23. The Case of Youth: Laura Dekker, Jessica Watson, and Abby Sunderland
To drive ships commercially with passengers or cargo in nearly all countries you must obtain and earn a license, which is earned from years of experience, a suite of professional training courses, and classroom and practical examinations. But beyond a shortage of cash, there is little stopping a private citizen from buying a recreational boat—the paperwork and licensing in most countries is easier than buying or driving a car. For less than the cost of a camper van, you could today buy a small seaworthy old fiberglass boat, fit the craft out for offshore sailing, and then pull up the anchor and aim across an ocean, regardless of experience, physical or mental fitness—or age.
In 1965 the youngest known sailor to take off to cross an ocean alone was Robin Lee Graham at sixteen years old. Graham had grown up sailing small boats, cruised with his family in their boat in the South Pacific, and had read his Slocum. Although he seemed to care little about this, he held the mark for the youngest solo circumnavigator—he explored the world for five years—until Tania Aebi finished her trip in 1987, also aged twenty-one but about three weeks younger than Graham at her finish line. Several years later, in 1996, another American named Brian Caldwell, who had also spent years cruising with his family, finished a solo non-stop circumnavigation at the age of twenty, sailing in and out of Hawai‘i. (That same year a fourteen-year-old boy named Subaru Takahashi sailed from Japan to California.) In 1999 the Australian Jesse Martin at eighteen became the new youngest person to sail around the world non-stop, which he did via the Southern Ocean. Martin set off after only three hours of solo sailing his boat beforehand. Shortly after Jesse Martin’s voyage, the World Sailing Speed Record Council stopped certifying age and other “human condition” records, such as oldest or youngest, and really any other category beyond speed—not marital status or disability or race, stating that these categories can be expanded endlessly and the verification is “a less exact science.” There had been special concern about encouraging young people, because in order to secure sponsorship and raise money for a boat, it was usually necessary to say they were doing something new or breaking some kind of record.
In 2007 (the same year I sailed in the other direction) an English boy named Michael Perham sailed across the Atlantic to the Caribbean at the age of fourteen; his father sailed behind him in another boat. Perham then set out to sail solo around the world, this time with a major sponsor funding his high-end offshore racing boat. An American teenager named Zac Sunderland was already doing the same, but on a fitted-out pocket cruiser. Sunderland, who had been inspired by growing up reading Robin Lee Graham’s Dove, definitively decided to do the trip after watching Deep Water (2006), a documentary about Donald Crowhurst. Sunderland finished his voyage and held the record for the youngest solo circumnavigator for about a month—until Perham finished, since the teenager from England was sixty-five days younger.
Then during the years 2009 to 2012 three teenaged women from three different countries—Laura Dekker, Jessica Watson, and Abby Sunderland (Zac’s younger sister)—set out to sail around the world alone. All three, at least in part, sought to claim the new record for the youngest person to circumnavigate single-handed. The story of these three teenagers—Dekker, Watson, and Sunderland—is extraordinary in part because the three young women had the further hurdle of social judgment in front of them, even though a handful of young men had already done the same types of voyages. “For women, and young women in particular, risk-taking is something to be avoided,” wrote social science researchers Mike Brown and Dawn Penney, who had found that the general public believes that risk-taking is primarily the “preserve of males.” In each of their books, published shortly after their voyages, Dekker, Watson, and Sunderland’s why-go and what-they-saw reveal a new technological viewpoint and a method of communication that Slocum or even Davison could never have imagined.
Her father bought her a little sailboat at age six, and by age eight, Laura Dekker so regularly won all the youth events that she was no longer allowed to compete against the other kids and had to sail against adults. In her narrative, One Girl One Dream (2013), Dekker explained that at ten years old her father allowed her to go camping alone with just her dog for six weeks. At thirteen, she sailed in a small boat alone from her home in the Netherlands across the North Sea over to England. After she had been there a couple of days at the dock, the police showed up to inquire. Her father was required to fly over, after which he then (legally) allowed her to sail back home by herself.
