Laura Dekker - Youngest Circumnavigator to Sail Alone Around the World

so Laura Decker story was a worldwide story and many of you may have noticed it at the time a 14 year old girl in Holland decides she wants to sail around the world alone and the Child Protection authorities in her country moved to stop her there are parents of course the father is for it the mother is ambivalent mostly negative it goes to court she pursues the issue all the way to the court and eventually the court decides to let her go so we've had many child geniuses on this stage precocious children mostly musicians the occasional mathematician but to see that kind of zeal and that kind of natural bravery and talent applied to solo sailing that's something entirely more rare and this is Laura Dekker all right so time is gone um to be saying this I find this a lot more scary than crossing the ocean um so just to give myself a moment to get some breath I'm going to start with a short video oh well that was not Oh 104 Bink I can Oh and fan dancing as fast as I can yeah ah lose a dick and we are told if I don't shake hairspray outsiders called fecal disrespect all exciting my big day and air and then the day shake fees and even leave dancing as fast as I can dancing as I can and all right oh man I'm not good at this aha okay that's where I want to start right so this is not my boat it's my parents boat I figured really the only way to describe by I wanted to do this is to start with my parents my parents are not like really normal they're kind of insane actually um my dad started building his boat when he was 16 years old and finished at 22 he then met my mother they married and they sailed around the world in New Zealand I was born and we continued after two years from New Zealand on the boat we always lived on the boat and we stopped a lot along the way my mum working as a street performer with here like snakes but mostly she did clown for birthday parties and things like that and my dad is a boat builder so we went through Australia Indonesia where my mom got pregnant again and they flew to Germany where my sister Kim was born who is now 15 years old and works in a circus she doesn't like sailing neither does my mom she still sailed around the world for several years I don't know why um she said she just liked traveling but not sailing so um she works in the circus in in in summer holidays she's still in school but yeah crazy parents make crazy kids I guess so my dad wasn't quite over building boats this is his new project which he started when I was six he started building this from scratch made two drawings it's um it's a replica of another ship and he started from literally a huge pile of wood and after two years it was this and now it's this again he started when I was six and this is now it's supposed to be a sailboat from that she's just putting it out there I got inspired and started building my own bow too so this is me at the age of six my first bow to Bill and myself I started like this and it became that which is a little bit more advanced I sailed this across the river to the other sides which at the time seemed like a huge challenge from there I advanced to a little bit of bigger boat which I got through a friend fix it up and I did first racing competitions with this it's a two-man boat so I wasn't allowed to sail at single-handed in races mostly because I won all the time and they just said that it was the fold that I was singling on my own so that's why my dog is there I sailed with my dog and they allowed this because he waits pretty much the same as me so and we still want it was great and he kept sailing with me and this is a boat that was about from my dad's boss and I asked him if I could sail it and he said yeah if you clean it up take care of it you can sail it so it did and I started really loving going further so I got money and I bought myself this boat now many people go like where the hell do you get this money just to say this I was born in a very poor family by my parents worked very hard for every bit of money they had but I chose to not keep the money that chose to work a bit and travel which is what I do and for this boat I worked very hard from the age of 8 through 11 I cleaned shops every day after school I did newspapers at some stations I even rode a unicycle around in the city during performances and things like that so yes I bought this boat on my own for my own money at the age of 11 yeah it gets better so then I decided I wanted to sail to England I'd sailed all around Holland in my summer holidays for seven weeks on my own with the dog and England was the next big challenge I did this at the age of 13 and then decided it was a good idea not to tell anybody about this because I had a sense that I would not agree with it sir arrived in England and after a few days to police was kind of wandering with this little girl and her boat was doing and just started questioning me and calling my dad who surprisingly was not too worried because I was gone and a boat was gone and he knew I could sail so he says nothing my mum though was quite freaked out but the police made my dad come over and he said well you sailed here he can sail back so I did and he kind of hoped that my my dream that I had had since the age of eight to sail around the world would fade away by crossing the English Channel the English Channel is a very difficult stretch of water and a lot of good sailors don't want to sail there and seriously after forty thousand miles did I did now I would not go sailing there again for fun it's a horrible piece of water it's always