For everything we love about sailing, it is possibly one of the equipment-intensive (read, faff-intensive) sports out there. Add kids and all their energy to the mix, and that can be hard to juggle…
All that tinkering with ropes, blocks and so on can take up time; even just rigging and getting ready to launch. Kids generally just want to get going – and let’s be honest, the same is true for many grown-ups too. Boat bimbling with kids in tow isn’t necessarily the most enticing prospect.
In an ideal world, we’d arrive at the boat park and pop our dinghy into the water straight away with minimum fuss. The kids would have their little jobs like doing up the cover clips they can easily help with, and you’d launch/recover with minimum fuss. That’s the dream…
But any equipment-intensive sport like sailing has an element of faff, and there’s bound to be jobs that need your attention once in a while. The problem is, young children need your attention too!
So how do you balance the two? Should you even try?!
Well, boat maintenance is necessary to keep your family safe and happy on the water so – unless you’re chartering – it needs doing at some point.
One obvious solution is to take advantage of kids being in bed/at other activities/with the grandparents and do all the jobs then. But sometimes this isn’t feasible. Other times there’s something that can’t wait and that needs fixing there and then. Or it’s ‘just’ a 15-minute job that needs doing before you can get afloat – but that 15 minutes always seems much longer when you have restless kids in tow who are anxious to go sailing.
Why involve children in boat prep?
Whether it’s a task that’s planned or an impromptu necessity, my view is that it’s great to involve the kids in ‘helping’ if at all possible, providing it’s safe and appropriate to do so of course. Gel coating with a pre-schooler is certainly not wise, but there are plenty of little ways youngsters can help – or at the very least, be allowed to ‘think’ they are helping, which is the important thing here.
I think of sailing as a sport for life, and building an understanding of why and how we look after our boat and equipment is an integral part of that. So it’s a conscious decision for us that we do involve our two young children in simple tasks when rigging and de-rigging the boat, and equally when there is boat bimbling to be done. This means being fairly inventive at times, and certainly would not stretch to include any major or dangerous job!
And yes, I’ll be honest, there are definitely times when you spend more time chasing, cajoling and dishing out snacks, and it’s not completely unknown for me to give in and let them spend a bit of time on their tablets – but on the whole, I think involving kids in boat prep can be a really positive thing.
It can mean thinking on your feet, or ideally having a go-to list of little jobs in mind, but getting them involved helps them to:
- Learn about parts of a boat and how they work
- Develop responsibility and, ultimately, independence
- Feel a sense of achievement and pride that they have contributed to/completed a task
For us, it also means both grown-ups can be there to pitch in equally on boat jobs and child care – especially useful when two pairs of hands are needed for jobs like stepping a mast, for example.
What boat prep tasks have we found easy to get young kids involved with?
1. Cleaning
A job that always needs doing! When we first acquired Squiggles the 2000, she hadn’t been sailed for a good six years or more. Even before our first sail she needed a good clean. The entire of the inside was obscured by mildew, even moss in some places. It took a serious amount of pressure washing to restore.
The kids meanwhile were delighted with a bucket and sponge each, scrubbing the easy-to-reach parts of the hull and transom – even our then two-year-old. It truly was a family effort, and by the end we all had a sense of pride that we’d restored Squiggles to a shine.
2. Labelling
Again, with any water sports, there is always something or other that needs labelling. Our five-year-old was delighted when we gave her free reign with a permanent marker – about the only time we’d ever let this happen; at home our kids are only ever trusted with washable pens! Sail bags, cover, rudder – she was asked to write our boat name and number in her neatest writing. The result is some very unique graffiti – but you can certainly pick out what’s ours in a busy boat park! Or why not give them a marker pen and some lengths of electrical tape and ask them to make labels for the names of parts of the boat.
3. Sorting stuff
This is the kind of task that most young kids love – whether something actually needs sorting or not! Give them your spares box and ask them to group all the similar items together, or perhaps arrange them by size order. With younger kids you may need to be a bit more specific – can you find me the biggest shackle? Some red rope? Three bits of elastic? Granted, this can go one of two ways and by the end of the day you could either have an immaculately organised spares box (the dream) – or a whole lot of extra tidying to do (more likely the reality). In any case, the kids feel like they have contributed and along the way they will have spent valuable time becoming familiar with bits and bobs of equipment.
4. Ropes and rigging
How often have you been trying to reach something only to not quite have hands small enough to reach, so you end up fruitlessly poking around with the end of a screwdriver instead. It’s a frustrating scenario. Having a pair of small hands, erm, on hand when you’re doing dedicated rigging jobs can come in really useful, as our five-year-old proved when we were mousing a new halyard on an SB20 mast – her fingers were small enough to reach into the foot of the mast and grab an errant rope. She was delighted to have helped. Another time, she helped rig up the new sail control systems on Squiggles. It took a lot of guidance, but with a bit of direction, this sort of job is great for young kids – even if it is as simple as practising figure of eight knots in the end of all the sheets. And think of all the fine motor skills they are honing too!
5. Make a list
Another job kids love doing! Have them write down a to-do list, maybe list a spares inventory, or perhaps a list of things that need buying from the chandlers. Encourage them to identify what needs to go on the list, and then take responsibility for, or at least help with, any action items.
At the end of the day, keeping kids’ focussed when there’s jobs to be done isn’t always easy, the last thing you want to do is force them into helping because that is likely to be counter-productive in the longer term. But gentle encouragement and age-appropriate tasks can mean everyone can take pride in contributing. So why not give it a go?
Happy boat bimbling!
