Daughter Reminy – Running Away to See

“Shave your legs, you’re disgusting!” the cry rings out under the hanger. I duck my head and keep walking; maybe if I pretend I didn’t hear it will go away.
“Stop the hair growth!”
Nope.

I don’t really care though because Dad’s bringing her home today. It’s been two whole weeks of waiting. Waiting for today. I ride the bus home in silence, not really listening to the music in my ears.

Budi and Sylvie are sitting at the kitchen table when I walk in. They jump up as soon as they see me. I drop my bag and we go. Our feet kick up small puffs of red dirt as we run past the Co-op, the surf shop, the boatyard, down the sandy track to the edge of the bay and I see her. I know at once which one she is, from the photo. She looks the same, tall and beautiful and so, so proud.

Dad picks us up in the tender and takes us out to her.
She smells musty and salty.
She smells like freedom.
“How long till she’s ready?” I ask.
“Two months,” says Dad.

Four months later we’re still here. We’ve fixed the leaking hatches, replaced all the chainplates, made new sails. We’ve re-covered mattresses, washed carpets, installed electrical stuff. We keep saying we’ll go and then we discover a new leak, a new rip, a new problem. She sits there patiently the whole time, like a child waiting for the adults to stop talking. She never complains, never rolls her eyes or mutters ungrateful things under her breath. She just waits for the work to be done.

Dad doesn’t sleep much at night. Mum cries often. Perfect weather windows come and go and still, we don’t leave.

At school, Madison and Katie beat each other up over Jake, and Stella plans a huge party. It takes her a whole two weeks to figure out who to exclude. Mum and I paint the insides of the lockers white and install a saltwater pump. One Friday night Maia’s gang breaks into the primary school and smashes windows and benches.

Every night I stare out the window and hope and hope.

Another month goes by. Keira is suspended for throwing a book at Miss Dawson’s head. Danny brings his speaker on the bus and plays porn out loud; the bus driver doesn’t notice. The bat colony moves from the side of the school to the middle and classes are constantly interrupted by screeching. Several students get shat on.

We take Pandion out for a test sail in the bay. She flies along! I can almost feel her heart pounding with joy. On the way back a dolphin rides our bow. Mum and Dad smile lovingly at each other. Budi, Sylvie and I grip the mast in terror.

Soon after that, we spend our first night on her. Mum cooks a pot of pasta onshore and brings it out. The yellow lights make a warm glow in her belly. Outside the wind howls. I go up on deck to look around; there’s a single bright star above her mast that’s perfectly aligned. I hug the furled jib sail and whisper to her that it won’t be long now. I think she smiles.

At school, Tyler laughs at me. He calls me gorilla and bear. “Shave your legs!” he shrieks, pretending to shield his eyes. I think of Pandion and her single bright star.
“Shave yours!” I answer. There’s a long period of silence. He can’t think of a come-back.

Dad has to go away to Alice Springs for two weeks. It’s his last job before we leave. I know we need money. Pandion’s first propeller didn’t fit, we had to lift her out onto the hard to replace it. The new one will take three more weeks to arrive. Mum sews sheets for our beds, we cram the lockers full of vacuum-packed beans, rice, flour and lentils, and Sylvie and I replace the old owner’s pictures with new ones.

Out in the desert, Dad has a dream. He dreams that Pandion is talking to him. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ve crossed oceans before. We can do it again.”

Stella has her party. Everyone gets drunk and smokes weed. They post photos all over snap chat so the excluded can see. Alexa and Danika send Bella texts about how fat she is. Bella cries in the school toilets. Rhiannon’s nudes get sent around the whole school.

I wipe down Pandion’s shelves and stack our books on them.

Freya and Krystal get caught smoking in the graveyard that surrounds our school. It’s ironic that they’re sitting on dead people doing something that will kill them. Mr. O’Brian is banned from teaching for selling cigarettes to kids. Hayden is teased the whole way home from school for having the wrong kind of headphones.

“Not long now,” Pandion whispers to me as I stroke her side. “Not long now.”
Dad gets home. We put the new propeller on.

