a storm forming, hey, my kid dont need to be in thecar today. I try my best to protect my children from the outside world while they are underage, and from sometimes themselves makeing a poor decision. I step in, and do what I have to do. Im the daddy. when and if she chooses to leave me and not listen, is her right.It was asked would I , no I would not.The sea is a big huge space, adn it can gobble anyone up and noone would ever know.

Allen, if your daughter went off to collage, I assume that she is over 18 years of age?

I can understand not wanting her to drive in bad weather, I'm from Canada, and I know all about bad weather.

For me, I want my daughter to get her drivers license as soon as possible, and my dad and my uncles will teach her how to handle the bad weather, the best of which is to stay home, but she will learn to drive in the snow, to change a tire, to use jumper cable to start a car (I've already taught her that, and the tire changing). She will also learn to have the right equipment in the car at all times, shovel, emergency stuff like a small stove pot and food plus blankets etc.

I'm more of a proactive guy, I'd rather teach her how to deal with bad situations, instead of ignoring it, hope for the best and plan for the worse. My daughter is 16, and I still have a say in her life, but at some point, we, as parents run out of "No" and if I use that last "no" poorly, it can have a lasting detrimental effect on my relationship with my daughter.

Understand, I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm not going to second guess your relationship with your daughter, I'm just saying I would handle my daughter differently is all. The great thing is we can both follow our own way still. :thumb:
 
Thinking about this some more, everything I have read says that her mast broke. This can only be atributed to having to much sail up. Either she didn't recognise the problem or was unable to take in sail due to being alone in either case this problem could have been averted and would have by a more expierienced sailor.

Interesting point, Don. I read somewhere that earlier in the trip she had trouble with a line getting jammed in a pulley at the top of the mast, and had to climb the mast to fix it. When it first happened, conditions were too rough for her to climb -- she tried then decided against it. Apparently the next day was calmer and she was able to climb up and fix it. So...I wonder if some type of mechanical problem prevented her from lowering the sails.

Also, I've seen speculation that the boat might have rolled in the rough seas. Could that have broken the mast? (Then again I read that one of the planes that spotted her reported that she was dragging sails in the water, so maybe some were up at the time the mast broke.) :dunno: Regardless, this just convinces me more and more that when I do my circumnavigation of the globe in a 40' ship, I'm gonna have a dad-gum motor. :p

On a totally different aspect of the whole thing. I've seen a lot of Internet angst about how the isolation and stress would be much more than a kid her age could endure. I agree there was surely a lot of physical stress, and some mental stress, but isolation? I don't think so. She talked to her mom twice a day via satellite phone, and maintained a blog on the Internet. She may have been alone, but she wasn't isolated. Yes, she or the ship could be come incapacitated (and in fact, did), but they had the plans and mechanisms in place to handle things pretty quickly when things did go bad.

It'll be interesting to learn about some of the details when they are made public. I understand she's already planning a book. If she wants to make a brilliant PR move, she should pay for the rescue with the proceeds from book sales. ;)
 
It is easy to say what you would or wouldn't do depending on your experiences with your own child and your upbringing. I have raised my kids to what I beleive is right and have done everything to prepare them for the real world out there. Most importantly I trust and beleive in them. I firmly beleive that our kids are the people that we raise them to be and there are lots of things in the world out there that will challenge them and make them stronger just as we were challenged as we grew. If I have done my job right they will over come all the adversities that confront them and rise to all the challenges that this world will throw at them.

I am in no position to tell anyone else how to raise their child. If her parents had enough faith and beleif in her sailing ability to do the task who am I to say that she didn't? What happened out there happened and I am thankful that she is safe as I don't wish any harm on her or any child. A problem happened and she did what she could to get the help that she needed. Sounds pretty responsible to me.
 