This was the summer of 2009. The American and British sixteen-year-old boys, Zac Sunderland and Michael Perham, were finishing up their world voyages, and Jessica Watson in Australia, also sixteen, was preparing to leave. Dekker likely saw all this in the news and thought I could do this, too. But she declared later: “I wasn’t looking for fame. I just wanted to sail and be left alone.” Her father helped her get a boat ready, for which Dekker came up with half of the money by working odd jobs. After they went to the Department of Education to register her for the distance school program set up for Dutch kids living abroad, the official leaked their plans to the press. Soon she and her father were overrun by phone calls from journalists and television reporters.
In the footage from the news cameras at the time Laura Dekker looks calm, partly confused, very young, but also maturely, mildly amused by the absurdity of the attention. She wrote in her personal notes at the time that she felt terribly depressed and exhausted by the trials, writing “It’s a good thing I’m a fine actress.” The Dutch Council for Child Protection saw Dekker’s idea primarily in terms of child neglect and seemingly a fear that this might break the compulsory education system in the country. The case about the girl who wanted to sail the world alone received enormous media attention. The Dutch Prime Minister weighed in on television that Dekker had to stay in the country to attend school. The court assigned a guardian (who was male) to keep a close eye on Dekker and make sure she did not try to sail away. The courts sought to evaluate Dekker’s technical competence as a sailor and her emotional, social, and cognitive development. The appointed psychologist found that Laura had an emotional “flatness” and that she “is inclined to operate independently . . . so that friendships take on a somewhat functional character.” She had very little interest in peer approval, the report said, and she “is self-centered and very self-satisfied.” The courts tried to decide whether her father, Dick Dekker, had shown gross negligence by supporting this voyage.
As Laura Dekker lived under surveillance and her case made it through the courts, on the other side of the world, in the early hours of 8 September 2009, Jessica Watson was outbound for a final shakedown cruise aboard Ella’s Pink Lady. Watson was sailing the boat alone from her home port in southern Queensland down to Sydney, which would be her official start. Watson’s parents had taken their four kids to live on a motorboat for a while, but both of them really hoped Jessica would abandon this circumnavigation idea—or at least put it off for a very long while. Yet Jessica had been persistent over the last few years in getting offshore passage experience, seeking expertise, taking training courses, and researching sponsorship. Her parents kept asking experts and people with whom she sailed if they thought Jessica had the stuff to do this. They kept receiving green lights. Against their instinct, they began to help with the business side of things, and Watson’s parents had a trusted friend, a true ocean-sailor and single-hander, who advised her (and them).
Ella’s Pink Lady was a proven rock-solid offshore fiberglass boat design, a thirty-four-foot Sparkman and Stephens, built to cruise anywhere—similar to Teddy Seymour’s boat. It was no coincidence that Watson’s was the exact same design that previous teenagers Brian Caldwell and Jesse Martin had single-handed around the world non-stop. Sailing out of the harbor, the hull painted a glossy pink, Ella’s Pink Lady displayed a mosaic of sponsorship advertisements on the hull and the sails shouted in enormous pink letters the name of the cosmetics sponsor that enabled the final push to get ready.
On this first night out, a little seasick and mentally and physically exhausted from the emotional departure, Watson was thankful that the winds were favorable, the night calm, and the visibility good with some moonlight. At 1:46 in the morning, she looked out at the horizon, set her radar alarms, and went below to catch a short nap. In her book True Spirit, Watson wrote: “A horrible bone-shuddering explosion of noise woke me as Ella’s Pink Lady was suddenly stopped in her tracks and violently spun around. I jumped up as the awful grinding noise continued, and a quick glance up through the companionway told me that we’d collided with something huge: a ship.” The black ship towered over and blocked out the stars. “The roar of the engines filled my head and my whole world.”
Watson hurried out to the tiller and turned off the electronic autopilot, but steering was useless as the boat had already been knocked to port and was now pointing forward as it was “shuddering and screeching” along what she would learn later was the port side of the northbound Silver Yang, a 740-foot-long bulk carrier delivering coal from Australia to China. The ship had not been traveling all that much faster than Ella’s Pink Lady. The officer and the deckhand on watch up in the bridge had, far too late, tried to steer to starboard to avoid the collision. When Watson saw that the hull of Silver Yang was going to clip her spreaders, she rushed below and listened with her hands over her head to the gunshot explosion of her rigging bursting out of its steel chain plates.
