Georgie, my wife and I love chartering, and did so relatively frequently before children. The arrival of our adorable little chaos merchants (Reuben, three, and Lily, one) rather tempered our cruising ambitions, but some friends at a similar family stage were keen to try chartering, and we reckoned most of the children were old enough to understand instructions, if not always follow them.
So it was that we found ourselves, along with Simon and Helen and their children Elizabeth (six) and Nico (three), finally at anchor on a luxuriously comfortable Sunsail 454 catamaran (a Leopard 45). As we sipped cold drinks in the warmth of the late evening on the island of Jakljan off the Dalmatian coast, the horde of small pirates were all (mostly) sleeping soundly down below.
We’d made it through the travelling, victualling, unpacking and briefings, frazzled but unscathed. Other than a ‘locked in the toilet’ incident and a few bumps with bits of boat as