A seventh-grader loses her virginity to a tenth grader. Kyle dares Georgie to punch Faith. Faith goes home with a bleeding nose.

One night when Dad comes in I’m crying. “I’m scared,” I sob. “What if it’s not like I think it will be?”
“It will be an adventure,” he says, “and all the best adventures have scary bits and exhausting bits and disgusting bits. Adventures are wild and unpredictable. That’s what makes them adventures.”

The next night we leave. I don’t think anyone can quite believe that we are finally going. We motor out the bar under the moon and I swear Pandion is singing for joy. It’s not a song that you can hear but it pounds through my heart harder than anything I can imagine.

Budi and I lie awake and listen to a whale singing right underneath us. “I’m free,” I whisper to myself.

Over me and under me and all around me Pandion laughs.

By Reminy Holmes
Reminy entered this article in a writing competition in Australia and won, age 15.

Mum Melissa – Locked in a floating cupboard: is it fair to take your teenager to sea?

Our eldest daughter turned fourteen a few months into our six-month trip up the Queensland coast and the total number of other teens she met cruising was … zero. Cruising kids of any age were thin on the water, but what is it that makes many long term cruising families sell the boat and return to life on land when their children reach high school age?

Partly it’s the belief that kids’ education becomes more critical the older they get, but the most common reasons people give for returning their teens to land are social ones. It’s true that peers become more important the older a child gets, and that navigating peer relationships is a big part of becoming an adult. So was it fair of us to pluck our thirteen-year-old daughter out of her social network and essentially lock her in a floating cupboard?

She says, yes, absolutely.

During the long painful months of preparation that preceded our cruise, sometimes the only reason we didn’t just put the damn boat on Gumtree was Reminy’s regular, plaintive cry, “But we’re still going sailing, aren’t we?”

She, of all our three kids, was most keen to go. Frankly, the seven-year-old would be happy if we told her we were going to push her to Alice Springs in a shopping trolley, so we couldn’t accurately gauge her pre-trip enthusiasm. Our eleven-year-old son was nervous about All Things Sailing: heeling, flipping over, getting lost, being seasick, running into stuff, missing friends, being abducted by mermaids … but Reminy loved the idea as soon as we broached it, and her enthusiasm was the impetus that kept us going.

We’re doing this for the kids, we’re doing this for the kids became our mantra whenever something expensive and unforeseen happened with the boat in those bewildering months before we left.

Other than being abducted by mermaids and flipping over, pretty much everything on our son’s Terror List happened to us in the next six months, but Reminy’s enthusiasm never palled. When we broke it to the kids that we’d have to go back home (and back to school) for a few months before heading overseas, she was devastated. “I just want to keep sailing forever,” she sobbed.

So what was the attraction?

Our daughter is bright, funny, friendly and likable, but she’s also a girl navigating her way through a phenomenon that no other generation of kids has ever had to deal with: social media. Adolescence was hard enough before anonymous messaging apps like Sarahah reared their ugly heads. Rates of depression and anxiety in teenage girls are soaring, not just because of cyber-bullying but because girls are constantly bombarded by images of other girls’ perfect lives.

“On the boat, I can be entirely myself,” Reminy says. “I don’t have to worry about what everyone else is doing, how I look, or what I’m wearing, or what’s coming out of my mouth, or any of that stuff.”

We watched her slowly unwinding as we sailed further and further away from all ‘that stuff’, becoming more childlike, but more adult-like at the same time. We watched her relax into herself.

It was important to Reminy that she didn’t fall behind in her schoolwork while we were away so when we started out homeschooling the kids we were super diligent – timetables, schedules, written records of everything each child had done and meticulously ticking off all subject areas. That lasted about a fortnight. Quite quickly it became apparent that the kids were managing their own schooling, with more motivation and efficiency than they’d ever shown at home. I guess the large dangling carrot of a post-school snorkel is enough to make any kid get stuck into their maths. The little kids could usually knock their schooling over in an hour or two, but Reminy, in grade 8 at the time, voluntarily took a bit longer. The only structured work she did each day was maths. Her incredible high school maths teacher had copied all his teaching notes and homework assignments onto a memory stick for us before we left, and the opportunity to take maths at her own pace worked very well for Rems.

