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If you were to pick an ideal place to self-isolate, it might be on a boat in the middle of the ocean. That’s exactly what happened to Elena Manighetti and Ryan Osborne, a couple that bought a 37-foot sailboat and decided to work from their laptops and record their adventures on YouTube. On February 28, they left Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and set off on a 3,000-mile journey across the Atlantic, but when they tried to dock on a small island in the middle of March, they found out something that the majority of the rest of the world already knew: we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
Their sailboat, called the Skua, was built back in 1976. Coming in at 36 feet long, it is not big by any means, but it has everything they needed to cross the Atlantic. Just before they raised the sails, there were whispers in the news of a strange new virus. “Before we set off we were aware of it, but it was mainly in China,” Osborne said in a radio interview with the BBC. “We assumed that by the time we got to the Caribbean it would be all over.”
Although they were able to stay in contact with their families while crossing the Atlantic via a GPS tracking device that can send short messages, they had a rule. “We’d said to our families that when we’re on the Atlantic we don’t want to be getting bad news, because there’s nothing we can do about it except worry,” Osborne said. “So no one had told us the full extent of how it was all unfolding and how the rest of the world was going into lockdown and what the situation would look like when we arrived. ”
They initially intended to land on Guadalupe, an island in the southern Caribbean Sea, but after 25 days, they got some not-so-good news: the Coronavirus was not over as they’d initially expected it to be. Quite the opposite, in fact. Towards the end of their crossing, they were alerted that their destination island was closing its borders.
“We bought some data and I remember Ryan reading out the news and our jaws just dropped,” Elena told The Guardian. “It was hard to grasp the scale of it at first,” Ryan continued. “If you were waking up from a coma now, I think it would be hard to imagine the scale of what had unfolded.”
So, with their initial plans unceremoniously dumped overboard, they pointed themselves toward Bequia, another paradisiacal little island nearby. But, as I said before, being on a boat in the middle of the ocean for a month straight is a pretty good place to self-isolate, and luckily the couple had the GPS receipts to prove it. After they showed officials in Bequia their GPS tracking history, they were allowed to land. “Thankfully the authorities understood our situation and that we’d been effectively quarantined. We’re really lucky and grateful. Life here is more or less as normal since there are no cases.”
But life on a tiny island unaffected by a global pandemic is strange, too, especially since Manighetti is originally from a tiny town in northern Italy that has been especially hard-hit by the Coronavirus. “It does feel very strange, especially on this island,” Osborne said. “Here, life is just carrying on because there are no cases. Shops are still open, so we’re just kind of reading about what’s going on in Europe and in the U.S., and here life is just carrying on as usual… [Elena is] from a little village outside of Bergamo, which is one of the worst-hit places in the world. When we found out about that, we were really shocked. Her family has been in lockdown for quite some time and the conditions were really quite severe.”
Now, with the pandemic in full-swing in many parts of the world, their future is uncertain. They’re hoping for the best, though, and would like to continue on their exploratory voyage when everything winds down. But sailing the ocean blue on a 36-foot sailboat isn’t a voyage to be taken lightly. ” In a couple of months, the hurricane season is going to start,” Osborne said. “For that, you need to be as far south as possible. After hurricane season, we were hoping to carry on around and head off towards Mexico.”
Follow along with Elena and Ryan’s adventures on YouTube or follow them on Instagram.
