Sailing For Home

The young and the restless have always sought to put space between themselves and their parents, to absent themselves from the stultifying and ego-stunting care of parents anxious for the well-being of their offspring. Independence, freedom to do as they wish, represents the allure of setting off on their own. And then there is also the more unusual occurrences of young people venturing off on their own, with the prefix 'ad' for full measure. In some instances the 'ad' resulting from parents advocating that their children undertake extreme adventures.

This unusual approach surely represents adults living through the promise of their children. Parents grooming children to become what they themselves could not, or were not able to. Exposing children to exciting opportunities and encouraging them to acquire expertise to achieve celebrity. A status that would reflect luminously on the parents, proud of their child's achievement. The parents, like a succubus, living off the child. And the child anxious to please, secure and confident through the parents' encouragement.

Seventeen-year-old Mike Perham, the British youth whose father introduced him to sailing at the age of seven, became the youngest person to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in 2007 at the age of 14. He has just now ended his solo round-the-globe voyage of nine months, taking his yacht on the 38,700-km trip. Throughout his time at sea he contended with technical problems, necessitating that he make port in Portugal, Grand Canaries, Cape Town, Tasmania and Auckland for vessel repairs.

Obviously this is not an adventure for the impoverished youth seeking to assuage boredom. Nor for the adventure-averse, home-body. "The low points are when things go wrong unexpectedly and it is down to you to fix it, because that's not getting you nearer to home, that's only getting you further away", he explained in a BBC interview. His sail ripped from top to bottom, and he'd had to swim under his Open 50 yacht's hull to cut a jammed spinnaker sheet free.

He was imbued with a sense of inevitability; that he would be able to complete his trip, but he was assailed, he admitted, from time to time, with wondering why he was doing what he set out to do. If he questioned the purpose of his adventure to himself, this was surely because it made little practical sense, and even the sense of adventure palled and paled when he found himself on his own, impossibly responsible for his survival, at age 16.

He set out to sail around the world. He was groomed to do this by his doting parents. Who obviously held notoriety for themselves, celebrity for their son, in greater esteem than the worrying potential of his loss at sea. As for the young Briton, he set out to explore and adventure and to satisfy his parents' dream for themselves through his ordeal. He persisted and he dealt with adversity, and he informed himself that "you push on and you handle it".

Victory lay in his arriving home, safe and sound. From the moment he set out on his voyage that was his goal, to reach home.