FAQ: Clarifications to Our Cruising and Coronavirus Situation

Garrett and I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support in response to our situation and endeavor to get home. We will be forever thankful to the people who have reached out to help, offered words of encouragement, and held us in their prayers. Thank you.

As many of you are aware, it has been a week. When I published Update to Our Cruising Plans: Coronavirus Edition last Sunday, Garrett and I were cautiously optimistic that we would be going back to the States on a May 7 flight from Managua to Miami. We learned, two days after I shared that post, that our flight, like all others, was postponed until June 4. On that same morning, we were featured on the homepage of the SFGate and, a few hours later, appeared in the New York Daily News. It was a day.

To say that things have been hectic since is an understatement. So many people have reached out with questions, ideas, and support (plus some negative comments from internet trolls, but they’re not worth the attention). Garrett and I like to focus on the positive and are grateful for all of the good energy that so many of you have brought forward in response to the news articles and blog post.

To address some of the questions we’ve been receiving and provide a concise depiction of our situation, I thought I’d clarify some things in the below FAQ.

Q: What’s it like being stuck on your boat at sea?

A: Our boat is docked at a marina in Nicaragua; we are not anchored off of the coast. We are free to come and go on land as we please. There are many sailors around the world who are anchored out and cannot leave their boats. In comparison, we are very fortunate.

Q: Are you safe?

A: Yes. We are in a small, isolated community where we’ve been able to keep to ourselves. We have access to all that we need: food, water, land, and, of course, shelter on our boat, which is our home. Our experience in Nicaragua has been great. The people that we have come to know here are kind and helpful.

Q: Have you enrolled in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP)?

A: Yes. Garrett and I enrolled with the U.S. Department of State STEP as soon as we got to Nicaragua. We have also filled out the correct forms to be considered for a repatriation flight, should one happen. We have also been in frequent contact with the U.S. Embassy in Managua. I have reached out to Florida Governor Rick DeSantis as well as Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio to see if they can offer any assistance in getting us on a two-hour flight from Managua to Miami. I have contacted UPS to see if we could get on one of their cargo flights back to Miami (the answer was no), and a friend has reached out on our behalf to the FedEx humanitarian department. Our family and friends have reached out to politicians in California, Illinois, and Michigan. I have spoken to family members with military connections to see what our chances might be there. I’ve reached out to private jet charters. I truly feel like Garrett and I have done all that we can in terms of trying to find a flight out of Nicaragua to the United States.

Q: Can’t you drive to Costa Rica or another country and fly home out of there?

A: The countries surrounding Nicaragua (El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica) have closed their land, air, and sea borders to all foreigners. This means we cannot sail our boat or drive our car to those countries.

Q: Is Panama closed? Why don’t you go there?

A: Panama is not technically closed to boaters, though on March 14 the Government of Panama locked down all marinas, boats, and sea ports, causing a lot of confusion. They have since clarified that Panama is not closed to boats, and instituted a fourteen-day quarantine and lock down policy on March 20. The lock down only allows six hours of movement permitted per person per week based on gender and ID number. It is about a five-day sail from where we are in Nicaragua to the marina that we would do our quarantine in Panama. We are in lightning season in this part of the world now, and it wouldn’t be very safe for us to sail five days non-stop without places where we can tuck in for safe harbor along the way. Once we got to Panama, we would not be permitted to leave our boat during the fourteen-day quarantine period. The sound of being on our boat for almost twenty days without a break or even access to swimming in the water to cool down in this heat sounds awful to me. In addition to that, there aren’t any flights out of Panama to the United States (they’re expected to resume on May 23, but there isn’t any certainty in that), so we’d just be stuck in a similar situation to the one we’re in now, albeit worse, because we’d have less freedom of movement.

Q: Why don’t you just fly out of Mexico?

