We set sail for Puesta del Sol, Nicaragua out of Chiapas, Mexico on March 11. We had 350 nautical miles of sea to cover which, with our hull speed of 5.5 knots per hour, meant we had a 64-hour sail ahead of us. Over the course of our three days at sea, the world’s reaction to Coronavirus accelerated.
Garrett and I were not feeling very enamored with cruising when we left. We’ve been sprinting down the coast of Mexico for weeks, zipping past or waiting out weather systems so we can meet our friends in Costa Rica on March 26. We’re tired and, to be honest, it’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve had any fun. The intense heat, lack of sleep, worrying over the gusting winds of the Tehuantepec and Papagayos, and getting stuck in a hot, remote, bare-bones marina for a week has tempered our enjoyment of living on a 35-foot sailboat.
Although being on a timeline has been a little bit stressful, Garrett and I were glad for the push to get us out of Mexico. We only have about seven weeks left in this cruising season and want to be able to spend enough time in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Our plan is to transit the Panama Canal by the end of April.
But Panama is closed off to us now. All of the marinas on the Pacific side of the country are closed until further notice and the marina on the Caribbean side where we plan to leave Thisldu for hurricane season is not accepting new boats. The country has instituted a fourteen-day quarantine period for boaters and the dinghy docks in a Panama City are guarded by officials to block entry to land.
El Salvador is closed, too. The border is shut down to foreigners. We were not planning on stopping in El Salvador (there’s a risky entrance to the most popular harbor there with breaking waves caused by a shallow bar that we didn’t want to deal with), but many cruisers do. If we were planning to enter and only had enough food, water, and fuel to get us there, we would be in trouble.
When we’re at sea, Garrett and I can text with people through our Garmin inReach, or we’ll sail through pockets of water with cell service, which is how we followed the evolution of the Coronavirus news on our three-day sail.
Being in the know did not help our nerves. What if we got to Nicaragua and found that they had closed their borders, too? What if we were quarantined, stranded on the boat for days, maybe weeks? What if we got turned away, only to be sent on to Costa Rica, only to be turned away again? We didn’t have answers for these questions. We plugged along, hoping we could get to Nicaragua before any changes were made.
In the scuffle of leaving Mexico—checking out of the country, doing a big provision run, refueling at a horridly tall and stressful cement fuel dock—Garrett and I forgot to tell the marina at Puesta del Sol that we were coming. By the time we remembered, we were too far out in the water and didn’t have cell service. We used our inReach to ask our friend Keenan for his assistance in contact the marina. He called them, he emailed them, he relayed their response to us (yes, they had room for us, but they needed our paperwork, and no, they did not recommend entering the marina at night like we planned, and yes, the country was still open to foreigners), and served as a go-between for days. Keenan was our lifeline.
He also asked for advice on our behalf from the Panama Posse, a group of cruisers traveling to and from the Panama Canal that we are all members of. Their knowledge about not only entering the marina but entering Nicaragua at all was invaluable.
Garrett and I pulled into channel leading into Puesta del Sol just before midnight on Friday, March 13 and dropped our anchor outside of the marina as advised by the group. We woke up six hours later with the sun to move Thisldu into the marina, where we are waiting now for health officials to clear us and immigration to check us in.
As of now, Nicaragua will remain open. El Salvador and Panama are, for our sakes, closed. Guatemala, like the United States, is not allowing any non-residents to enter from Europe. Costa Rica is still open.* We are crossing our fingers that our friends will be still be able to meet us, but the likelihood of that seems to lessen day by day.
Like the rest of the world, Garrett and I are unsure of how long these travel restrictions will occur for and whether or not they’ll get worse. If we cannot enter Panama and transit the canal by the end of April as planned but still have access to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, we will enjoy cruising those countries and find a temporary place to keep Thisldu while we return to the States until Panama opens its borders to sailors. Right now, we’re just taking everything one day at a time.
Garrett and I are not worried about the virus itself; instead we are amazed at the universal hysteria and drastic measures being taken to control its spread. We are healthy and better off than most, naturally socially distancing ourselves and living in pseudo-isolation on our tiny sailboat. We’re grateful for our health and the support of others while we figure out what’s next in this uncertain time.
*Update: Costa Rica closed its borders to foreigners on March 16. This unfortunately means that our friends who planned to visit us had to cancel their trip. Costa Rica plans to reopen on April 12. If it does, we will sail there and enjoy its plentiful array of anchorages before deciding what to do next. Panama’s quarantine and curfews are growing stricter by the day. If there’s any chance we can transit the canal, or even leave our boat on the Pacific side of Panama for the summer, we will. If Costa Rica does not open its borders on April 12 and/or Panama does not look like it will welcome boaters any time soon, we will likely leave the boat in Nicaragua for a bit and return to the States.