Sailing around the world: week 1

Well, this isn't quite how I'd planned out our first week of sailing around the world. Helen and the boys were due to arrive at Lucky Girl in A Coruña on 23rd of March, I was to be there with the boat in the water waiting for them. As it turns out, all the stuff we sent to the marina from our house in boxes (clothes, toiletries, cooking utensils, THE NINTENDO SWITCH, board games, card games, stacks of reference books for school etc...) are waiting for us in the marina office. The marina is closed, so they can't put our boat in the water (there are a few practical reasons why it's really not ok to live on a boat out of the water, esp. with 2 small boys. I'll leave that to your imagination), and it's unclear whether the flights are running. If they are, would we be allowed into the country? I think we could argue the case that the boat is where we live, therefore we're not tourists coming on holiday, but it would be a big risk to take, turning up with the boys uncertain of whether or not we would be allowed in. Even then we'd be living in Spanish lockdown and there's pretty much nowhere we could sail to, I'm in a facebook group for sailing families all over the world and they're all reporting that they're basically stuck wherever they are. 

On Monday night when Boris announced his 'this is not a lockdown' lockdown, we were installed at Grandma's house. This situation was not ideal for a number of reasons, not limited to:

1. She's accustomed to living by herself

2. She has spent a lot of time and effort clearing up her house to make it look nice

3. She has many delicate things she cares a lot about (eg. white leather antique chairs)

4. The boys are very ... 'energetic' (ahem)

5. I am not good at sticking to other people's rules if I don't understand/agree with the logic behind them

6. Grandma is 'vulnerable' because of her years. Us being there meant that with the best will in the world she was exposed to more risk. 

This combination of factors meant that when it became clear (to me, probably after it was already clear to others) that the 'not a lockdown' was going to last weeks rather than days; we took up our friends' extremely kind offer of weathering the storm at their large house in Scotland.

Boris finished his 'not a lockdown' speech at about 2040. Helen came rushing downstairs and said 'we need to go; now'. She had said out loud what I think I was denying inside my head - that there was a good chance that by the next day the authorities wouldn't allow us to make the journey from Kent to Scotland. By 2110 we had packed up the car, lifted the children out of bed elbow-bumped our goodbyes and were on the road. En route, we only stopped to charge the car and have a pee. I drove all night and arrived at 0530 the following morning. I was incredibly grateful for Tesla's autopilot which kept us safer than my sleep-deprived brain could do on its own. 

So now we're holed up with incredibly kind, easy-going and generous friends in a very large house, in very large grounds. We are sticking to the rules - none of us are going off-site except to get supplies. It's mostly possible to exercise without leaving the grounds, although it turns out I did run over the boundary, briefly yesterday. I know that the lockdown is extremely stressful, and hard for most people, it makes me feel a bit guilty that were here having a nice time together, with enough space that we don't tread on each others' toes too much; and with good friends to stop us going too crazy.

We're now a few days in. The boys have been enjoying the company of 3 other kids. I am much less stressed, and have mostly stopped shouting at the people I love! Homeschool is up and down. Today, we did some mindfulness at the beginning of the lesson where, even with my eyes closed, I could tell when Roo's concentration started to wander! Because it was just the two of us, I was able to gently remind him to bring his thoughts back to what we were focussing on in the exercise. At the end I congratulated him on managing to bring his focus back. It was then a skill I could keep reminding him about when his mind started to wander during the subsequent lesson.  I spent some time with him looking at the pilot book for our Atlantic trip. He wanted to look at the Straits of Gibraltar, so we looked at the tidal-streams atlas and worked out what would be the best time to enter the med from Cadiz. Then we looked at the marina in Tenerife, checked the harbour rules and made sure there were no places we might run aground. Everyone has been asking me for the last few months how we're going to homeschool the boys, and I have become comfortable with our plans for this. Ironically now everyone else is thrust into it, without the months of anticipation we've had. The internet is awash with people sending each other links to various online seminars, museums, classes, zoos etc... so far I'm happy when I can get Roo to recognise when his focus is wandering and bring it back to the subject in hand!

We've done a couple of video-calls to friends and family with more planned, there's an enormous jigsaw on the go, and I have ordered the next one: a picture of people at the table in the living room doing the current one. I've had a Spanish lesson, with another one booked early next week, my tutor has almost no slots available - I guess everyone else is taking the enforced-downtime opportunity to learn Spanish! 

The boat feels further out of reach than she did a week ago, to me at least. I must be coming to terms with the fact that we're not doing what I thought we'd be doing (who is!?). For a while I felt like I had a right to be more disappointed than everyone else about the situation - they were all just expecting to go to work; I was expecting to start a new life. Now, I'm aware that if we were on the boat right now, we couldn't go anywhere or do anything anyway, so better to be where we are.

Covid stopped play

Today is the day the boat was booked to lift-in. I was supposed to wake up in a hotel room in A Coruña, and then Dave and I were to walk down to the marina, finish installing the diesel stove, inspect the hull, maybe install the new house batteries, make sure the engine turns over, then drive away from the lift-in to begin life afloat. Gosh that sounds nice. What I did instead was wake up at my mother-in-law’s house (thank you Susan), do 2 hours of home-schooling with the boys in Grandma’s dining-room, have some lunch, trawl a couple of supermarkets to scrape together the ingredients to see the house through the next few days and go to a garden-centre. Years of preparation came to a head last Friday morning when we finally got the last of our possessions either into storage, sold/given away or boxed up and handed-over to UPS to await our arrival in Spain. We emptied and then departed our house of the last 10 years and handed the keys over to the letting agent with a Tesla packed to the gunnels with all the things we hadn’t finished sifting through, plus clothes and toys to see us through a week of goodbyes before our flights. A couple of days on and it was clear that we shouldn’t visit my parents as planned, as my dad would be classed as ‘vulnerable’; so we headed to Helen’s old family home to stay with her mum instead, obviously this isn’t ideal as Susan is also in the vulnerable age-bracket, but she doesn’t have underlying health conditions to add into the mix, and we do need to stay somewhere, as we are now homeless. I’ve been learning Spanish for the last few months, so I’ve exchanged a few emails with the marina, sail-maker and battery shop. I’ve also (virtually) met another parent whose boat is in A Coruña - she is now stranded in the UK while her partner is on the boat in Spain! The reports are that no-one is allowed out, the only open shops are supermarkets and they’re only allowing 5 people in at a time. The marina says that customers aren’t allowed into the yard and they wouldn’t lift our boat in. Now our flights are cancelled and the next available booking with the same airline is May 1st (should I book that?). The situation with Spain’s border is not clear to me at the moment - if we could get there, would they let us in, on the basis that we’re homeless in the UK and our home is now locked up in a yard in A Coruña? I’ve written to the Spanish embassy in London to see if they can provide us with something we could show at the border to let us in, but they haven’t replied - I guess they’ve got other stuff to worry about right now! Here we are then, self-isolating with Grandma for an indefinite period. She has been very kind and generous, and the house is plenty big enough, with a big garden for the boys to play in. It’s still not where we should be though, and we are all (including Grandma) on our best behaviour. I’ve found today particularly hard to deal with, and I’m afraid my family has borne the brunt of this in the form of shouty-daddy. Hopefully I’ll manage to be more patient tomorrow...