Fifteen-year-old Dutch sailor, Laura Dekker, arrived in St. Maarten after a 2,200 nautical-mile voyage from the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. She sailed from Gibraltar on August 21 and spent two months in the Canary Islands waiting for the hurricane season to pass. She left the Cape Verde Islands on December 2nd. She is attempting to become the youngest person to sail around the world alone.
Teenage sailor on solo voyage reaches St. Maarten
Dekker’s venture stirred an intense debate about whether young people should be allowed to sail the world’s oceans alone. A Dutch court originally blocked the voyage and only permitted her to set off after she took measures to manage the risks.
She bought a bigger, sturdier boat than the one she originally planned to use, fitted it with advanced navigation and radar equipment, and took courses in first aid and coping with sleep deprivation.
In the end, the Dutch court ruled that her preparations were adequate and it was up to her parents, who are divorced, to decide whether to let her make the attempt. Dekker was born on a boat off New Zealand while her parents were sailing around the world.
On a recent blog posting, Dekker said she “regularly wakes up after only one hour of sleep” and was looking forward to sleeping through the night while in St. Maarten.
On Sunday, she told the AP that she wasn’t sure how long she would stay in St. Maarten or precisely where her next leg would take her.
“I will just stay here now for a bit and I will think about that,” Dekker said. “I’ve not really a plan. I just want to be in the Panama Canal in May, April, so until that time I will cross the islands, I think.”
Overall, the solitude of the trip wasn’t difficult, she said, although she did have fleeting bouts of homesickness.
“There were two or three moments that I thought, ‘OK, why the hell am I doing this?’ But they were not for very long. If I feel really lonely I can always call my parents or something so then it’s over,” Dekker said.
Her circumnavigation attempt started two months after Abby Sunderland, a 16-year-old American, had to be rescued in a remote section of the Indian Ocean during an attempt to circle the globe. Earlier this year, Jessica Watson of Australia completed a 210-day voyage at age 16.
But while Watson remained at sea nonstop, Dekker plans to stop at dozens of ports and may even return home to catch up on her studies before resuming her trip.
If Dekker completes the voyage, any record she claims would be unofficial and likely to be challenged. The Guinness World Records and the World Sailing Speed Record Council have decided they will no longer recognize records for “youngest” sailors to avoid encouraging dangerous attempts.
Dekker said she’s in no rush at all and is having an “amazing” experience out on the ocean.
“For me it’s more weird to be in a house for a week than to stay three weeks on a boat,” she said.
I wonder how a “youngest-yet” record is to be “scored” in a rational way. For an event that takes up to a few hours (soloing an airplane, setting a land speed record) the person’s age is easy to measure. For an event that might take more than a year, it seems to me you would have to average the age on departure and arrival, and therefore, it isn’t possible for Miss Dekker to challenge Jessica Watson for the record unless she changes her plan immediately in favor of fewer stops and a much more gruelling routine.
I have doubts about how prudent it is to sail alone on the high seas at any age because of the difficulty of maintaining a proper lookout 24/7 as both law and prudence require. Also, even with the best communication equipment, a minor injury or illness could be a mortal threat when you’re alone on the high seas.
However, I deplore the craven behavior of what passes for sanctioning bodies as they evade their responsibility merely on the grounds of the political incorrectness of allegedly encouraging more “youngest-yet” voyages. A sanctioning body does not make or socially engineer records, it just keeps track of them. Setting the record is up to the sailor, her parents if she’s under-age, and her sponsors. If the family and sponsors think she has the skills and are ready to fund her, let her have at it, I say! Perhaps the Guinness crew isn’t equipped to keep such records for sailing, but the WSS Record Council should be. Is it time to set up a rival sanctioning body?