No offense, Stu. I understand differences in thinking and cultural values (well, at least, I TRY to understand them). But, supervised shooting and letting that girl go out like she did is not comparable.
I believe most jurisdictions around the civilized world would find the parents guilty of child endangerment if it got to court.
Sailing aside, her stops at some ports in underdeveloped countries posed dangers. A pretty young white girl can bring big money in the slave market. It happens but isn't talked about much. Or she could just (just? :eek: ) be raped or killed and her boat ransacked.
A child still needs adult watchfulness.
I won't say more about this. The diverse views here will not come together in this thread.
 
Another thought for the discussion.

The style of boats used on these modern trips. Is this even really the same as sailing alone? Blogging, GPS, all that stuff. Isn't it really auto-pilot?

(Another good book for the sea faring types. Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.) Wow
 
Would you let this 16 year old girl try to sail the world alone?

Would you let her depart on her trip at this time of the year?

Yep, interesting discussion, and the best part is that no one, including myself is right :D :thumb:

Stu,

Couldn't agree more. What makes it all interesting is that it's undecidable. That Dutch court clearly overstepped when it forbade a similar journey. I would be furious!

On the other hand, you have to ask about motivation, and where the drive comes from. A 13 year old boy just climbed Everest. Cool. But Everest is a fairly dangerous place
. Clearly, the parents encouraged the idea, supported it, made it possible. Young kids get lots of ideas, but at some point, it's more the parent's idea than the child's.

Yes, I was climbing mountains alone at that age, and we didn't have the resources for something like Everest. But if I'd told my father I wanted to do something like that, he likely would have said "That's a good goal. Wait a few years. And then when you can make an informed decision on your own, come back and talk to me..."

Thanks,

Bill
 
Ben Stein had an interesting take on happiness this morning.

Ben Stein - How to Live.

(CBS) As the college class of 2010 heads out into the world, take a moment to hear the advice of our contributor Ben Stein:


It is graduation time for you young people. That means time to make some decisions and take some action about your lives. I would like to offer you some deep thoughts at this season.

A few days ago, I asked my shrink, a super-smart guy, how he would generally divide up the people who were happy in life from those who were not.

He answered like a shot.

The unhappy ones, he said, are people who let their parents or their family talk them into doing something for a career that wasn't really them. They are people who wanted to be writers or performers, and decided instead to take the cautious route and go to accountancy school or law school or dental school.

Now, he said, they are well into their middle age and they make a decent living, but they just don't like what they do.

What they do, you might say, is not them. It is not who they are or who they wanted to be. It's too late for most of them to try to change, and they haven't built up a lifetime of experience and contacts in the field they want to be in.

So, he said, "they just come in to my office and complain."

"And what about the happy ones?" I asked him. "What did they do?"

My shrink answered that, again, like a shot.

"They made a decision to live," he said, and those were his exact words.

They decided to do what their hearts told them to do, to do what was in them to do. They took risks and they took chances, and they tried a lot of different things until they got to where they wanted to be.

This very often means working incredibly hard and living on the edge. But it gets you to where you can look back on your life and say it wasn't wasted.

I left the doctor's office with my brain on fire. His advice is spectacular.

Unless you are born rich - or even if you are - you have to earn your keep, that is for sure. But to decide to live - that makes a lot of difference in this difficult world.

That's it. Choose to live a life you want to live, not one that's safe or what someone else thinks you should do.

Decide to live.
 
This is an interesting discussion... I didn't read all of the posts, just the first 3 or 4 pages, but agree on some points and disagree on others. Sixteen is young, but depending on how the child was raised as to how young.... if they are taught from an early age to be responsible, to take responsibility for your mistakes, to actually think and do for yourself, it's not that young. If they're not, then 18 or 21 may be too young. I really think it comes down to how they are raised. If the parents think the child has reached an age of responsibility, then they are in the right to let her go.

