It’s 17 weeks since Grenada went into full lockdown with closed borders ( apart from repatriation flights and returning cruise ship personnel) , curfew from 5pm until 7am, all businesses closed except for very limited shopping days etc. For around half of this time, we have been up in Carriacou – so lovely to see familiar boats and faces! Very slowly, over the following weeks, things have been eased and life has become easier and more comfortable…amazing how little time it takes to accept the new “norms”. We’ve had 23 confirmed cases here, all of whom have recovered and we’ve been “COVID free” for at least 4 weeks. Despite this, everyone is still to maintain social distancing and wear masks in any public building/business etc. Even though borders have remained closed, there has been provision made over the past couple of months for yachts to come down from the more Northern islands for the hurricane season – all arriving crew have to have a health check on arrival, quarantine for 10 – 14 days and then have a COVID test before being allowed to clear in. The airport opened up for regional flights 5 days ago and is due to open to International flights on the 1st August although there are no scheduled flights coming any time soon that we are aware of. The Ministry of Health here have been busy preparing the airport to process the increasing numbers of passengers that will no doubt be landing on these shores over the next several months. Although the airport is open to flights from other Caribbean countries with just the requirement of testing on arrival, yachts are still not able to sail between those same countries without the crew doing a 10-14 day quarantine which really doesn’t make any sense. We’re hopeful this will change soon as we’d love to be able to go back to St Vincent and The Grenadines and spend some time there.
We were due to fly home in May to visit and spend time with family but, unsurprisingly, our flights were cancelled. We remained hopeful we’d be able to go back home for our annual 2 month visit in August, but once again, our flight was cancelled, with Virgin telling us that they will not be flying to Grenada again until October. So, yesterday, we rebooked our trip home for late October – we’re keeping everything crossed that there are no more cancellations.
Over the past 17 weeks we’ve done several jobs onboard, but we’ve also been able to enjoy the fab beaches and do a little bit of cycling and walking and more latterly, as things have eased, spend time with friends. We now have a new water maker fitted after our original one finally gave up, we’ve finished replacing all our black water pipes, done some painting and varnishing, fitted hardware for spinnaker sailing, polished our stainless steel….twice!…., done some fibreglass repairs, sorted through all of our “stuff” and disposed of quite a bit of it, fitted a new auto pilot head as the other one had stopped working, installed a replacement wind generator after having modifications made to the stainless steel framework. We have also been back down to Grenada several times ( with the permission of the Chief Medical Officer) to take a friend and her husband who live on Carriacou for medical care – despite the purpose of these trips, we’ve had a fabulous time together and we had the opportunity to use the spinnaker for the first time with the newly installed hardware and see Dolphins. Awesome!
We hope hope you are all staying happy and healthy. It seems great advances are being made with possible vaccines and treatments…….it’s just a matter of time. Hang in there 🙂