Once clear of the ship, Watson searched and saw that she was not sinking. Although most of the rigging was down, the mast had snapped at only about halfway up. Watson called her father on the satellite phone. As they talked, her mother immediately called the Rescue Coordination Center, who then called Watson directly. She confirmed that she was not hurt and did not need assistance. Watson then called the ship, reading its name on the AIS, and finally made contact, confirming she was fine and not sinking. The watch officer did not speak English well. The Silver Yang carried on without stopping.
As revealed by a later official report, both parties were in the wrong here. It was a clear, moonlit night, but Watson missed seeing the dark hull or the ship’s two white masthead lights and single red side light. She also did not see the ship on her radar, nor did she read its name on her AIS, which said how close the ship was. Before going below to nap, Watson checked that her boat’s running lights were on and she set her radar alarms, but these were adjusted to warn of ships crossing circles of four and two miles away; the Silver Yang was already too close at one mile. On her AIS, Watson broadcast only her identification number, not more specifically her boat’s name and the type of vessel she was. She did not have any passive radar reflectors, and she’d forgotten to turn on her electronic radar transponder, a device aloft that increased her visibility on another ship’s radar. None of this is intended to diminish Watson’s seamanship. She was still getting used to her suite of electronics, and lookout in the middle of the night is riddled with challenges and mistakes. It’s very easy in the dark, for example, regardless of how much sleep you’ve had or however preoccupied, to mistake the masthead lights of a ship for a much smaller vessel or even as two stars.
Aboard the Silver Yang meanwhile two presumably well-rested, professional-licensed mariners failed in their duties. The second mate and deckhand, it seems, were chatting to the point of distraction. The officer did not properly observe his radar or his AIS. The two men only saw the single green light of the sailboat visually a few minutes before the collision—assuming at first it was just a fishing boat or an anchored buoy.
In other words, all of the electronic devices on both vessels, through user error by both parties, had failed to avoid the crash. Regardless of any official right of way, international law and custom demands that the watch officer on both vessels identify imminent collisions miles beforehand and try to make contact and take steps to avoid it. The mate of the Silver Yang, aware of the scrape, should have immediately cut his engines and made certain that the small boat was okay before continuing on. Watson had hoped that night to get farther out to sea and out of the shipping lanes, but the wind had been light earlier in the evening. Now she was lucky to be alive. In the previous twenty years, there had been at least thirty-eight collisions or near misses in Australian waters and more than half the time the merchant ship had not stopped to offer help.
After cutting away the torn sail and stabilizing the rigging, Watson began motoring back to port. She somehow suppressed the terror, then the shame, to stay resolved. She later wrote that as she returned to port after this experience she knew then that she was going to be able to accomplish her goal of sailing alone around the world. She had proven to herself that she could respond methodically and sensibly to a crisis. “I am not playing down what happened at all,” she wrote later. “It was terrifying. But after living through it, I had no doubt that I was going to set off on the trip. I was more determined and more focused than ever.”
Watson’s collision made international news and fueled criticism in the Netherlands of Laura Dekker’s plans. Yet once her boat was repaired, Watson set off again to sail single-handed down to Sydney, but this time with family and friends on another boat in company. She then sailed alone out of Sydney harbor, bound north to cross the equator to get more experience in more forgiving waters and to put in enough miles so that this ‘counted’ as a true circumnavigation. By mid-December 2009, after two uneventful months alone at sea, Jessica Watson was barreling southeast, blogging away cheerfully as she prepared for heavy weather and the passing of Cape Horn.
Desperate and frustrated in the Netherlands, on 17 December 2009, Laura Dekker, now fourteen, gathered all her remaining money, then wrote a goodbye note to her dad. Dekker boarded a plane to Saint Martin, the French-Dutch island in the Caribbean, where she had found a suitable boat for sale on the internet. She wrote that she had to use another laptop because the government was spying on hers. Once in Saint Martin, she posed as a seventeen-year-old with a fake name. After reviewing the boat and finding it suitable, she was about to sign the agreement with the broker when the man got a phone call. The Dutch authorities had tracked her down. She was arrested and sent home. Before it was all over, Dekker and her father would be forced to sit in total for six different verdicts from three different courts.
