As much as I can between now and when we head off, I will begin blogging by posting an answer to one of the many questions that people ask us.

Sailing into the fear of the unknown

Many people have asked me aren’t you scared? I am, but that’s okay and here is my explanation of why I think that.

I can honestly say now that fear was the reason why, for so many years, I shied away from committing to the Big Trip, but now it has become the biggest reason for me to want to do it. Let me explain. As you can imagine, there is so much to fear leading into this trip. Storms, dragging anchor close to shore, scary fevers far away from medical help, the possibility of being boarded… to name a few. Those fears are still real, however, about three years ago I felt a shift in me. I started thinking about my biggest fear of all, the feeling of regret. I don’t want to be in my later years of life, sitting in my rocking chair thinking, ‘why did we not do it when we had the chance as now it’s too late’. We only get one chance at this life and just because something is scary or uncomfortable doesn’t mean we should steer in the other direction. Knowing that knowledge is power I tried to figure out how to try to resolve some of my fears. I read the book Facing Fear Head On, written by Lanise Edwards, and was thankful to learn from it that I was wrong to think I could resolve all my fears about the trip before we set off. I feel silly now to think that I actually thought I could do that. I have learned that all my current fears, whether I like it or not, will be carried with me the day we move onto the boat in a few weeks. What I can do, however, is find ways to manage those fears. I can do this by actually answering the questions in my head like ‘what would we do if this happens?’…instead of letting those thoughts only make my heart race, I now try to arm myself with skill and knowledge in hopes to find the answers.

Storms can be scary for many reasons – they can cause great damage to our boat and in extreme circumstances, cause injury or worse to us. For example, one of my crippling fears had been of doing a night sail in heavy weather and waking up at 2AM to do my shift at the helm only to find Jason had been swept overboard at some point in the night. We needed a plan to ensure that would never happen and we now have one.  Anyone alone at the helm on a night watch will be tethered to the boat. I do know that experienced sailors would argue with me to say that tethering still does not 100% eliminate the risk of an overboard scenario. Those sailors still have to admit though that it greatly reduces the likelihood of that happening. Heavy weather at night would also mean Jason and I would both be up and in the cockpit and sleep would just have to be postponed. Our plan for night watches also includes us wearing a personal eperb with a locator beacon. In the event that one of us goes over in the night, the eperb would immediately set of an alarm as well as send a distress signal including GPS positioning. By having these plans in place, I no longer fear waking up to find Jason swept overboard.

Getting caught in storms has happened many times to us and can be so frightening. Confidence in our sailing skills, the integrity of our boat and mental relaxation strategies are now how I will prepare to face those fears. Two excellent books that Jason and I have both read are Sailing a Serious Ocean by John Kretschmer and Storm Tactics Handbook by Lin and Larry Pardey.

There are so many scary scenarios that could potentially be a part of our three-year adventure. Sharks, swimming into riptides, being boarded in the night, suddenly taking on water – sometimes when I lie at night in the comfortable safety of our bed in Winnipeg, some of those thoughts do their best to try to get me to want to pull the plug on the trip entirely. I won’t let that happen. I wish so much that there was a guarantee that nothing bad is going to happen to us on our trip, but I just don’t have that luxury. The thing is, none of us have that luxury. Bad things happen. A car accident, a scary health issue or being a victim of crime can happen in our regular life now and things like that already have happened to us to an extent. I have been in a car accident that has sent me to hospital, we have had loved ones who have suffered with illnesses like cancer and one night we had a scary home invasion while all four of were sleeping. When things like that happen, we deal with it the best we can, learn from it and move forward and that is the same thing we will do out on the water. I refuse to let the darkness of fear rob us of living the lightness that is out there waiting for us.

Well, darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear
And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety ’till I sank it
I’m crawling on your shores

Closer to Fine – a song by the Indigo Girls

Navigating homeschooling on a boat

Question – What are your plans to effectively continue Dylan’s education on the boat?

Ensuring that Dylan’s education on our trip continues to meet curriculum requirements is one of our highest priorities. In fact, it is one of the few deal breakers for us. If that piece did not work out, we would stop the trip early and return home. As you would expect that is the last thing we want to have happen so we are preparing thoroughly for success with his schooling. That preparation includes talking with Dylan constantly about our expectations of him when it comes to this essential part of our trip.

Over the years we have followed as many sailing families as we can through books such as Voyaging With Kids – A Guide to Family Life Afloat as well as families with YouTube sailing channels and websites. We are happy to see that there is a community of sailing families who boat school their children out there and we will be doing all we can to search them out in our travels. At times families will come together with educational delivery. This is sometimes done by having one parent teach lessons to kids from several boats who are all at similar education levels. We weren’t surprised to hear that as we already know that sailors are a resourceful group of people, and it is common practice for a sailor go out of their way to help another sailor. Should we find ourselves in an anchorage with other boat schooling families we will likely find that we will follow the same school hours as other families. Much to Dylan’s delight, because we will be teaching him directly, he will only have school in the morning hours. We just simply will be able to get through more by teaching him one on one compared to a teacher who is responsible for educating an entire class. We are planning to have his school days run Monday to Friday from 8:30 AM to noon with a break in the middle of the morning. We read about how sometimes kids on their boats will make a special flag that gets raised up the mast when school in underway in order to communicate to others to not come and disturb them. In those scenarios we are told that it is often seen that as soon as noon hits on school days, you will see kids instantly connecting and heading to shore to play and explore.  