shitty weather a lot of wind a lot of ships seriously no fun but I loved it and I wanted to have more so unfortunately not everybody agreed with this and I had to do schooling so I did I wanted to go home schooling and I went to the person who has to allow this and she just thought that I was completely insane so I went through ten months of court cases eight course cases in total during these court cases I got myself another boat because they told me that the boat I had before was too small which it's small but it's not too small so I got this boat I fixed it up together with my dad and kind of felt like there wasn't in between it this okay um my dad literally taught me everything I could possibly know about sailing navigation engines technical fixing stuff everything so I won the court cases after after a year which was a lot more challenging than a trip itself and it yeah was very difficult because I knew how to sail but I had no clue how to handle media or anything like that so to learn very quickly on the 21st of August 2010 I finally left on my big trip and whoops so first I went down to the Canary Islands across the Atlantic and countered my first kind of storm I made a big mistake by watching the day after tomorrow and getting totally freaked out by hurricanes and then the next day I had this huge storm and I was like who um so yes I was scared sometimes but hey there is no way out you can't really step over the side and swim back and turning around is not really gonna help either so you've just got to keep going plus I realized that this was the dream that I've had since I was eight so of course I was not going to give up I was gonna keep going and I knew the challenge is laid along the way they were just good and over time I began to really love challenges this I suddenly don't have a love time to explain every technical detail but this is a wind fan it steers the boat so I don't just sit there and stir the boat all the time I can just kind of read coke do whatever I don't have to row or steer and it broke so that's a huge problem but I fixed it on the ocean it's kind of like being in a roller coaster and having to fix something so finally reach the Caribbean after 17 days at sea and there I met locals who were very different from what I knew in the Western world they lived in houses that kind of look like this and still they invited me and for dinner gave me food gave me water and basically everything that they had and that was such a beautiful thing to see these people share everything that they're had but they have well they don't have anything and they're happy they're happy to give you these things it's such a beautiful thing I asked them if they would have a million dollars which I do with it and they had honestly no idea they were like oh well but I already have a wreathing I have a house I have food I have my family I'm happy and that's changed my world because on my boat I didn't have much either I don't have a shower I don't have any fancy navigating things I've got a GPS in a paper map and my wind sign is about it pretty happy with it so yeah you learn to live with the basics and I learned that that makes you really happy and it really makes you appreciate other things that are out there so these people live in these huts and they're happy it's awesome who wants a house we want a bigger house in one's like three cars what are you going to do with three cars at one time right so from there on I went through the Panama Canal and pretty cool thing but I'm going to move on I went through the Pacific where I encountered the most beautiful islands and experience I've had on my trip so far beautiful sunsets sadly not as much sea creatures as I wish the rather my parents told me they saw dolphins everyday the times I saw dolphins I can count on two hands it's very sad and there's such beautiful creatures so that's one thing they're disappearing and that's very sad so it's beautiful moments when it did actually see them I did see flying fish as well now I'm not that good a photographer that I can make a picture of a flying fish flying this is a death flying fish so I guess I have a better imagination than actually being able to make pictures and these are a lot of dead flying fish if we saw in the presentation before it happens a lot and it was disgusting job to pick them up in the morning check them back in the water I didn't eat him no I didn't fish I don't like killing fish yes I sail around the boat but I don't like killing fish so from there on through the Pacific again the most beautiful islands I've seen and also the most Hospital and awesome people I have met of course here are really awesome people sir I'm not saying that you guys are hunters definitely not I have encountered many many nice people on my travels I just really loved the way of thinking of these people totally open my eyes having nothing and just being Hospital and inviting me all the time was amazing I wish I could give the same to everybody so from there on I went through the entire Pacific that's topped quite a bit on the way but had a little bit of pressure as well to stay in the right seasons and therefore I pushed my boats quite a bit I stopped on one of the seedy island didn't really have a lot of time to fix things so things started really falling apart here my steering wheel actually fell off which is very inconvenient so I had to kind of make something that it stays there which worked out and on my trip to Darwin I actually had all of my sails rip and so it's just kind of having still pieces of sail up but it's just slowed me down a lot most of the