A couple of weeks later in January of 2010 a third teenager, Abby Sunderland, aged sixteen, set out to go around the world alone. From southern California, she, like Watson, wanted to sail around non-stop.
Jessica Watson had rounded Cape Horn by now and was recovering from her worst weather so far, which she encountered in the South Atlantic with gusts of sixty-five knots. Her boat was knocked on its side a few times, including when one massive wave rolled her so far that it buried her mast underwater, bending the steel frames above the cockpit that held her solar panels, twisting part of the railing, and forcing a few splits in the mainsail. She and the boat were bruised, but okay, and now she was charging along again, ever eastbound. In her blog a few days later on Australia Day, after writing how she received a call on her satellite phone from the Australian prime minister, Watson wrote: “P. S. Congratulations times a million to Abby Sunderland for departing on her voyage last Saturday, I know what a challenge it is just to get to the start line. Despite the fact that there seem to be a lot of adults determined to see Abby and me pitted against each other as rivals, I only wish her the best of luck and am totally thrilled that there’s another girl going for the record!”
As it turned out, the starting line had to wait for Abby, because she had steering-gear and electrical problems and had to pull into a port in Mexico. She sailed with two electrical autopilot steering systems only, because a wind-vane self-steering system would not work with her boat’s racing hull. Her father and her support team flew down and fixed the problem. Off she went to start again, southbound for Cape Horn.
Although Sunderland appeared taller and physically stronger than Dekker and Watson, Abby projected on camera a quieter, more passive persona—an ever so slight deer-in-headlights vibe. When she was little, the whole family had cruised in a sailboat for three years along the coast of Mexico. One of their favorite books to read as a family was the story of Robin Lee Graham and Dove. Back home, her father self-published a book of their family adventure as cruisers. As her brother Zac was planning, then sailing on his circumnavigation, Abby was fourteen, helping out—and telling her mother that she wanted to do it, too.
For her “campaign,” as the Sunderlands, Neal Petersen, and other modern racers call a major voyage, Abby was able to secure sponsors. They purchased a high-tech deep-water racing boat named Wild Eyes, with the thinking that if she could sail faster, she might avoid the worst weather, and spend less time in the Southern Ocean. This boat had already been sailed solo around the world by another person, and it was a design that was lightweight but theoretically unsinkable because of its several separate watertight compartments and extra flotation. Part of the reason that Abby aimed to sail solo around the world non-stop, instead of pulling in to ports, was that, as her mother put it in one interview, there was the worry about her as a teenaged girl, “this young blonde thing,” in ports “filled with political unrest, violence.” And there was, too, the matter of moving quickly to be able to set the record as the youngest person to circumnavigate the world alone.
As with Watson and Dekker, people from all over questioned the parents and Abby’s experience and maturity— even though the family had just supported their teenaged son in a safe circumnavigation. The parents opened themselves up to further criticism, because they welcomed a film crew in to observe their family and their seven kids as Abby prepared for her voyage. The idea was that this would be a family reality show about home-schooling, Christian life, and a way to raise children away from, as Abby’s co-author put it, “the electronic cages of Facebook, texting, and video games, and to aspire to achieve great things.” The show never happened, but it was to be titled Adventures in Sunderland.
Abby embraced this idea that to sail around the world alone is an important, laudable feat. Her explanation of her why-go feels like a young Western anthem, a striving for individual prowess in service of a trophy, a dream—which somehow rings slightly different, perhaps unfairly so, from what, say, Davison expressed. In her book Unsinkable: A Young Woman’s Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), Sunderland was sailing southbound toward the equator, getting her sea legs, having success taking care of her engine, when she mused, “It seems like people my age are over-protected today.” She wrote that the “Student of the Week” stickers on the back of minivans are meaningless and that when America was founded, boys her age were running farms, apprenticing in a trade, and going to war, while girls her age were starting families. She questioned the very idea of “teenage years”:
If you belong to a church, you might go on mission trips to foreign countries, which is cool. Other than that, it’s hang out at the mall, surf the Internet, and wait until you’re eighteen to start your life.
As I passed weeks alone at sea, especially when watching amazing sunsets or night skies filled with shooting stars, I was so thankful that my parents trusted me enough, and had enough faith in my abilities, to let me follow my passion and try to do something great, even if I might fail. And it was little successes along the way that changed me, built my confidence, and helped me grow.
