Safety - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 89

check-ins with other boats even on our passages. Had anything cropped up then, we could
have easily talked to a doctor).
Finally, it's a fallacy that remote island communities in the Pacific lack medical facilities.
In this day and age, many islands have some sort of regional clinic that sailors can tap into
as needed. You'd be surprised how much help is out there. Case in point: in the sparsely
populated Yasawa group of Fiji, there's a centrally located clinic that friends used when a
stomach bug persisted for over a week (for mother and child). They hired a local skiff to
take them there (twice the speed, plus local knowledge of the reefs) and saw a UK trained
doctor within an hour. Again, easy. Much easier than you would have thought. In Suwar-
row, an uninhabited Cook Island popular with cruisers, one man hurt his foot and
promptly got stitches from the doctor aboard another boat anchored there. Easy.
I can add many more cruising success stories, but I'll leave it at that for now. The three
years we spent cruising the Pacific were among the healthiest and happiest of our lives.
We were sick far less often than at home, where the germ breeding grounds of school keep
us in constant contact with contagious illnesses. We suffered very few injuries because we
were careful. We knew the potential for risk, and we acted accordingly. I'd say that far
more injuries occur on your average neighborhood playground (not to mention the aver-
age highway) than out in the cruising grounds of the world, especially if you sail aboard a
well-found vessel along prime cruising routes in favorable seasons. In fact, Markus sus-
tained the worst injury of our Pacific trip when he fell in an Australian urban playground
and broke his collarbone!
Yes, there's always a chance that something sometime might go wrong. But given good
preparation and care, that chance is no greater than the chance of a freak mishap at home.
When I was in grade school, a childhood friend nearly died of a ruptured appendix be-
cause her parents didn't take her complaints seriously - they were too busy playing tennis!
Luckily, all was well in the end. The point is, you don't need to be in the middle of the Pa-
cific for bad luck to strike. And you don't have to hope for good luck - you can make
your own luck by taking sensible precautions.
Every family must make their own decision about taking children cruising, but whatever
you do, don't let paranoia hold you back.