START 'EM YOUNG!

Liz Hammick Scott

An amazing change has come over Lone Rival, and it's all due to our new crew member, eleven month old Chloe, making her first ocean passage from Bermuda to Newport on the second leg of the Bermuda 1-2 Race. We worried about how she'd take to it -- no problem! It's how we take to it that's in question. Gone are the days when we each finished our sight-taking, sail changing, cooking or whatever and leapt back into our bunks with that great novel we'd been meaning to read for three years, or me with the tapestry I'd been given a decade ago. Now we spend our time off watch sitting on the cabin sole re-winding swimming Snoopy for the sixteenth time, re-reading Spot looks at the weather or just following Chloe around as she climbs everything, trying to stand up. Jimmy Buffett's music has been replaced by Raffi tapes - jolly tunes about baby whales and frustrated giraffes by the under-fives' own folk singer. We crunch over broken, half-chewed pretzels, slide on puddles when she's nappy (diaper) less, and straighten out crumpled plotting sheets she's grabbed in a split second when on our knees at the chart table.

We're back to astro for this trip, inspired by a special prize for the Bermuda 1-2 entrant who uses celestial navigation rather than GPS or satnav, and it's great fun -- years of pressing satnav buttons had made us lazy. Actually it was the comment in the rules that stated `navigation by sextant alone probably isn't practical these days' that got us indignant enough to dust off Mark's Zeiss Yachtsman and dig out the almanac. But I must admit to losing my train of thought completely when Chloe peed all over my knees.

We showed her her first (dead) flying fish yesterday. She was so excited she squeezed it until its eyes popped out. As I wiped the scales and gunge from her hands we decided to end this sort of game until she's older. Lone Rival's lockers have changed too. Now they contain tins of powdered baby milk and numerous jars of baby food -- all a sort of brown colour, with enticing names like `Turkey Dinner' and `Vanilla Desert'. She eats them to please us but has discovered the more interesting flavours of potato crisps (chips) and chocolate. She still loves her apple juice (gallons of that stowed away) and enjoys crawling down the quarter berth to pull out some of the seventy disposable nappies.

Back home in New York City, in an attempt to save money and be green, I wash cloth diapers (and dry them on a line on the roof, to the amazement of the neighbours) but here, disposables are the only option. Dropping them overboard is out, of course, so our garbage bag has an interesting aroma. Is it any better to take them hundreds of miles to shore only to go in a landfill? It reminds me of a friend who carefully saved his garbage on an Atlantic crossing, only to discover that the locals in the Caribbean island of his landfall threw all their rubbish over the cliff into the sea. Or the harbour master in Indonesia who, on being asked where we should put our garbage, replied `Throw it in the harbour' (we didn't).

One benefit of taking part in a race, however uncompetitively, is that the rules focus one's mind on safety equipment. Chloe is convinced that the soft-wood plugs attached to every seacock are there for her to chew on, and she regularly checks out the ones which she can reach through convenient holes. But her greatest fascination is for the chrome ring-pulls on the small inspection hatches which dot the cabin sole giving access to the watertank, bilges etc. These are wonderful for little fingers to play with.

Even when bad weather hit us Chloe remained cheerful and curious. I must admit to having been a bit nervous about her first passage, but it's been a great success. We knew we'd got a real crew-member when a dollop of seawater came down the slightly-open centre hatch and sprayed the pilot berth and Chloe's face. In unison with our yells of "Oh s--t" she gave a cry of surprise and annoyance, then rolled over and went back to sleep. She'll do!