"I would be interested to see what some of your cruising families have to say about schooling aboard. I am a single father planning to set sail with my two young sons (11 and 12) and would appreciate any advice/success or horror stories that may be out there."

Great! It's the best thing you can do for them. Don't worry about school at all (which isn't to say it won't take planning, though.) I first went offshore sailing as a tutor for three children, aged 11, 13, and 15 (they used the Calvert System), and now I teach my own two children (aged 6 and 7) on board our boat.

You didn't say how long you plan to go cruising. If it's just for one year and you want to put them back into the same school district with their old friends afterwards, then you will need to liaise carefully with their schools to ensure they aren't kept back a year, which could be hard on them socially when you return. The school might provide you with the same textbooks and assignments and maybe even a teacher to grade them, depending on where you live and what the local support for homeschooling is like. Or, they might be willing to accept a pre-packaged system like Calvert or your own syllabus if you clear it with them first.

If you're going away for a year but they'd be returning to a different school district and having to make all new friends anyway, you might consider skipping traditional schooling. You could have them do boat-oriented work, such as keeping a nature log, drawing, etc. and do computer-based courses like typing or foreign language instruction, but since you could put them back in school a year behind, you wouldn't have to worry about keeping up the pace.

If you're planning an open-ended cruise, then you've suddenly become the person solely responsible for their educations, and so it will take more planning and thought.

The easiest option for eight graders and under (and probably most expensive) is a prepackaged curriculum like Calvert's http://www.calvertschool.org/home-school/ where the school books come in one big box, and you can choose to sign up for the Advisory Teacher Support as well. Calvert is the best-known American program; other countries have their own programs, many of them supplied as part of the national curriculum. There are many high school programs for homeschoolers as well; I don't have any experience with any of them.

I used Calvert with the three children I schooled in the 90s, and it worked well. For my own children, however, I've decided to write my own syllabus because it can be more easily tailored to each child. If you do a system like Calvert, your children are trapped by their "age graded" expectations: if they are particularly good at math, for example, or reading, they won't be challenged enough, and if they're weak in an area, it may be too hard. In a public school, the teacher can go down the hall and borrow materials from another teacher to better match your child; you probably can't do that in a remote anchorage.

My girls do a math program from one company, handwriting/typing from another, science from another, foreign languages from another, and reading, writing (stories and essays) and history from my own syllabus.

This works really well for us. Math programs should come with an answer key so your boys can check their own work and be fairly independent. I've worked as a university writing instructor, so I'm comfortable grading essays and so on; if you're not, it might be worth asking around the writing department of a local university. Universities with graduate programs often use their graduate students to teach Freshman English, as well as hire additional instructors. One of these might be willing to be an email teacher for your students for a very reasonable price.

If you decide to write your own syllabus, Home Learning Year by Year: How to Design a Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School by Rebecca Rupp is an excellent starting point.

I haven't worked with independent materials with children in middle school, so I can't give specific recommendations for companies. You might like to take a look at Singapore Math - http://www.singaporemath.com/Homeschool_s/60.htm - the primary school books are superb, so the middle school books are probably worth a look.

Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page is a fantastic resource - they've digitized 25,000 books that are off copyright (which is to say almost all the classics). If you will have regular internet access, you can just download them book by book; we were able to get a DVD from them with 17,000 books because we aren't in internet range most of the time. We read these with a Sony Reader, http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644523779 ; you can also read them with Amazon's Kindle (with a conversion program), on the computer (which isn't easy to read in bed), or an eeePC.

If you're going for several years, you'll need to think ahead. It can be hard to get materials ordered and shipped to you (although the Internet has made it much easier) in remote ports, and it is important to have the "next book" ready when your sons need them, not two months later. I try to stay a book ahead in Math, for example, so I order the next set as soon as the eldest begins a book. When I buy math materials, I buy two workbooks for the material at the same time to protect myself from textbook or workbook updates which would mean I'd have to buy new answer keys and maybe textbooks and teacher manuals.

A Wikipedia/Google buddy is helpful. We have email access all the time, but rarely have Internet access. When we HAVE to know an answer, I email my father with the query, and he sends us back a couple of pages of text-only answers from Wikipedia or whatever.

Your boys are old enough to help you outfit the boat with encyclopedias (DVD or paper), books on topics that interest them, books about the wildlife you're likely to see etc. If you think you may be educating them through the end of high school, it's worth looking at university requirements. It can easy to miss requirements if you're doing a bit of schooling on board, a bit on shore, etc., and then come to apply to college and find you don't have enough lab science credits or whatever. Everything can be done on board, but some subjects require more planning and equipment.

Homeschooled children usually require far fewer hours per day and school days per year to get through the same work that they'd do in school on shore. With a prepackaged curriculum, it's easy; you just need to finish the box. With your own curriculum, you'll need to set goals and figure out a reasonable expectation for a "school year." For us, many months of the year are taken up by chartering, so we have a schedule that fits around that. We don't have any school at all on passage, on charter, or for about three days before and after either, and we have minimal schooling (math and two other subjects) in between charters.

With the family I tutored for and my own children, I found schooling works best when staying in the same region for a minimum of several weeks. We often have school seven days a week for several weeks, and then a week or two off. Schooling while on ocean passages did not work. That's the time for the children to read books. I often read of families setting off and planning to do all their schoolwork while at sea, but how is the teacher parent supposed to keep up a watch schedule and run school? I can't imagine doing it. Maybe with high-school aged children who are seriously self-motivated, but then, at that age, they're probably standing a watch themselves. The teenagers I taught were able to do two-hour stints on the helm long before they were self-motivated enough to be their own school teachers!

The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey by Diane Stuemer and Into the Light: A Family's Epic Journey by Dave and Jaja Martin are two excellent books about cruising with children.

For more about Seal see http://www.expeditionsail.com.