“Dylan at the helm of the ‘M/V Our Pleasure‘ before departing the cove” – Belmont Bay, Occoquan. VA.

As my son becomes more and more responsible and his attention span gets better I am more inclined to allow him to do more grown up things, such as help out with the boat and help me with around the house projects. This weekend he told me that he would like to drive the boat. I asked him why he thought he was able to take on this task and he said because he did such a good of driving the one on our Manitoba fishing trip. Hard to argue with a 6 year old when you know he’s right. So I told him that I would start teaching him how to drive the boat, but he could only be at the helm when there was another adult present. I also explained that daddy’s boat was not a small fishing boat and therefor would take more practice to master driving. First thing he had to learn would be how to navigate, so this session at the helm Dylan worked on spotting the channel markers and keeping the boat on the correct course between them. He took the whole exercise very seriously and did a great job! Next time we will incorporate the compass into the equation.