A: We have not ruled this option out. But it’s a three-day sail from where we are in Nicaragua to where we can go in Mexico. We are hesitant to sail right now because of lightning season and the fact that our mast is essentially a lightning rod. We do not have radar to detect where the lightning is and therefore cannot smartly navigate around it. People do sail on the Pacific side of Central America at this time of year, though; we have friends who just completed the trek from Nicaragua to Mexico by sea. But at this point, I’m just not up for facing lightning storms when that sail north would already be stressful. There is no guarantee that we would be allowed in if they decided to close their borders, and there’s no guarantee that flights will continue to go out from Tapachula to Mexico City and then to the United States.

Q: Why not sail to Hawaii?

Thisldu is set up to be a coastal cruiser—we don’t have radar, Iridium Go, or a water maker. It was never our intention to cross an ocean or be offshore for prolonged periods of time. On top this and of our own personal reasons for not going there, Hawaii does not want boaters right now. Garrett and I would not want to exhaust their already limited resources.

Q: Key West is only about 1,000 miles of a sail, why don’t you do that?

A: No, it’s not. We are in the northwest corner of the Pacific side of Nicaragua. Getting to Key West would involve sailing five days and 800 miles to Panama, undergoing a fourteen-day quarantine period during which we would not be able to leave our boat, and hiring an immigration agent for $1,000 to allow us to be able to dock at the marina (see above for additional restrictions in Panama), and then going through the Panama Canal. Right now, we would need to find two other boats also planning to transit the canal due to additional requirements from the transit authority. All three boats would need to raft up, and that raft would have to fit within certain size limits. All passengers of the three boats—a minimum of a skipper and four line handlers for each—would need to undergo the fourteen-day quarantine period together, and also hire an agent to secure the proper documents needed to transit the canal. Getting through the canal would be the easy part. But then, once on the Atlantic side, the “best” course requires you to sail upwind roughly 3,000 miles—at the beginning of hurricane season—to Florida. This is why we are not sailing to Key West right now.

Q: Why not sail straight back to California?

A: See above re: lightning season and not being set up to be at sea for prolonged periods of time. For those of you new here, you should know that it is our overarching goal to sail from the West Coast to the East Coast, and the past eight months have been dedicated to making progress from San Francisco to Central America. And, as you go farther north in Mexico during this time of year, you enter the hurricane zone. Even without hurricanes, it’s a nasty upwind sail north, known amongst sailors as “the bash.” Returning to California is the least appealing of all of our options.

Q: Can’t you just stay where you are?

A: We need to return to the United States for work. It was always our intention to leave our boat in Central America and return to the States before hurricane season, which is fast approaching. We had just originally planned to leave it at a marina in Panama on the Caribbean side of the canal. Now, our plans have been changed, and we are going to leave the boat in Nicaragua until we can return (granted we can leave) to move it to Costa Rica or Panama. In addition to this, our visas expire in June, and well, we just want to go home. It’s time.

Q: Why do you want to come home now?

A: We need to. We had been hoping other borders would open to get our boat to a safer place, but the repeated extension of border closers would now have us sailing into other waters in lightning/hurricane season (see above), and we need to get back to work. We are not retired, millionaires, or trust fund kids. We worked hard, saved, and gave ourselves a budget. We had always planned on returning to the states during hurricane season to work, and left ourselves a cushion in case unforeseen circumstances arose. We are okay for the time being because of that foresight, but like so many others right now, that number is only getting lower and we need to get back to work.

I hope that this post helps clarify our current situation, our future plans, and the reasoning behind the decisions that we have made. Please know that we are okay. We are healthy and safe. It would just be best for us to be in the United States now, and we’re doing all that we can to make that happen. We are not deserving of or interested in anyone’s pity. We have had a really incredible year of travel and a full cruising season from the time that we left San Francisco to the four months that we spent in Mexico to the two months that we have spent here, in Nicaragua. It’s all part of the adventure. Now, the adventure lies in getting home. Thank you again to all of those that have tried to help.