Dekker, Watson, and Sunderland all espoused pretty much the same idea, just as did their contemporary male teenaged solo sailors. To sail alone around the world was something awesome, with a somewhat pompous suggestion that every person wanted to do something like this but did not have the courage to pursue their ultimate goals.
“Why are some people strong and others weak?” Laura Dekker wrote later in her account, One Girl One Dream. “Why was I able to fight so hard against the Dutch state to be able to sail, while others don’t pursue their dreams and most just carry on dreaming endlessly?”
On 14 May 2010, Watson returned home to an adoring crowd of thousands of people after her non-stop around the world of 210 days alone. A flotilla of hundreds of boats surrounded Ella’s Pink Lady, with passengers waving and honking and shouting as they all escorted her in. Helicopters whirred overhead. Jessica yelled happily over to her family and from a grocery bag handed over the rail she slurped cold whipped cream right out of the dispenser. When her boat tied up to a pink-carpeted quay at the base of the Sydney Opera House, she stepped off and hugged her parents and sat immediately for speeches, delivered her own, and cried and waved and smiled.
Watson wrote in her book True Spirit that she was timid as a child, the last of her siblings to hop into the sailboat. She also had significant dyslexia growing up, so that it took her a while to read and her spelling remained a challenge. Part of her stated why-go was to prove to herself she could do this and to inspire young people to follow their dreams. She felt stung by being continually underestimated at the docks or elsewhere because she was a young woman. Her mother had once read to her Jesse Martin’s Lionheart, in which the Australian teenager ended his book saying he was just a regular person. “He was someone I could relate to,” Watson wrote, “and it made me wonder . . . Could I do it?”
Watson read more as she grew up. She read her Slocum, her Chichester, her Graham. (Neither Watson, Dekker, or Sunderland mention or seem aware of Ann Davison or Sharon Sites Adams.) Watson reread Lionheart, and she read over and over First Lady (1989) by Kay Cottee, the Australian single-hander and the first woman to sail non-stop around the world. Watson read about the recent racing champion Dame Ellen MacArthur, who a few years before had not only nearly won the Vendée Globe around-the-world race as the youngest ever entrant but later set the record at the time for the fastest solo non-stop trip around the world by anyone.
While out at sea during her circumnavigation, Watson sent a regular blog home. From the start of her voyage she had a gift for storytelling, for delivering a voice that was humble, fun, self-deprecating, and inspiring. Watson wrote about chocolate, her hair, how she liked to talk on the phone. She did not challenge broad stereotypes, seemed even to play with them. For most of Watson’s voyage hers was the most read blog in Australia. She used her satellite phone for twice-daily phone check-ins with her parents, advisors, and weather forecasters. She also called her friends just to chat. She called other single-handers on their boats or ashore, to get their advice or just to connect.
In her blogs Watson embraced the sort of animism so frequently found among solo sailors. She personified her much-loved boat, extolling its sea-kindliness, how they were in this adventure together. She named her wind-vane self-steering gear “Parker,” after the character in the British science-fiction puppet show Thunderbirds who is the butler and chauffeur for the impeccable Lady Penelope. In the show Parker drives a futuristic pink bullet-proof Rolls-Royce convertible. Likening her Parker to “Wilson” the volleyball in Tom Hanks’ movie Cast Away (2000), Watson explained, “I did have some pretty complete conversations with my stuffed-animal crew members and my trusty friend Parker.”
When Jessica Watson stood onstage at the Sydney Opera House that day, she declared: “I’m actually going to disagree with what our Prime Minister has just said, I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who believed in her dream. You don’t have to be anything special, anyone special to achieve something amazing. You just have to have a dream and believe in it, and work hard.”
Jessica Watson’s triumphant return to Sydney was in May 2010. Laura Dekker was still sitting in a courtroom. Abby Sunderland had by then successfully, uneventfully sailed south from Mexico and rounded Cape Horn. Sunderland and her team decided to abandon the non-stop endeavor, however, because her electronics and automatic self-steering gear continued to be unreliable. She stopped in Cape Town, where her team flew out to meet her for an electrical overhaul. It was in Cape Town where Sunderland watched Watson’s return on television. She blogged out her congratulations.
