Boat International - July 2018

http://www.boatinternational.com | July 2018

Home schooling, or yacht schooling, can make

globe-trotting a life-changing experience for

the whole family, says Cécile Gauert

W

hat if your children could pack their

memory banks with close encounters

with 40 tonne whales, descendants of

Fletcher Christian or Second World War

wrecks? These are some of the rewards

for trading a brick-and-mortar classroom

for the world, an experience that Alan and Ashley Dabbiere

and their children recently enjoyed when they did their own

semester at sea aboard the CRN Constance (a trip that won them

the Voyager’s Award at this year’s World Superyacht Awards).

“The amazing thing is that every one of my children came back

with a passion,” Alan says. “My daughter passionate about diving,

one of my sons about photography, another about fishing, and the

youngest wants to be a naturalist and fell in love with birdwatching.

You want your kids to be passionate early, because passion is what

drives you through your life.”

Home schooling appears to be a growing trend all around the

world. “In general, more people are looking for greater flexibility

and greater options. Learning outside the traditional classroom is

what parents are looking for,” says Susan Fancher, a marketing

consultant for Calvert Education in the US, one of the sources for

accredited curricula.

Calvert Education was one of the

resources Delisa and Tony Mayer turned

to when they got ready to take a 15-month

journey. In late 2013 they headed to the

South Pacific on 42 metre The Big Blue

with daughter Alexandra (then in seventh

grade) and her twin brothers Justin and

Nicholas, who are 18 months younger. On

board, the children had structured

classroom time with a teacher – 8am to

midday four days a week, which put them

ahead of their school curriculum halfway through the year.

Meanwhile, their time on shore exposed them to very diferent

ways of life. “So many of the people we would encounter spent time

just looking for water,” Delisa says. Alexandra, now 17, says: “I

would be studying World War Two early in the morning only to later

go diving on a World War Two wreck. Everything in the textbooks

I could apply in the places around me.”

To round out the experience, the children learned about the boat

and the crew’s roles. “I did not want my children to have silver

spoons in their mouths,” Delisa says. From the stews, they learned

how to fold laundry and keep inventory; from the engineer they

learned about osmosis, generators and water filters; and from the

bosun how to drive the dinghies. When the Mayers discovered that

the chef had been a maths teacher, they asked him to take over the

maths curriculum. In his galley, the children learned practical

applications that made them better students. After the journey, the

children are taking advanced placement maths classes, remain on

the honour rolls, and Alexandra, now a passionate diver, got into

all the colleges she was interested in.

A set school schedule was also a must aboard the 37.5 metre

Fitzroy sailing yacht Escapade. Before their multi-year adventure,

the owners placed an ad in the Financial Times, interviewed

candidates and hired teachers to oversee the education

of their young son while they sailed from New Zealand

to the Mergui islands of Myanmar, then east across the

Pacific to Pitcairn and on to South America and the

Magellan Strait. Whenever conditions allowed (they did

not always as some of the passages were rough), their

son reported to his classroom dressed in his school

uniform for daily lessons with his teacher. “The set

times were 8am to 12.30 with a half hour pause around

10am. He had to follow that; we thought otherwise there

was too much risk that it would become a three-year

The world

is your

classroom

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES

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