Aspiring to anything out of the ordinary is stupid.
Better to live as a vegetable and be safe. Or at least think you are.
She only was able to do this because of her parents. So if she dies it is their responsibility to live with her death.
She’s a 16 year old child.
It was a stupid idea for her parents to let her do it.
I admire her courage. The future belongs to the bold and the daring.
I live vegetable is better than a dead adventurer. Would you let your 16 year old sail around the world alone?
Yes, courage and boldness are to be admired, absolutely. But this girl is 16, a minor—her parents should have stopped this.
Better to live as a vegetable and be safe. Or at least think you are.
Hear, hear!!
Prayers inbound for this brave young girl.
Aspiring to anything out of the ordinary is stupid. The question is 16 really old enough to do this sort of thing. In most states you are not considered old enough to have sex, drink beer or drive without supervision at 16. In general those are good rules.
In the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld: "it's not the unknowns we know, it's the unknowns we don't know that get us".
When you are 16 everything is an unknown you don't know. I would suggest that she really didn't have enough sailing experience to take on this trip. It's a trip that you should have a decade of serious off shore passagemaking under your belt before attempting.
It is also worth considering "am I willing to die now". It's a lot less sad to die at 53 doing dare-devil stunts (Like Jeff Fossett, a hero of mine) than doing them at 16 when you really do have your whole life ahead of you.
If it were my kid I would have said no. But no matter what I still have to respect her spunk and bravery. And hope she does well. I just think it was way bigger and harder than she imagined.
So does that make you a squash or cucumber?
Ok, you may want to think a little harder on this. I always challenged my daughter to live life to the fullest. She could surf and sail by the time she was eight. She was doing long competitive open water ocean swims when she was twelve. However, allowing your 16 y/o child to attempt a solo circumnavigation is child endangerment. In fact it is really worse than that because it is not simply negligence, it requires the willful participation of some very disturbed adults.
You can live in your cocoon if you desire, but others will continue to aspire to things out of the ordinary...
...hopefully, at the appropriate time in their life.
The problem we have today is the nanny-staters wanting all risk eliminated, and life confined to the safe harbors where nothing ever happens, and life stagnates.
Prayers up for this brave girl. If the Fates have snipped her thread, then she went out doing it her way. If not, I hope she has many more adventures in store.
How brave you are! You can do what you like with your own adult life but parents have no right to place a 16-year-old into a situation like that. Hopefully they'll be charged with child endangerment.
I admire people who can take responsibility for themselves and choose to take risks. But encouraging a child to attempt this is insane.
It was all about the "record" of being the youngest and nothing else.......
Hopefully all will turn out well. If not then her parents can take solace in the fact that their daughter "lived her life to the fullest"....yea, the mere two or three years in which a child starts becoming aware of their life........and if she is dead, here's another thought: she never got to experience the joy of her high school graduation or a prom.
If this young girl has died, and I hope to God she hasn't, the blame rests entirely on her self absorbed parents whose only thought was to put their 16 year old daughter in the history books.
Living with the fact that they were responsible for her death is not enough, they should be prosecuted for stupidity if nothing else........
Thank you for saying it better than I could. The world is running out of adventurers.