Wild Eyes rejuvenated, Sunderland sailed back out eastbound. It was now the start of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. She rounded Good Hope and sailed into the Indian Ocean, making excellent speed. Within a week conditions deteriorated and then a line got stuck up aloft which stopped her from pulling the mainsail down. If she were to try to free it, she would need to climb aloft in near-storm conditions. She conferenced with her team ashore about what to do. Her mother sent out a group “Urgent Prayer Request” email to help Abby for her climb the following day. But in the morning Sunderland didn’t have to go up after all. As if in answer to their prayers, the line managed to free itself.
A few days later the weather again piped up, with gusts of wind forecast to sixty knots. On 10 June her boat was rolled over on its side. Four times. The mast slammed down into the water, but the boat levered back up again. When the weather seemed to ease off a bit, she set some more sail. Soon after a phone call to her dad about a problem with the engine—she was running out of power to run the autopilots—Sunderland was below when she heard a roar “like a jet engine.” The boat was lifted up. Abby was thrown. The back of her head banged against a set of metal gauges. Wild Eyes rolled over through a complete 360 degrees. Sunderland blacked out for a short period. She remembered later a few seconds when she was lying flat on the roof of her cabin, with tools, the tea kettle, the engine cover falling, attacking, crashing on top of her.
Back upright, regaining her senses, Sunderland saw the cabin was flooded, but the boat was not sinking. She looked on deck and saw the mast snapped and the rigging hanging over the side, like a trampled marionette. Her dodger, the solar panel frames, the wind generators, everything was twisted and broken. Ropes, sails, and rigging were so tangled that she had to use a knife to cut herself out of the cabin to open the companionway hatch.
Sunderland tried to gather herself. Her electronics and her two satellite phones were swamped and useless. She knew her position exactly, however: this was several hundred miles from the nearest land in quite literally one of the roughest, most desolate locations on Earth.
She found the EPIRB. She removed it from its bracket. She prayed to God. The wind and seas were still pounding on deck. She sat there down below, listening to the slosh of water around her feet, wedging herself as the swells bucked and heaved the boat, holding the object that would end her trip and set so much else in motion. She weighed her options. She concluded there was simply no possibility for any kind of jury-rig. She lifted up the plastic flap and activated the signal for rescue. The white box began to flash a little red light in the dark cabin.
“Flipping that switch,” she wrote, “was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
Less than two months later, despite the disastrous news about Sunderland and Wild Eyes, Laura Dekker and her father received a release from the courts in the Netherlands. They wasted little time, leaving the country and sailing south together along the coast of Spain and Portugal in the Canary Current, silent about their intended ports because they weren’t sure if the Dutch authorities might change their minds. A few weeks later, Dekker left alone to cross the Atlantic from Gibraltar aboard Guppy, a forty-foot ketch. Seeing family at each port for assistance and sightseeing, she stopped at the Canary Islands, then the Cape Verdes, from where she sailed uneventfully and quite quickly alone across the Atlantic in seventeen days to Saint Martin, the same Dutch island where she had been arrested. Now she received a warm if cautious welcome.
Dekker argues in her narrative that she chose the harder route of stopping in ports, because she wanted to see the world as she went. It is almost always a safer route to stay in mid-latitudes and travel via the Panama and Suez Canals, thus avoiding the Southern Ocean and the scary capes and their enormous waves, isolation, and the march of weather systems with an endless fetch. But the equatorial route is not necessarily easier. Most sailors feel safer far away from the coasts, away from rocks, coral reefs, shoals, currents, and shipping and fishing traffic near shore. Navigation is easier far out at sea, while approaches to harbors are often the most difficult parts of a voyage, especially if you have to manage this on your own. So there’s a trade-off. Stops in port allow regular maintenance, replenishment of supplies, and the opportunity to rest and recover, but port stops and coastal sailing require a wider range of seamanship skills.
Under the eye of reporters in the harbor of Den Osse, Netherlands, Laura Dekker walks the gangway to her boat Guppy to begin her sail around the world (2010).
