How you gonna keep em down on the water?

When people ask us how we instilled the love of sailing in our children, my wife and I laugh. When people ask our children how they learned to love sailing, they laugh. The subject is a standing joke in our family, because after what we put them through, there is no way our son and daughter should want to have anything to do with sailboats.

Both sailed before they walked. We didn’t ask if they wanted to sail with us; we just hauled them aboard. Our not-yet-toddling son bounced around the cockpit like a pinball in one of those baby seats suspended from a metal frame on wheels. It was, in retrospect, a silly way to go sailing, as he made perfectly clear with his squalling.

Flash forward a few years and the boy, dragged along on an offshore race that is now a family legend, is pinned on the cockpit sole, more or less under water. Flying a spinnaker in a blow, the boat had spun into a classic, full-throttle, Technicolor Chinese jibe. As the spreaders tried to kiss the water, the boy’s mother planted a foot firmly on her firstborn to keep him aboard the broached boat. Maternal instinct worked fine until the cockpit started to flood. The lad finally thrashed his way free and rose coughing and complaining about yet another force-feeding of the joy of sailing.

We once pressed the kids into service as crewmembers on a spring passage that covered the full length of Lake Superior and a good part of Lake Michigan. Our little daughter holed up in a pilot berth with her Barbie dolls and a bucket. She rarely left this refuge. Part of it was seasickness; the rest was protest.

A few years later, when the babysitter cancelled, we took her along on a Saturday afternoon race. To defuse the inevitable protest, I explained to her how I loved sailing on clear, breezy days like this one, and how she would too. It is an understatement to say she didn’t. She got seasick, was buried under a soaking wet spinnaker while curled up below and stepped on by an oblivious crewman. Back in the marina, the third-grader jumped on the pier, looked me in the eye and delivered one of the most succinct and effective speeches I’ve ever heard: “You said I would have fun. This was NOT fun!”

Is that any way to develop young sailors? I’m not recommending it. I may even have some regrets. Maybe we were selfishly indulging our love of sailing at our kids’ expense. Maybe instead of piling into our cramped boat for one more of those many family cruises we should have gone to Disney World.

I still don’t know if it was because of, or in spite of, the immersion in sailing we administered, but the children who endured it became adults who are sailors through and through—thoroughly skilled, in their element on anything under a sail from dinghies to ocean racers, so in love with sailing that even after all of the gaudy adventures they’ve experienced in their own lives on the water they can still enjoy something as prosaic as one of those family cruises of ours. So in love with sailing that they each married sailors. Now there are a couple of grandchildren, who haven’t seen Disney World, but have been on a family cruise.

These ruminations are prompted by an Internet debate on the subject of how to get children to like sailing. Surprisingly strong feelings were expressed on the effectiveness of various types of youth sailing programs.

I take neither side in the argument over whether it’s better to teach children by having them sail alone in an Optimist dinghy or with a crew of their peers in one of the other sail-training boats; either way, kids learn a lot about handling a sailboat.

I do have an opinion, though, about programs that put a heavy emphasis on competition: This is not the way to teach sailing as a lifetime pursuit. I know most kids love to race. I’m the first to say that racing is the quickest way to learn boat-handling skills. I acknowledge that the sailors we raised in our family derive most of their enjoyment of sailing from racing. But when children are given the idea that racing is the end-all of sailing, it often means their sailing experience is on a course to a dead end.

Like the playground basketball prodigy who makes it to the NBA, a few gifted graduates of youth sailing programs go on to yacht racing careers that allow them to make sailing the focus of their lives. For the many others, sailing that rests only on a foundation of competition fades away too easily into childhood history, like soccer and Little League baseball, never to be visited again.

I wish more youth sailing programs would find ways to expose children to the fun of sailing without taking the easy out of feeding them a steady diet of racing around the buoys.

But I guess I shouldn’t be giving advice. It seems this magazine is part of the problem. Or so says John Glynn, the man who started the Internet fuss by posting an opinion piece lamenting the difficulty of getting his 6-1/2-year-old daughter interested in sailing and, curiously, placing the blame for it on sailing magazines.

“What truly bothers me,” he wrote, “is a trend I’ve seen over the last few years amongst the sailing magazines: almost complete inattention to children afloat. Worse still, sailing with children is portrayed in unappealing fashion.”

Too bad Mr. Glynn didn’t specify which sailing magazines he thinks are committing these sins. Had he done a little research, I’ll bet he wouldn’t have included this SAILING Magazine in his indictment. I’ll send him a long list of kid-friendly features that have appeared here in recent years. In the meantime, I recommend that he read “Isla Holiday,” from our January issue, to his daughter.

Lora Guajardo’s delightful account of sailing across the Gulf of Mexico to Isla Mujeres with her husband and a boatload of children—their four sons, ages 2, 4, 6 and 8—is the kind of story that can excite an child’s imagination and kindle their dreams of similar adventures on the water.

In fact, when I read about her children “asleep like puppies on the converted dinette” and making landfall at Isla Mujeres on Christmas morning, it stirred my imagination and replayed nostalgic images of our family sailing.

We still joke at family gatherings about the challenges our children had to work their way through as wards of sailing-obsessed parents. But we all know we had many more happy times than hard times under sail. Somehow, the kids absorbed it all—the way of sailing, the beauty of sailing.