March 16,2020
What a strange time to be alive, on land or at sea. Stephen and I have just returned safely to Flo in the British Virgin Islands a few days earlier than planned due to the rapid spread of COVID 19 and the associated travel complications. We were meant to be in Boston for a week visiting my family, some of whom we hadn’t seen since our wedding nearly a year ago. But once Trump announced the European travel ban, we figured we should get the hell out of dodge and get the next flight out to ensure we could get back to our floating home. I’m American, Stephen is British, the boat is British-flagged and currently sitting in a British Commonwealth… Who knows what the travel restrictions will look like in a few weeks, or even days?
After a long day of travel from Boston to San Juan, San Juan to St. Thomas, St. Thomas to Tortola, we eventually made it back to Florence where she was waiting for us patiently in Nanny Cay marina. Never have I been so happy to see her! The thought of being unable to get back to our home for perhaps months was enough to send panic waves through my stomach and to yearn for the self-contained lifestyle that Stephen, Flo and I are so lucky to share at this strange moment in time.
What seemed an annoyance a few week ago has now turned out to be a pandemic that is affecting almost every facet of life all around the world. Stephen and I certainly weren’t preparing for the apocalypse when we decided to leave the rat race and big city living for the comparative isolation of life on a boat, but in these uncertain times, it doesn’t seem the worst place to be. We are by no means feeling smug or cavalier about our current situation: it is often the opposite, as if something were to happen to one of our loved ones, there is a very real chance we would not be able to get back to them. We spend most of our time checking in with family and friends, some of whom can reasonably be considered high risk, who are all in affected areas where the virus is spreading exponentially and where authorities seem to be chasing their tails to catch up. Our first order of business after getting back aboard Flo in Tortola was to launch an email and Twitter campaign against my mother’s employer. She works at her local public library, and Stephen and I were appalled to hear from her that the town had refused to close the library to the public, despite national and local guidance. Instead, the library remained open and became more crowded than ever, acting as a gathering place for people from all surrounding towns whose own libraries had sensibly been closed. After a frantic night and morning spent contacting the powers that be in her town hall and taking to Twitter for the first time since 2008, we were relieved to see the mayor finally succumb to reason and shut down the library, no longer putting my mother, her co-workers and her patrons at risk every day. So while Stephen and I are thankful to be for now “safe,” no one is really safe during this pandemic, as we all have so much at stake.
While there are currently only a handful of confirmed cases in the Virgin Islands, that could very quickly change, as it’s a place with a large daily influx of tourists from around the world, mainly Europe and the US. The customs line in Tortola the other day as we queued to re-enter the country was packed to the gills with American tourists, and the fact that the BVI health official making the rounds to randomly take passengers’ temperatures had a hacking cough which he quickly spread around the enclosed room didn’t help matters… We’ve also only been back from Boston for a few days, so it’s not impossible that one or both of us start to experience symptoms in the next 2 weeks, but we recognise that as an unlikely scenario. Still, we are monitoring ourselves for symptoms and staying away from other people as much as possible. No more beach bars for us, though every bar and restaurant around these parts is worryingly still open. For now, it's just the occasional market run for Team Flo.
This crisis has me recalling the first moment I started to come around to the idea of leaving the rat race and going to live on a sailboat. It came the night that Trump got elected president. At that moment, to me the “civilized” world seemed to have turned upside down: right was left, up was down, and a volatile, under-qualified, shamelessly self-promoting, morally bankrupt charlatan (or in his words, a “very stable genius”) had just become the leader of the free world. This to me seemed an exceedingly dangerous turn of events, the ramifications of which I couldn’t predict at the time, but I didn’t underestimate their potential severity. I’m not an overly political person, nor do I like to proselytise my views – but I will say that in that moment, the idea of getting the fuck out and moving onto a boat sounded like not such a bad idea. I immediately woke Stephen, who at this point had spent months trying to bring me around to the sailing idea, and said to him “OK, I’m in. Let’s buy this boat.”
While Trump isn’t to blame for COVID 19 and it’s wasted energy to spend our time pointing fingers rather than looking forward, this situation has both Stephen and me feeling introspective about our current choices. And it has us appreciating things about this lifestyle that we used to struggle with and at times even resent. The adjustment to living on a boat and being away from it all has definitely taken time for both of us. For the most part, you don’t see your friends, you don’t see your family, you’ve said goodbye to your colleagues – you have made the decision to leave that all behind. You become a team of two – a world of two, as it can sometime seem. This isolation over the past 11 months has at times been really hard, and I still crave the company of my friends and family, especially that of my 3 sisters with whom I’m incredibly close and have barely seen over the past year. It’s also been a challenge for our relationship: not many people spend their first year of marriage literally on top of each other all day every day, and Stephen and I joke we’ve crammed about a decade's worth of holy matrimony into the first year. Being confined in a small space with your partner forces issues to the surface that you can’t just walk away from. There have been more than a few times when Stephen and I have HAD IT OUT in the proverbial ring. There is no hiding on the boat, and when stress levels are high and the cabin fever is palpable, the emotional tension is like a guitar string about to snap, where the littlest thing has the potential to set one of us (read: me) off. However, the need to work as a team to ensure each other’s safety and the safety of the boat tends to trump whatever petty argument we are having at the moment and soon puts the disagreement into perspective. Boat life has definitely been a relationship lesson on steroids! For everyone out there self-quarantining with loved ones for the foreseeable future, I’d advise you to put the butcher knife away: confinement does have its relationship benefits, and the cabin fever does subside!
This has been a somewhat stream-of-consciousness way of saying that life afloat is a very specific lifestyle that has its benefits and its drawbacks. At times when you crave connection, it’s not always there. You miss things, like birthdays and weddings and holidays. I have on more than a few occasions felt at the end of my tether - craving external stimuli, missing the action, and longing for the sense of purpose that my career provided. Stephen and I have had to work through those feelings and put the sacrifices into context, knowing there is a reason we are here, offshore, on own own, undertaking different challenges.
But we’ve also gained things from this lifestyle choice, and never before have these benefits seemed more tangible. We’ve learned what it means to be properly self-sufficient. We can make our own water and catch our own fish. We are each other’s company. We have learned that sometimes the ability to get away from it all is not just desirable but necessary; that sometimes external stimuli is not actually what you need, despite what your instincts are telling you. Florence over the past 11 months has become our own little spaceship. At this moment, as we bob on anchor in an empty bay, I am perhaps for the first time fully appreciating the solitude that life at sea entails. We continue to worry about our parents and all our loved ones ashore, but for the time being all we can do is wait it out. Stephen and I are sending all our love from Florence and encouraging everyone to stay calm, stay smart, and stay clean – we will all get though this together, on land and at sea.
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