Dekker traveled through the Panama Canal, stopped in the Galápagos Islands, then made her way west across the South Pacific. She stopped at ports for a few days at a time, watching the seasons ahead for favorable weather, while mindful of the days ticking by to make sure she could still set the record for the youngest solo circumnavigator, taking longer and longer jumps. She wrote that in Cape Town she needed a security detail and her father to fly in because the Dutch government still did not want her to complete the voyage and claimed she had not kept up with her schoolwork. On 21 January 2012, shunning a return to the Netherlands, Dekker finished her circumnavigation in Saint Martin. She was sixteen years and 123 days old, the youngest solo circumnavigator ever. She still is at the time of this writing.
Tania Aebi wrote the foreword to Dekker’s One Girl One Dream, in which she eloquently expressed the matter of technology and the modern, young single-handed sailor—both the why-go and the what-they-saw:
But, we live in different times, and only seagulls have the luxury of disappearing at sea. Modern sailors are not Bernard Moitessier, sending messages to loved ones with slingshots aimed at passing tankers. They keep daily blogs and use satellite phones to call home. GPS and chart plotters provide up-to-the-minute positions and EPIRBs pinpoint them immediately in the event of a disaster. All this can be a double-edged sword. At the same time that technology has made the high seas feel safer and more accessible to everyone, it also keeps the sailor tethered to land. In the middle of the ocean, Laura was still on stage, and I got the impression that she saw this as a necessary evil, the price she had to pay to fulfill her quest.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the number of hours, days, and weeks of quiet, solitary time that Watson, Sunderland, and Dekker spent sitting in their cockpits looking out at the surface of the sea alone and pondering their smallness on the ocean as they recalibrated the meaning of their lives. Yet as is true for most of us in the twenty-first century, their relationship with the ocean, their sense of patience and knowledge, was quite a different one, from, say, Harry Pidgeon or Ann Davison.
In her writing, for example, Sunderland communicated her ocean world with technological metaphors, “being at sea is like watching the whole world in high-definition,” and watching bright white cumulus clouds was “almost like you’re watching a 3-D movie.” Sunderland flicked the icky squid off her deck, “making as little skin contact as possible.” At the beginning of the trip she enjoyed the dolphins, who seemed to welcome her to the sea and always looked happy. One dolphin swam in front of her boat on the way to Cape Town, when she was feeling down about having to stop, “kind of like he was guiding me, and that cheered me up a little.” At one point she saw a seabird as an agent of God. This was in the Southern Ocean when a bird flew above her mast, after her mom had emailed out the prayer request and just before she saw the stuck rope had freed itself somehow: “It might sound corny or overly religious, or whatever, but maybe God really did send an angel to untangle the line.”
For her part, Laura Dekker’s flying fish were “smelly beasts” and the squid “caused even more mess.” Dekker hated seabirds, which merely represented something to clean up after. As she was reading Moitessier’s The Long Way, she nicknamed a white bird that landed in her cockpit “Messy.” (By the photo and video, this was a red-tailed tropicbird, Phaethon rubricauda.) Dekker tried to feed the bird, but it was not interested in her canned fish, and its droppings splattered on her gear and into the cabin. The seabird stayed on board through the day and even as she came to anchor in Vanuatu. When she returned to the boat after clearing customs, Messy had left. “I can now start cleaning up all the bird shit,” she wrote. Dolphins fare a bit better through Dekker’s eyes (see this page). She was cheered by pods of them, especially once toward the end of her voyage when dolphins appeared for several hours in the middle of rain and squalls.
Jessica Watson’s narrative True Spirit is also mostly focused on the survival and technical aspects of the voyage, but through her blog entries and the backstory and perspective she wrote alongside them (as well as the QR codes linked to onboard video clips), she had among the three teenagers the most interest in the natural world. Watson occasionally offered a blue environmentalist message. She was more sympathetic to the seabirds, for example, berating herself for not bringing a bird identification guide, and she looked forward in particular to the albatrosses during her voyage, their signaling of a change in latitude and their dynamic beauty as part of the character of the Southern Ocean. About a month into the voyage, heading toward the equator in the South Pacific, Watson wrote in her blog:
Tonight I’ve got company out here. Let me introduce you to Silly. He’s a little brown seabird who’s landed on the Sailor 250 satellite dome on the stern of Ella’s Pink Lady. Silly earned his nickname because of his dangerous fascination with the wind generator and his amusing attempts to land on the bendy windvane blade. Even though the wind generator isn’t spinning too fast at the moment, watching him fly so close to it again and again was a little nerve-racking! Anyway, he’s been sitting there for well over three hours now and seems to have made himself quite comfortable perched on the dome.
