Too young? Probably

Verlyn Klinkenborg has an article in The New York Times about a young girl flirting with trouble:

Early last year, the boat I was on, a 47-foot yawl, pulled alongside a red-hulled vessel of similar length not far from the mouth of a fjord in Chilean Patagonia. The lifelines around the deck of that boat had been reinforced with netting because the crew— apart from the Austrian captain, his Dutch wife and her sister— consisted of two yellow Labs and two very young children. The mother of those children had herself grown up on a sailboat. It was like pulling alongside a scene from Little Ship on the Prairie.
I thought of that brief Chilean encounter when I read about Laura Dekker, the thirteen-year-old Dutch girl who wants to sail alone around the world. She was born in New Zealand when her parents were circumnavigating, and she has become a sailor in her own right, sailing single-handed in Holland and in the waters off Friesland. Her parents are now divorced, and her father reluctantly backs the idea of her solo circumnavigation, while her mother has made no public comment.
Recently, Laura sailed solo on the 26-foot Guppy to Britain, where she was detained and placed in a children’s home. Her father went there to retrieve her, but allowed her to sail home alone instead.
The Dutch authorities were not amused. They have taken Laura into temporary guardianship until a child psychologist can assess her ability to withstand the rigors of a solo sea voyage that could last as long as two years. On 26 October, she will learn whether she can weigh anchor for parts unknown.
This isn’t pure Huck Finn on Laura’s part. Huck wasn’t trying to be the youngest person to float down the Mississippi. In fact, Laura hopes to beat the record set by Mike Perham, the British seventeen-year-old who, on 27 August, finished a nine-month circuit of the globe in a fifty-foot racing yacht. He broke the previous age record by two months. But there’s enough Huck Finn in Laura’s ambitions to make this a real tangle, just the right mixture of nautical adventure, independent youth, state paternalism, and laissez-faire parenting to get everyone upset.
A circumnavigation means knowingly taking your life in your hands, which is something the social contract doesn’t ordinarily let parents allow their thirteen-year-olds to do. Nor does it let parents purposely raise social isolates. Would a thirteen-year-old be allowed to live alone in a tiny flat in Utrecht? Why then in a very small boat— and the Guppy is a very small boat— on the high seas?
Laura would be at sea, utterly and sometimes abjectly solitary, at just the time in her life when most kids find their social world reknitting itself around them. Some people— looking back on their own adolescence— are likely to wish they could have spent those years alone at sea. Laura says she knows exactly what she’s getting into, and the question, finally, is whether we believe her.
The telling contrast isn’t with thirteen-year-olds who want to stay home. It’s with Mr. Perham, who crossed the Atlantic solo when he was only slightly older than Laura. His feat embodies the modern ideal of adventure. His boat was well-sponsored, and he had the vocal support of his family. Above all, there was never a sense that he was fleeing anything. He was sailing within the social contract, fund-raising for two charities every mile along the way.
Laura Dekker’s desire, as she told Dutch television, is “to live freely.” Knowing adults everywhere will hear her youth in that phrase, and they will recall that the usual response to adolescents who want to live freely is, “grow up”. She is, in fact, proposing to grow up at sea, to face without relief the almost unrelenting challenge of the ocean. And she’s also proposing to do it in the shortest rounding she can, in order to take the Guinness record away from Mr. Perham.
It may well be that, for Laura, a solo circumnavigation is the shortest way home. She may, in her twenties, come to inhabit the sort of floating household that my friends and I came upon in Chile, the very kind she was born into. So far, she has done an excellent job of calling her father’s bluff. If, in the end, the Dutch court allows her to set sail aboard the Guppy, the only bluff she will have to call is her own.

Rico says even he doesn't think this is a good idea, especially for a thirteen-year-old girl... (And, no, it's not sexism. Even pirates will often decline to rape a thirteen-year-old boy. And, being Dutch, they wouldn't think of providing her with a gun, of course...)