Back in February we met with our wonderful homeschooling liaison officer through Manitoba Education and Training, and she has put us on track to plan and identify which resources we want to use to teach him. On our trip he will be doing his junior high school years – grades six, seven and eight. Although we do not know yet if we will be returning to Manitoba after our trip, we decided early on in this process that we would be following the Manitoba curriculum as that just made sense to us and is what we are obviously familiar with. We are required to teach him the four main subjects: language arts, mathematics, science and social studies. Other areas such as physical education, music, art, languages are optional but encouraged. Each year I will be required to develop and submit a homeschooling program outline as well as progress reports each January and June.

One of the neat parts of our trip is how we are going to be able to incorporate into Dylan’s education so many portions of our daily life while we travel. Jason and I are both quite excited about that.  For example:

Science learning opportunities:

• Weather – Our life will be 100% guided by weather while living on the sailboat. 
• Biology – Diversity of living things is one of the science areas we will be covering. As a scuba diver he will be able to examine and explore marine biology firsthand.
• Astronomy – I love the idea of doing a ‘night school session’ on a clear night out on the water to study things like human conception of the position of Earth in space and how that conception has changed over time. I have always had a fascination with astronomy, and I am excited to also learn along side him!

Math learning opportunities:

• Length, area, volume and angles – These are all items included in the shape and space segment of the math curriculum. There will be many ways that we can relate those teachings through things like sail surfaces and effects of sail trim or by calculating distances travelled.
• Currency – By travelling to different countries we will have many chances have him practice currency conversion to help reinforce some of his newly learned math concepts. 

Social Studies learning opportunities:

• Citizenship – Identity, culture and community are one of the knowledge categories we are to cover. We will be incorporating this into our experiences we will have learning from the various cultures and history of the countries we will visit along the way.
• Geography – Dylan will be very much a part of various route planning as we go. We also want our experiences to teach him not only location mapping but also the different physical features of our world.

Language Arts learning opportunities:

• Writing – We will be encouraging Dylan to document his experiences as much as possible trough journaling and storytelling to further develop his creative writing. I will encourage him to put special attention into areas like, grammar, spelling, character motivation, plot development and symbolism.
• Reading – I have been waiting for a long time to finally see Dylan transition from reading because we tell him to into him developing a love for getting lost in a good book. It has finally happened and just in time! We will ensure he has lots to read for leisure on the boat and I am right now reviewing options for recommended novels for grade 6 and considering My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George as one that I think he would like!

Music/Physical Education/Language learning opportunities:

• Dylan plays guitar and ukulele so we will be bringing those instruments along for him to continue with.
• Swimming and scuba diving are activities he enjoys and is looking forward to doing frequently!
• Although not fluent in French, Jason knows quite a bit and will be taking the lead on teaching him French.

Despite all the educational experiences we will do our best to draw from our travels, we will not be able to cover all the curriculum requirements that way.  I have also selected textbooks and teaching resources to bring for math, science and social studies. In addition, I have purchased a full grade 6 curriculum bundle of assignments and assessments from a fantastic website called https://www.teacherspayteachers.com. I see that website also has a great looking study package for that My Side of the Mountain should I decide on that novel to do with him. Perfect!

As much as possible we will follow a regular school year with summers off as well as break at Christmas and spring break. This means that grade six on the boat will start in September. Severak weeks after that, according to our plan, we will be getting off the Great Lakes and shipping our mast south to begin our adventures motoring down the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers towards the Gulf of Mexico. We plan to motor about 5 hours a day for that leg of our trip which works out perfectly for school. The engine is quite loud when you are down inside the boat with it running. Each day we will not fire up the engine until school has finished for the day at noon and will be stopping to anchor each day around supper time. We do know that there are going to be some days that will work better than others.  There will be days when he won’t feel like doing it, especially when we get to some tough stuff that he will have to work harder at than others. I have told him he had better listen to his teacher those days as she’s in a very serious romantic relationship with the school principal…to which he rolls his eyes at me and groans!

There certainly will be some trial and error with schooling along the way but by the time we hit salt water in Mobile, Alabama, I am hopeful, and fully expecting, that we will have found our groove with the process and be enjoying a consistent routine that works for us all. And if I have it my way – we will be having a lot of fun with it too!

Next time I will answer the question – Aren’t you scared of things like storms, riptides and sharks?