In May 2010, a few days short of her 17th birthday, Australian girl Jessica Watson became the youngest person (male or female) to sail around the world solo and unassisted. Concerns about encouraging young people from attempting this incredibly arduous achievement had already led the Guinness Book of Records to stop recognizing “youngest” attempts at sailing around the world, and the World Sailing Speed Record Council to stop accepting any records from sailors under 18. Watson did it anyway.
But in 2009, an even younger girl, Laura Dekker from the Netherlands, announced plans to attempt the same thing. She was 13 years old, and within months she was taken away from her father and made a ward of the court in what Dutch social workers regarded as an effort to save her from herself and her sailor father. By then she had already sailed solo from England to the Netherlands. After much legal wrangling and more sailing training, the system relented. Laura Dekker would be allowed to make the attempt starting in January 2011, aged 15 and a half. Conditions that she would continue schoolwork (with textbooks on board, and via satellite) were included.
Ironically, because Dutch law does not allow a person under the age of 16 to sail a boat in Dutch waters, Laura had to begin her journey elsewhere. She chose to start in the Caribbean and (as with most around-the-world sailors) sail mostly in the southern oceans.
Launching from the Caribbean in a 39-foot boat named Guppy, it took approximately 8 months for Laura to sail west through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific Ocean, to the northern coast of Australia, and another 3 months to cross the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope (having her 16th birthday along the way). During this time, Laura took the opportunity to blog via satellite for Dutch, and passing through the media, to tweet, and to give interviews to various media outlets. A 16 year old girl on her own with a grudge against the Dutch court system and several forums in which to shoot her mouth off. What could possibly go wrong?
Incidentally, famed internet meme and real life health hazard — Somali pirates — had an impact on the voyage at this point. Laura’s blog and media reports of her journey were published on a delay of 2 weeks while she was near the African coast to avoid giving away her exact location to any tech-savvy pirates interested in kidnapping her for ransom.
After some of Laura’s interviews and blog posts suggested that she wasn’t really doing much of that schoolwork, debate resurfaced in the Netherlands about the wisdom of letting a 16 year old sail around the world solo anyway and shouldn’t she be taken back in hand when she got home and forced to go to school like other kids? Even worse, the Dutch department of child protective services got involved and issued Laura’s father with a truancy notice. In response, Laura replaced the Dutch flag on the Guppy with a New Zealand flag and declared she would not return to the Netherlands after the voyage, but would instead take advantage of the fact that she was born in New Zealand (or more accurately, on a boat in New Zealand waters) to go and live in New Zealand.
Also controversially (in some circles) Laura has endorsed environmental activist group Sea Shepherd, best known for its violent clashes with Japanese whaling convoys.
Laura Dekker and the Guppy are now back in the Caribbean and expected to arrive back at her starting point of St. Martin in the next 24 hours… exactly a year and a day since setting out. This is significantly slower than Jessica Watson (who took 210 days to do the trip) but then, Dekker is 6 months younger now than Watson was when she finished.
The Guppy is still flying the flag of New Zealand. A blog post from Laura on 18 January reads in part: “Now, after sailing around the world, with difficult port approaches, storms, dangerous reefs, and the full responsibility of keeping myself and Guppy safe, I feel that the nightmares the Dutch government organizations put me through, were totally unfair. I think that the nightmares will follow me for the rest of my life…” A tweet posted in the past few hours on her official Twitter account says “Dutch authorities should understand, Laura is gaining more education on her trip. Different cultures, places & people. What an experience!” It seems very likely that the end of Laura Dekker’s amazing journey is going to be overshadowed by a debate about the “nanny state” and to what degree it is reasonable for a government to overrule the desires of both a minor and the minor’s parents.
What do you think, denizens of Crasstalk? Share your views, both the parents and non-parents amongst you.
The English translation of Laura’s blog can be found here.
