Three Days on an Old Barge, and the Mattress Won

The International School of Amsterdam calls it the Challenge Trip. Grade 10 spends three days on old flat-bottomed sailing barges, with a captain and a first mate, and comes back changed. One tenth-grader wrote it up for the school paper, and the challenge, in the end, was bedtime.

Here is the trip as he reported it, in numbers.

Three days. The first was mostly sitting. The barge moved at the speed of a thoughtful cyclist, his homeroom lay on the cabin roof playing cards, and every so often the first mate called for someone to pull a rope, and six people pulled it.

Three cooking groups, one galley. Each group was responsible for one meal in a kitchen the size of a wardrobe. His group made pasta. The pasta was fine. The sauce was a matter of opinion, and the opinions were loud.

One island supermarket. The class was let loose in it and concluded that the essential supplies were crisps and energy drinks, then provisioned like a small army preparing for a very short war.

One shower. He could not turn round in it.

Many bunks, low, narrow and warm, in a wooden room holding most of a homeroom. He lay awake sweating while someone explained poker to someone who did not want to learn it. He had been sent to sea to be challenged, and the thing that beat him was a mattress.

One beach, beside the harbour on the second island. The water was too cold to swim in properly, so they swam in it improperly. At sunset the teachers and crews built a fire and the whole grade sat round it and sang, at length. He thought it was the best evening of the trip.

One last day of real sailing, with the wind up and the barge leaning over and staying leaned.

I booked my own family on a sailing weekend in Friesland two summers ago, on the theory that adversity bonds. The eldest got sunburnt, the middle one got seasick in the harbour, the youngest refused the toilet on moral grounds, and my husband spent both nights on a bunk twelve centimetres shorter than he is, with his feet in the galley.

We did not sing round a fire. We argued round a gas ring about whose idea it had been.

Asked afterwards what the hardest part of the weekend had been, my husband thought about it for a long time and said, “You.” The Grade 10 answer was better. The ropes, the cooking and the singing were all fine. The challenge was sleeping. A month later he still missed the boat.