This is the diary of our family sailing voyage aboard a 46 Foot Sailing Catamaran. We are Michael and Barb, with our children Danielle and Harrison who were 11 and 8 when we started in October 2009 from San Diego. We've been cruising through Mexico and the next leg of our travels takes us to the South Pacific. You can contact us by email at michael@mitgangs.com or barbg@mitgangs.com.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
How Cruising Kids Torment Their Siblings
The other day, Danielle was returning to the boat via dinghy on her own, and Harrison ran to the back of the boat to help tie her on. Apparently Danielle didn't speak as nicely to him as he liked, so he decided to drop the line and push the dinghy away from the boat. At the same time, Danielle had killed the engine. The current had gotten stronger, pulling her further away from our boat, further into the anchorage. And she couldn't get the motor started again. She hailed me on the VHF for help, but of course I couldn't go out to get her because she was already in my means of transportation. She kept trying and trying to get the motor started, meanwhile drifting further and further away from the boat. She then got the paddles out and was trying to paddle herself back, but the wind and current were too strong so she was getting nowhere. The entertaining part for me was that Harrison was more panicked than Danielle was, and asked me if he should go to his room. He felt horrible about what he had done. In the meantime, one of the other boats in the anchorage noticed that Danielle was having trouble starting the engine (by this time it was probably flooded given the number of times she was desperately trying to get it started), and he went out in his own dinghy and towed Danielle in our dingy back to the boat. She would not speak to Harrison for a while after this episode. Wonder who had the last laugh?
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Glad to hear it's not just us "land parents" who have to put up with our childrens' sibling torment!
ReplyDeleteAll's well that ends well...is Harrison out of his room yet?
xoxo
B.
All I can say is OY VAI! I can't believe this -- and you were watching this the whole time? Oh well, I hope this was a good lesson as well as good luck.
ReplyDeleteI'll see you in less than a day when I hopefully will be able to tune out all the miseries of the world and relax...ha, ha, ha!
Love you and can't wait to see you all...
Im not sure how you could restrain yourself from not helping her.
ReplyDeleteGood thing it all ended as well as it did.
Great experience for them to talk about in a bar/bat mitzvah speech.
I was laughing reading this Barb... thinking that my kids would do the same thing and I was wondering if Jake would feel feel any remorse....NOT!!
ReplyDeleteLove reading all your stories... Missing you all madly...Sha