The Chapter Written by Twelve Cruising Kids
I read this one backward — the only chapter I really needed was written by a dozen kids who already did what we're about to do to ours.
Most of my boat research runs through a spreadsheet. This week it ran through a paperback from 2015.
Voyaging With Kids, by Behan Gifford, Sara Dawn Johnson, and Michael Robertson, has been sitting on my shelf since we first got serious about taking four kids around the world on a catamaran. I finally read it properly this week — except I read it backward, because the chapter I actually cared about is the last one: a bonus chapter written by a dozen former cruising kids, now grown, looking back at what the whole thing did to them.
That chapter is the closest thing this lifestyle has to outcome data. The rest of the book is written by three parents who had each sailed thousands of miles with children aboard, and it's solid — practical on infant care afloat, education options, and how parents carve out enough private time to keep the marriage working in a shared 45 feet. But the authors were still inside the experiment when they wrote it. The dozen grown kids are the results coming back from the lab. Every other source I've found on family cruising is written by people mid-voyage, which is a bit like judging a retirement plan by interviewing people the week after they retire.
Two things from my week with it.
First, the book spends real pages on the return — helping kids make the transition back to shore life when the voyage ends. In three years of researching this trip I have read hundreds of pages on anchor selection and exactly zero on re-entry. My worksheet has a row for davit load ratings. It does not have a row for what happens when a nine-year-old who learned fractions on night watches gets dropped into a fourth-grade classroom in Bend. The book treats coming home as a passage that needs planning, same as any ocean leg — weather window, staging, contingencies. That reframing alone was worth the cover price.
Second, the arithmetic I did in the margin. If we cast off in 2029, our kids will be roughly 8, 7, 5, and 4. Five years out means the oldest steps off the boat at 13. I keep modeling this trip in boat terms — displacement, sail area, watermaker output, the 50-foot cat we're researching — when the actual purchase is ages 8 through 13 of a childhood. Non-refundable. No survey contingency. That is a different diligence problem than the one my spreadsheet solves, and it took a dozen strangers' grown kids to make me see the two problems aren't the same one.
None of this changes the boat work. A wrong boat can end a circumnavigation in year one, and I'll keep grinding on rudder bearings and rig surveys. But the book earned a permanent spot next to the pilot charts, and my worksheet is getting a second tab this week — one that has nothing to do with the boat and everything to do with the four people we're bringing aboard it.
Numbers I'm tracking for the boat decision live in the worksheet.