In addition to Silly, I’ve been seeing a lot of birds out here today, mostly little Jesus petrels and brown gannets (at least that’s what I think they are!), which is kind of surprising as the nearest island is about 200 nautical miles away.
Trying to fish she nearly killed a bird that hooked itself on her line, about which she felt terrible and it put her off fishing for several weeks. Later, Watson was able to catch a tuna, and she had a go, too, at cooking calamari with the squid that ended up on deck. And dolphins perked her up as well when she was feeling down.
Most significantly in terms of environmentalism, in True Spirit Watson comments on ocean plastics. She explains that on her voyage all non-biodegradable garbage was compressed and packed up for the end of the trip. While sailing in the South Atlantic she saw a lot of plastic garbage floating by. “It looks so out of place and ugly drifting by on the swell,” she blogged. “So I’ve resolved to put a lot more effort into refusing plastic bags and using less plastic when I get home.” Later, as she was approaching Western Australia, Watson wrote in her commentary about how having to collect all her garbage for the voyage in one place made her think carefully about consumer waste when ashore. She explained how her fellow Australian single-hander Ian Kiernan, who completed the BOC around the world race in 1986–7, returned home to report how much garbage he saw en route, inspiring him to co-found the nonprofit Clean Up Australia, which organized a Clean Up Sydney Harbour Day. This grew into a worldwide campaign, Clean Up the World, now organizing cleanups in 120 different countries. Watson cheered: “From little things big things grow!”
At first Abby Sunderland’s parents assumed that the EPIRB had gone off by mistake. They had just spoken to their daughter on the phone thirty minutes before and conditions sounded as if they were improving. But the US Coast Guard rescue response operator explained that the boat’s EPIRB had been manually activated, as had her smaller personal EPIRB.
Abby, with no communication at all, as Wild Eyes lay ahull in large seas, could only at first try to nap and stay warm. Although she saw the EPIRB bulb flashing, she could not be sure if this message was received anywhere. And if it were, how long would it be until rescue came? She tended to a gash on her foot, stabilized the boat and tidied the mess on deck as best as she could, and then tried to bail out the water. She tried unsuccessfully to get the engine going.
Yet everything would work out perfectly from a communication and operations standpoint. It was, in fact, a model rescue, something astounding even in the twenty-first century. A large industrial fishing vessel happened to be on the way to Kerguelen Island. It diverted its course toward Abby’s location. Meanwhile, the Australian authorities chartered a large aircraft and sent their own search-and-rescue staff and a dozen volunteer “spotters.” From Perth they flew for six hours and due to a fortunate break in the clouds saw Wild Eyes exactly where the boat was reported to be. Sunderland was able to speak to them on her VHF radio. They explained that a fishing vessel would be there in about twenty-four hours. The plane then returned to Perth to refuel. She assembled a bag and waited.
After her boat Wild Eyes was dismasted by a rogue wave, Abby Sunderland stands by for rescue in the middle of the Indian Ocean (2010).
A little over a day later, Sunderland was rescued from the middle of the Indian Ocean. They abandoned Wild Eyes. (Eight years later fishermen would find the hull, still floating, off the coast of southwestern Australia.)
Once home in California, the Sunderland family repelled the photographers and news trucks outside their house, deciding to hold a news conference the very next morning. That same day, going into labor during the press conference, her mother gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named Jean-Paul after the captain of the fishing vessel. Soon Abby, her brother Zac, and her father appeared on the television news shows. Her father deflected criticism for the cost of the rescue operation to the Australian taxpayers. As Abby sat there, her father answered questions: had the whole operation been too dangerous from the beginning? Should his family help offset the rescue fees? And even, had he and his wife pushed Abby for the purpose of selling the reality TV show? Abby kept a brave, composed face during these interviews. She spoke of still loving sailing, the unfortunate nature of the rogue wave, and that she was proud of what she had accomplished. She had after all, at sixteen years old, sailed from Mexico to South Africa via Cape Horn, alone.