This isn't something that's all that new. Back in the '60's or '70's, don't remember exactly, there was a young man that left California in a 30 or 40 foot ketch to sail around the world. I'm kinda remembering that National Geographic did a story on him. He didn't try to win any records, and made a number of landfalls... one in the south seas somewhere to wait for a new mast (his was aluminum) that had to be shipped to him when he suffed some rough seas. I remember a follow up story on him where he had met and eventually married a girl from one of his ports of call. Seems like by the time he married he had reached the age of 18 or 19, so he was a couple of years sailing on his own...

Vaughn mentioned driving at 16... this has almost become a rite of passage, getting your license and a car at 16... in my opinion, in many cases, this is much too young. I don't know the statistics, but I suspect more 16-17 year olds are killed in auto accidents then their older counter parts... I don't know if it's still true, but I read somewhere that in the UK, a new driver has to drive with an experienced co-driver for one year before they are allowed to be solo... maybe one of our European family members can confirm.

As to the initial question...should she have been allowed... why not if Mom and Dad felt she was mature enough to handle it... not knowing the girl, I haven't any basis for that judgement.
 
...Sailing aside, her stops at some ports in underdeveloped countries posed dangers. A pretty young white girl can bring big money in the slave market. It happens but isn't talked about much. Or she could just (just? :eek: ) be raped or killed and her boat ransacked...

Not to beat a dead horse, but replace "boat" with "car" and all that can happen a block from home while out on a grocery errand. I would think she's far more likely to run into bad guys in Southern California than she is on the open ocean and at various ports of call (remember, originally there were to be no ports of call).

Looks like a number of sailing folk agree that she picked the wrong time to sail that part of the world, and some are not too happy about her attitude about the whole thing (may have language that's not "family friendly"):

http://www.sailinganarchy.com/index_page1.php

And this is related...sort of...

It happened that one of the best mimes in the history of theater was also a skilled small boat sailor. When bad times came, he decided to give up the stage and sail around the world, and promptly disappeared.

His colleague, another master of mime, announced that he, too, would attempt the circumnavigation of the globe, in honor of his old friend.

He, too, was never heard from after leaving port.

Years later, a diver found the wreckage of the first mime's little ship. He brought back the ship's bell as evidence of his find, and announced that he would be searching the area for the second, confident he would find it nearby, because, after all, great mimes sink alike.

:D
 
but thats the point vaughn.

you would not send your 16 y/o daughter into a (lets just say High Crime neighborhood) if she absolutely could avoid it.
Ill bet that girl never drove or walked through a high crime area her entire life, her parents would never permit that, they are too smart for that, and know they are looking for trouble.
Too many unforseen problems can happen when sailing across oceans, why put your daughter out there for those possibilities. Thats about my only point of all of this.
 
but thats the point vaughn.

you would not send your 16 y/o daughter into a (lets just say High Crime neighborhood) if she absolutely could avoid it.
Ill bet that girl never drove or walked through a high crime area her entire life, her parents would never permit that, they are too smart for that, and know they are looking for trouble.
Too many unforseen problems can happen when sailing across oceans, why put your daughter out there for those possibilities. Thats about my only point of all of this.

Compared to a lot of the country, she lives in a dangerous area, and I'd be willing to bet she drives through high crime areas on her way home every day. Statistically, is the open ocean more dangerous that Southern California?

Would I allow my daughter (if I had one) to knowingly go into that kind of environment? I don't know for sure, but I think a lot of it would depend on the person and her experience, not her age or gender. But as Stu mentioned, I'm just armchair quarterbacking. I have no idea how I'd react if it was my kid. (Other than surprise, because as far as I know, I don't have any kids.) :p
 
Hey Vaughn this is an interesting point you raised and while i initially said i agree with the parents i have been giving this some thought in a slightly different way.

The issue i have is one of Moral Hazard.

At what point in our lives do we have to continue to deal with the errors of our kids ways just because we love them.

We all say we need to make our kids aware of consequences and then be responsible for their actions and hence suffer the consequences.

Now perhaps and that is the debate here 16 is too young. Ok so lets simply agree to disagree on the 16 part. What age is not then.

I find myself increasingly ideologically divided with loml on this issue.

