Sail-World.com : Glad to be Home - Sailing Grieves tell their Story
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Glad to be Home - Sailing Grieves tell their Story |
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'Guy and Juliet Grieve with sons Ocar and Luke, photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk'
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Are you tired of reading all those stories of cruising couples who break the ties, go sailing and never regret it? How fantastic it is for families, especially for the children, to experience the joys and freedoms of cruising, using distance learning? Well, you'll be glad to know there IS another side to the story - that some families are ambivalent about it, and don't mind telling you why.
Ten months ago, the Grieve family – Guy and Juliet and their children Oscar, then 7, and Luke, 4, – left their home in Scotland for the Caribbean on what was to be the trip of a lifetime. The plan was to pick up a 41ft yacht in the Dutch Antilles, sail it around the islands, then up the east coat of North America to New York before heading home across the North Atlantic.
However, when the family reached New York, a difficult decision was made - for Juliet, Oscar and Luke to fly home, leaving Guy to sail the Atlantic with another crew, David. (See Sail-World story )
After crossing the Atlantic with an unscheduled stop in Ireland, Guy has finally arrived home in Mull. Here, each of the adult Grieves relive the separate highs and lows of their epic trip, their different reactions, and the experiences they encountered in taking their children to sea.
Guy Grieve - Why I am glad the sailing adventure is over:
I hoped that our time at sea would do good things for my family; reminding us of just how small we are, and the importance of getting as close as we can to nature and, in turn, each other.
At first I hated it. I suffered, more than anyone else, from seasickness, and it was hard to keep positive when every day I faced challenges that filled me with a debilitating fear of failure. Yet gradually as each hurdle was crossed I grew more confident, and began to revel in the freedom of being self-sufficient at sea.
The rediscovery of life on land has been fascinating. A friend telephoned and asked how it felt to be home. “Well, at least I can whistle again,” I said. We laughed at how superstitions can take hold. I was not at all superstitious before I left Halifax and thus, to the horror of David, my crewmate, not only did we depart on a Friday (very unlucky) but I then spent days whistling on watch. It was surely this irresponsible behaviour that led to us being caught by a severe gale which turned into a storm.
Of course our reactions to being back safe and sound are dwarfed by the effect this great journey has had on our two brave little boys. If Juliet and I felt so small in the face of it all, how on earth did Oscar and Luke feel when they found themselves engulfed in big weather, or having to face another endless day at sea surrounded by nothing but sky and water? But somehow they managed to keep themselves happy when Juliet and I were too busy to reassure, amuse or simply explain things to them.
The boys learned quickly about the importance of self-preservation: that cabin door could slam shut; that jib sheet in a coil in the cockpit could wrap around your leg and rip your young life into oblivion. And all around was the great menace of the ocean, waiting to trip us up. All of this terrified Juliet and me, and if we were wiser people we might have stayed at home.
Having found ourselves in this situation, however, we had to teach the boys how to deal with it. Politically correct parents might not have liked the way we taught the boys, but the dangers were so serious that at times we had no option but to grab our children and to hold them tightly while an important lesson was learnt.
Once, I took Oscar snorkelling on a remote reef. Beneath us, I spotted an immense eagle ray. I pulled Oscar closer and pointed to it, expecting him to remember our rule that all animals should be watched from a respectful distance. Before I could stop him, he was heading towards the ray with his hand outstretched.
Eagle rays have a long tail, tipped with a venomous barb. I shot down, pulled him away hard and brought him roughly to the surface. I shouted at him and then swum him over to the dinghy and told him to get in. The next day I could see that, although he was the same happy little thing underwater, there was a new note of caution. A lesson had been learnt and a boy’s respect for the world around him grown another ring.
There is so much I could write on the effect our journey has had upon the fabric of our family life. Yet it feels good that it has come to an end. The boys needed to be back on land. In a boat, everything children do has to be controlled by an adult. Our boys needed the chance to be free of us and to gain control of something that could be entirely defined by them, even it was just a hidden spot in the bracken.
As for Juliet and I? I believe a man is only half effective without the complementing skills of a woman, and this is even more the case on a boat. Her great sense of order and ability to make a home wherever we were lay at the root of our real happiness. This of course is the first rule of being happy in the great outdoors: before one does anything a good camp has to be made. We were also lucky to have found Forever, a great boat who never let us down, no matter how often I came close to chuffing it all up.
Juliet Grieve - Why I would do it again at the drop of a hat:
Two weeks ago I received a call on my mobile phone as I browsed in the village shop.
“Juliet?” A crisp, efficient female voice, authoritarian, unknown.
“Yes?” I was immediately wary.
“This is the Headquarters of the Coastguard at Falmouth.”
This was the moment I’d been dreading. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead and I put my shopping basket down. “Is Guy okay?”
“Yes. He’s in a storm, but he’s all right. We just wanted to make sure we could get in contact with you if need be. Keep your mobile on.”
I drove back from the shop in an agony of worry mixed with relief that the children were safe at home. We had flown back from New York in mid-July, leaving Guy to bring the boat back to Scotland without us.
It was a big disappointment for me not to cross the Atlantic and it felt awful to be separated from Guy, having done the whole journey together. But our decision was entirely the right one, as Guy and David were hit by gale after gale. During the night I would lie in bed, listening to the wind and rain, deeply worried for my husband but heartily grateful that my children were safe in their beds.
Over the last nine months we have snorkelled on pristine reefs, beachcombed in the remote Islas los Roques in Venezuela, fished on deserted creeks on the Chesapeake Bay. We have swum with turtles, surfed with dolphins, watched sperm whales calving and leatherback turtles burying their eggs. I know we have fostered in our children a sense of wonder at nature’s bounty and a duty of care.
On the down side, we have experienced the fear and vulnerability of being alone in the middle of the vast ocean with no place to hide as storms rolled in. We have been confronted with the fear of falling overboard in the night, and have had brushes with the scariest creatures of all: desperate men.
Pulling Oscar out of school seemed like a big risk at the time (Luke hadn’t yet started) but we planned to home-school on board. Though it wasn’t always easy (Oscar would invariably be overcome by heat exhaustion when the textbooks appeared), he seems to have kept up with his peers. I hesitate to sound like one of those awful competitive mothers, but it is unarguably true that a period away from TV forced him to turn to books for entertainment, and during our time away he worked his way through Harry Potter and the Spiderwick Chronicles. In place of maths he learned to steer by the compass and work out distances from the chart. The benefits in terms of life experience were vast.
One of the biggest challenges we all had to face was living in such close confinement, with very little space or time to oneself. Luke would go forward to the bowsprit when he needed to be alone; Oscar would retreat to his cabin with a book.
For Guy and I there was no escape, and there were testing times, when the engine was giving trouble, the heat was oppressive and the kids were at war.
I still have flashbacks of winching Guy perilously up the mast to retrieve a halyard which Luke had let fly, and watching him launch himself into the Atlantic in a three-knot current to cut free a fishing line that had snagged the propeller. Numerous rescue missions had to be launched for toys or pieces of equipment that had been dropped overboard, and fishing lures had endlessly to be retrieved from sails, other people’s boats and, not infrequently, each other.
Living on a boat with young children is a serious exercise in patience, and we didn’t always come up to the mark. Nevertheless, it was joyful to live so closely, to eat, sleep and play simply together in a way that is rare in today’s fast-moving world. All my hopes for this journey were fulfilled and more, and I would do it again at the drop of a hat.
by Juliet and Guy Grieve, Telegraph/Sail-World
8:45 PM Sun 7 Sep 2008 GMT
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