‘Navigating infancy makes rock pilotage and tidal calculation look like a stroll in the park’ – Libby Purves

Libby Purves discusses how Family sailing can be an incredibly rewarding experience, but it does need a healthy does of ingenuity to do it right

I applaud the idea of families with small children trying out what cruising would be like with them as crew. One of the many things never mentioned in National Childbirth Trust classes or by maternity wards is just how imperially, demandingly, unanswerable are a baby’s demands.

Nor does anyone mention how long the riotous qualities of babyhood endure before they become alert, biddable crew members – or even grateful and admiring passengers.

Navigating through the new world of infancy makes rock pilotage, tidal calculation, and boat maintenance look like a stroll in the park. And the orderly landbound world of carpeted floors, high worktops, safety plugs and comfy buggies doesn’t let you know what a free-range toddler in a bit of a mood can do to a galley and chart table.

It all needs thinking about. Curiously, we found that the earliest days and the smallest boat – a Contessa 26 – were the simplest to deal with.

A small baby takes up very little room in him or herself, and a bit of discipline can reduce the mad mounds of kit which are foisted on parents by keen manufacturers and social pressure.

A carrycot firmly secured becomes a favoured haven for sleeping, and some sort of baby-chair with a harness, lashed with equal security in the corner of the cockpit under the sprayhood, means that there is always somewhere safe to put the infant down while the next boat emergency happens.

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Bathtime, by the way, can be very satisfactorily conducted in a large rubber ship’s bucket in the cockpit right up to the age of one or beyond – babies adore it because they’re sitting up, supported, and allowed to throw soapy water all over the place. Just pad the metal bits round the handle with spare flannels.

Roll on a few months, and a small boat at anchor or in harbour provides many excellent places for the sport of pulling oneself up for the first time, even taking first steps – as long as you pad every corner of everything. This is the point at which chartering gets trickier.

Our old Contessa, then the slightly bigger Rustler, was for a period rigged out like padded cells. But one year more, and the toddler will probably be better at avoiding banging into things than the parents are. Boats are also, luckily, full of good things for toddlers to play with.

A nice clean fender can be banged, rolled, bounced, ridden and thrown around the cabin for long enough to permit the making of supper or a bout of passage-planning. Everybody loves inventing ridiculous and impossible knots in a nice soft bit of rope (keep the child well within your sight, of course, the dangers are obvious).

Slightly older children, reaching the age of imagination, require toys. When we set off round Britain the most useful bit of gear on board was a child’s plastic suitcase labelled LITTLE WORLD, into which we had loaded Dinky cars, toy animals, Duplo people, tiny dolls, farm animals and boats for them to interact with.

The children sat opposite one another at the cabin table inventing stories infinitely better than anything today’s lot get on their iPads. Their fantasy about the lion, the dinosaur, the penguin and the Bad Lorry Man was particularly fine. It does help, though, if you’ve rigged fiddles on the edges of the table; nothing worse than Bad Lorry Man tipping the penguin into the bilge.

When it gets too rough to play, bring on the recorded storytelling, even simpler now than in the days of cassettes. I think audio works better than videos though – a droning voice saying, ‘It was a foggy day in Greendale and Postman Pat was on his rounds’, for the twentieth time that week has a pleasingly calming effect. A bit like yogic chanting.

Small children have their own emotional meteorology, and contending with it is never entirely joyful. Respecting their sleep is key. Once on a Greek flotilla, early briefings made it clear that we were probably the most experienced of the punters.

Sailing in company to Antipaxos we were all close-hauled at first, but then the wind freed us. But we couldn’t let out the main because Rose, after a huge meltdown, had fallen fast asleep on the coiled fall of the mainsheet on the cockpit floor. So we sailed on, inefficiently tight with just the jibs free, and looking back saw to our horror that two of the other boats were copying us, having assumed we were doing something seamanlike. We never owned up.

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The post ‘Navigating infancy makes rock pilotage and tidal calculation look like a stroll in the park’ – Libby Purves appeared first on Yachting Monthly.