I was reading this story today on the successful location of the 16 year old girl who was trying to be the youngest person to sail unassisted around the world or something like that.  As the story goes, she was fine until sometime around Wednesday/Thursday when she activated her emergency locator beacon as she became increasingly concerned about the stormy conditions she was sailing in.  On Thursday, her boat was successfully located in the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean.  She is 2000 miles East of Madagascar, 2000 Miles West of Perth, Australia and 500 miles north of some small French Islands in the Antarctic.  An Australian rescue plane overflew her boat and noted that while it had been dismasted, it was still afloat and appeared seaworthy.  The French government has diverted a small fishing boat to pick her up, but she is so far from anywhere that it will take them until Saturday to reach her.  The Australians have also dispatched a military vessel to the area.

Okay, so here are my questions – first of all, who the hell is going to pay for this?  The rescue plane had a good distance to fly to find her and with rising fuel costs, it’s not going to be cheap for either the French fishing boat or the Australian Naval ship to get on the scene.  Secondly, as the article states, she is pretty far off any shipping lane.  She is supposed to be a very accomplished sailor – if  that’s true, then what the heck was she thinking?  If she had a medical emergency, she might very well be two days or more from help sailing where she is.

While I’m certainly glad that she has been successfully found, I hope that her and her family gets the bill for rescue effort.  It just really annoys me when people go out and do something so amazingly stupid like this and then look to the rest of us to pay a lot of money to get their stupid butts out of the mess they got themselves into.

I’m also going to go out on a limb and suggest that these idiot record books that track things like “youngest person to sail around the world” or “world’s fattest person” are partly to blame for this.  We should not have records that encourage stupid behavior.  Left to our own devices, as a race, humans do some pretty stupid things without additional encouragement.   If this girl had been successful in making it around the world, eventually, some 15 year old would try a round the world stunt, then a 14 year old, and on until someone eventually gets killed.  The parents of this girl are incredibly irresponsible – really – letting a 16 year old try to sail solo around the world.  What would have happened had she come across some of the pirates that sail in the area – hell – her web site was tracking her progress so it wouldn’t have been too hard to find her.  She would have disappeared into a brothel or faced an even worse fate never to be seen again and then everyone would have felt sorry for her parents instead of asking them what the F- they were thinking letting her do this in the first place.

Like I said, I’m glad she was found, but I sure as heck hope we hear about the five or six figure bill her family gets to pay for the rescue effort.  It may help discourage similar stupid behavior in the future.  Chances are, though that you know they’ll be able to afford it with the royalties they’ll get when her story gets turned into the inevitable TV movie lauding her daring and skill or something foolish like that.