Sorry for late reply, but I've been started thinking about taking the kids out, specifically about harnesses....
Good points,
@Scandium. I'm congenitally a bit paranoid, so it's no surprise that
@rgranger is more adventurous than me. Thus far, we've managed to limit or COB drills to a stern rail light and a dropped bag of popcorn.**
I've been planning to write up a post about my jackline setup on my build thread (
https://forums.sailboatowners.com/index.php?threads/sailing-and-restoring-9874.195739/). But I probably won't get to that for another week or two; but maybe a quick description will help. We have 2 sets of jacklines, marked in red and blue on this diagram (stolen from sailboatdata.com). One on each side of the cockpit, running just below the seat level. They're about 3 feet long, so we can clip in and still move around some in the cockpit. With a 3-foot tether, you might theoretically be able to fall out of the boat, but wouldn't reach the water.
My recollection when we had a 2-year-old is that we mostly held her while sailing (our first 'big' season of sailing wasn't until she was 4). But the cockpit jacklines did let her move around on her own; nice for her and when we needed all the parents' hands free to raise or douse sails, etc. And once or twice, when it got rough, we've sealed up the cabin and clipped everyone in in the cockpit.
The forward jacklines are mounted to pad eyes anchored through the bulkheads, and to a single pad eye forward. The jackline runs are ~2 feet from the rail. And we have ~2 feet of freeboard, so with a 3 foot tether and a chest harness, you'd always stay head above water. But it might be close on the low side if we had a rail in the water. The kids are pretty good about clipping on the high side, but that's not quite 100%, especially after a tack.
More details to come eventually with a future post; I'll post a link here when I get it up.
** Both recovered successfully; the latter incident had my 10-year-old in a major panic, not for the lost snacks, but out of concern for adding plastics to the ocean.
...maybe I need a separate thread for kids on small boats..
Sounds like a good plan. We'd all learn something useful.