As far as everything else went, the sky was the limit. Pandion has lots of bookshelves and all the kids read voraciously: non-fiction, historical texts, biographies, classics, novels, poetry, and philosophy. She ate up her science work in a single term and spent the rest of the time exploring a topic of her own choosing: neuroplasticity and the wonders of the human brain.

Reminy is back at school at the moment and she hasn’t fallen behind in any areas, and her general knowledge and resourcefulness are streets ahead of the masses so it must be true what everybody says, that the incidental things cruising kids pick up along the way form a holistic education: passage planning, knots, weather, geology, ecology, pollution, waste, resource use, history, wind angles, engine hours, anchor scope, outboard maintenance, boat repairs, cooking, provisioning, music, journaling, geography, navigation, letter-writing, radio protocol, seamanship, film-making, photography, coping with boredom, and getting along with others in a confined space.

Which brings me to the V berth.

Our boat has a generous parents’ retreat aft and a cubby tucked away behind the salon for the littlest person on board, which leaves the fourteen-year-old girl sharing a couple of square meters in the front cabin with her eleven-year-old brother. This is not a recipe for familial harmony.
“Malachy’s little toe is on my side of the bed!”
“Reminy’s hair is on my pillow!”

It’s true that they improved over the course of the journey but Reminy has been campaigning heavily for a curtain since we left. For the next leg of our journey, we’re changing the configuration in the front berth a little, removing the fill-in wedge between their two sides of the bed and building small walls (battlements) on either side. They’ll have less space, but a greater sense of space. That’s the theory.

The utter dearth of people her own age meant that Reminy had to play up and play down. She’s the eldest of three, so she already knew how to have fun with younger kids, but she also really valued the opportunity to spend time with adults. Her favorite island was Middle Percy, where she helped butcher a goat with a 50-year-old German man, helped the local adults build a pizza oven, and quietly observed the crew of a superyacht getting totally plastered at the A-frame. “Mum,” she whispered. “They are so drunk.”

Living in close proximity with her parents also gave Reminy a front-row seat to our relationship. I like to think that Miles and I usually operate upon mutual respect and affection, but there were times when it wasn’t pretty. She heard all our arguments, she watched us resolve them, sometimes she even helped us resolve them, and I can think of no greater gift to a child than the knowledge that people who love each other can make mistakes, behave badly, and forgive each other anyway. She saw the humor in our relationship and the way that laughter forms the foundation of our stability as a couple.

The main reason we undertook this vast journey in the first place was a growing realization that our daughter was growing up fast and that soon she’d leave home to live her own life and have her own adventures. Selfishly, we wanted a good solid chunk of time with her and her siblings before that happened. The cogs of our lives were spinning too quickly for us to connect fully with our children and we all wanted to slow down and suck the marrow out of life. I would argue that teenagers more than anyone need time to slow down, time to reflect upon their lives, time to contemplate butterflies and whales and Christmas tree worms and all the things that are important to them in this world.

I can’t think of a better way to do that than take them to sea.

By Melissa Beit
www.svpandion.blogspot.com

Sailing Biography
Melissa, husband Miles, and their three children knew little about sailing when they bought their 42 foot Brewer ketch, Pandion. After a grueling year fitting her out and learning to sail, they spent six months last year island-hopping 3000 nautical miles up the Queensland coast and back. In May 2019 they left for New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Their kids will turn 15, 12 and 8 while they’re away.

Author Biography
Melissa Beit has had stories published in The Australian newspaper, Best Australian Stories, The Big Issue, Southerly, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Sleepers Almanac, and in various national and international anthologies. Her fiction has placed or been highly commended in several prizes, including the EJ Brady, Age, Rubery, and Alan Marshall Short Story Prizes. She writes feature articles for Coastbeat magazine.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of Noonsite.com or World Cruising Club.