Dutch courts have cleared the way for another teenage girl to attempt to sail around the world. A few months ago, 16-year-old Californian Abby Sunderland was located and rescued at Australian and French taxpayer expense adrift in the Indian Ocean, and 16-year-old Jessica Watson of Australia recently broke the world record for youngest person to sail around the world.
Today, sailboats are largely automated and require little physical effort. Additionally, instruments and global positioning devices are so sophisticated that reckoning is essentially obsolete, so it isn’t all that much of a stretch to have little girls sailing around the world. In fact, I wouldn’t even be all that surprised to see a well-trained monkey pull it off.
However, hazards are still involved, not the least of which is the threat of piracy. If some Somali or Indonesian pirates got their hands on this girl, I guarantee that they could pull down an enormous ransom, because, after all, it’s already been proven that the entire Western world will open its coffers to save some white girl who strays into dangerous waters.
Ms. Drekker isn’t too worried about pirates, saying, “they don’t attack yachts so much. If you’re in a convoy you should be OK.” She also makes light of the threat, flying the Jolly Roger from her mast, and considering a route that would take her through the Gulf of Aden, which is crawling with pirates.
Pirates aside, there is this thing called weather, and it can be a real bitch. In fact, it’s so mean that it doesn’t even care about teen girls — just ask Abby Sunderland, whose mast was snapped off after she sailed into a storm. However, little Laura Dekker’s chances of success aren’t all that bad, and if she fails some armada will surely come to her rescue.
Despite the willingness of Western fleets to intervene in these ventures when things go wrong, as a parent I still don’t care for the idea of sending children off alone on the high seas. If one of my kids said they wanted to do this at 14 I’d simply say “no” and leave it at that — even if I had a great deal of money, as Ms. Drekker’s parents must.
For all the money spent on setting these little princesses to sail, I wonder why we can’t give some boy an opportunity to go to space. I know that sailing, old and quaint as it is, comes off as romantic for the girls, but I can think of about a billion boys who would give anything they had to be launched into orbit. However, given the contemporary political climate, they’d probably choose a girl for that as well.