Example you buy a kid a present of an ipod. Ok.

Next they make themselves deaf with the thing cause they wont listen to the education that you give them in terms of sound pressure and deafness.

So now you are morally coerced into the whole take them to the hearing specialist and get them a hearing aid when they going deaf.

Same goes for letting them drive. They prang the car, we had a case of this. Now they have to pay. But the moral hazard is the car aint the same and neither is your insurance or theirs for that matter.

At what point does this end? What gets considered bad enough that they stand on their own and trully live with the consequence the way some of us have had to.

Would love to hear some views on this topic here.
 
Compared to a lot of the country, she lives in a dangerous area, and I'd be willing to bet she drives through high crime areas on her way home every day. Statistically, is the open ocean more dangerous that Southern California?
:p
Thousand Oaks, CA is hardly a high crime rate location, by any standards. See here for statistics compared to national averages.

Compare to Irvine, CA which is often rated as one of the lowest crime rate cites in the nation.

It looks to me like Thousand Oaks has a lower crime rate than Irvine but is smaller in population so it may not be compared to Irvine in the national rankings. Unless she drives down through South Central LA, it look to me like she's pretty safe at home.

Mike

[Would that all kids had as safe a home area.]
 
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This has happened before to Robin lee Graham who wrote a book of his adventure called Dove. he started out at age 16 in 1965 and took 5 yrs to sail around the world. He took his time and didn't rush it. Maybe there is too much stress on setting records maybe there isn't but it will be interesting to see if she continues the adventure or just quits.
 
Im sure she does go through high crime areas, but not by choice.
I refuse to believe any sane parent or individual would choose to go into a high crime or known unsafe place without concerns about personal safety.

I guess Im just an overly protective father.
 
Just read on Foxnews, that dad is broke and a reality show has been signed up for. Seems he signed couple weeks after she left.

The plot thickens. There are no more hero's, only wanabe's
 
I sent my daughter away to college, not far away, 500 miles away.
she wanted a car, I said no.
I knew where she was going was the snow capital, lake effects now all winter long, and I didnt care how experienced a driver she was, I was the parent and I made a decision based on the hardships Ive face in my 50 plus years of life dealing with snowstorms. I look up at the sky, I see a storm forming, hey, my kid dont need to be in thecar today. I try my best to protect my children from the outside world while they are underage, and from sometimes themselves makeing a poor decision.

Allen, you and I have a friendship that allows us to have polar opposite opinions on driving. Here in Northwestern Indiana where we get a lot of lake effect snow, I wanted my girls driving their vehicles (Fina had a 4 wheel drive Dodge, Tess bought a 2 wheel drive) know how to handle them and take it easy compared to the conditions. I looked at it from this point of view. If they were going (and no we didn't allow them to come and go at will) somewhere, I prefered them to be in the driver's seat and making the decisions. They had been driving since, well Fina was going to start first grade, Tess would be starting kindergarten) when Lou Ann was sick in the hospital with an intestinal infection. We had hay down, I went ahead and baled on the ground, the girls drove from bale to bale and I loaded the truck then drove to the barn. Took a while, but we got it put up without it getting wet. Yep, took a break each evening and shot BB guns a year or so later we started in on the 22's. Training, leading, showing a calf weighing over a thousand pounds in some situations could seem dangerous also. They rode horses without helmets. Did wear helmets when driving their go carts. I'm not picking on anybody, just we all allow our children/grandchildren to do things when we are one on one with them and they seem attentive to the project. Maybe it is handle a sharp chisel, work without safety glasses, what about kevlar gloves? The list is endless, my goal was to raise self sufficient, sound decision makers. Who knows if I met my goal? Got to go for now, will post again about Fina's wreck and another dad's solution. Oh, we won't go into the details of the girl's mutton busting adventures, pig scrambles, ribbon pull off of calves tails and moving full grown sows to and from farrowing crates and the havoc while castrating, detailing, detoothing and giving shots to baby pigs.
 
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