time like these things I would stitch by hands but I literally had complete sails just blow out so here I am in Darwin fixing things I chose not to have big sponsors I had people helping me to prepare the boat but I didn't have any big sponsors because I kind of thought well they're going to want something back and they're going to tell me what to do and I don't really want it I just want to have my own trip I want to to sail around the world and I'm going to do it and it's going to be my way so I did that the consequences of that though where I didn't have much money I had to work on the on the way on the trip and this is the cheap way of getting my boat out of the water I just literally beached it there was a big difference in tight so I went up on high tide tied up to the poles and just waited until it's low tide checked everything did that a couple times and then saved a thousand bucks so okay I know a little bit here this is one of my communication systems that just failed working this looks very interesting I could actually have no idea what's going on there I just thought man that looks like candy so I don't know but I do know a little bit about engines not a lot but enough to fix it luckily it's a sailboats they don't really need an engine and I did try to maintain my boat I figured out that laundry just doesn't wash itself kind of in Discovery when you're 13 years old and you live on your own for the first time same is that the fridge just doesn't fill itself okay I didn't actually have a fridge but okay cut boards um and shopping is quite an experience if you live on a boat I was always a tanker so I had to go with my backpack to the shop put it in the dinghy go to my boat try to chuck it on the boat while the boats going up and down without falling into water on my own of course because I didn't have my dog with me so he probably wouldn't have great help anyway and from there on I sailed to South Africa which I sell to straight from Australia to South Africa it took me how long they take me I think like 52 days I already forgot um I started out with two weeks of no wind nothing two weeks imagine sitting there out in the ocean it's just nothing you can do so it was a little bit of frustrating at the time but um yeah as I said there's just nothing you can do step two ways so what I did I waited and watched a lot of movies from there I got a lot of storms which I actually loved a lot more because they just got me moving and I did encounter some big storms are gonna knock down four people that are known is knocked down the mass goes flat in the water and I was just hanging there holding on my feet flying in the air having a full shower inside of my cabin well everything was closed and but I was fortunate enough that nothing big really broke and I just thought okay that just happened the rain was awesome as I said I didn't have a shower than have a water maker so rain was really good and I collected a lot of it I did have some company on the way the this is messy he stayed with me for a week he is called messy because he in my entire cabin I gave him some sardines and he trade them around my cabin and this is the present that he left me very nice oh okay yes in South Africa I've got the most a first-term I went through not really in waves but more in winds at 65 knots of wind which yeah it's a lot of wind but it didn't really scare me or anything it's just something that you have to go through if you're in a storm you just like okay I'm in a storm there's no way audio just have to keep going and that's kind of if you're in these situations where there's no way out and you have to keep going you're focused on keeping going so no I was not scared in the storms from there I went back to the Caribbean another nun sorry nonstop voyage from South Africa straight to the Caribbean and yes I sailed at night you can't anchor at night the ocean is like 3,000 4,000 meters deep I don't have that much pain on board so the boat sails itself keep the sails up of course you need to wake up every now and then look around and everything is still fine but keep going I got my last rough parts and then arrived safely after exactly a year back in st. Maarten the Caribbean where my family was waiting for me and for me it was kind of weird because it was the end of a dream but the beginning of my life and I was like okay I achieved this thing that I've been wanting to do for my entire life what am I gonna do now you know so I thought okay I'm there really no so I'm just gonna keep sailing and so I sailed to New Zealand wears boring and that's where my base is now I live in New Zealand I sailed together with a cat and and unwanted visitor he just creeps on the boat went a hip when I was an anchor scared to crap out of me but he left the next day sandy Zealand I got my driver's license got a car travelled around the whole of New Zealand and I wrote a book and German and Dutch it will be published in English by the end of this year and I'm also youth ambassador of a youth group in New Zealand that's against or trying to prevent suicides in New Zealand New Zealand has got one of the highest suicide rates under youth so I'm promoting and being an ambassador of that group and I'm just traveling a lot I want to maybe become a professional captain but then kind of afraid I might get too much sailing so I don't know there's a lot of options but that's festering you

Channel: ideacity

Views: 776,020

Rating: 4.8678546 out of 5

Keywords: Circumnavigation, Laura Dekker, Sailing, Adventure, Travel

Id: BA60BScgmzw

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2015