In mid-August 2019, my wife, Terrie, and I laid up our Malo 46, Nada, in Falmouth, England, and flew home to Maine. We booked flights back to the UK for May 2020, anticipating a summer of cruising the Atlantic coasts of France and Spain. Then Covid struck.
Remember that first lockdown in March and April of 2020? It seems like a lifetime ago. We all thought we’d be back to normal in May or June. But as May approached, Europe was still locked down. We changed our flights to June, then July and then August before reluctantly concluding there would be no boat or cruising in 2020. We rescheduled for May 15, 2021.
March and April of 2021 brought a wave of optimism. Terrie and I were vaccinated; I went on a shopping spree for boat parts. Then the Delta variant struck. Once again, Europe closed its doors to non-essential travel. The UK imposed particularly severe and expensive quarantine requirements.
In July, the UK briefly lift ed its quarantine restrictions with Portugal at a time when Portugal was more-or-less open to vaccinated Americans. We immediately booked flights to Porto, with onward tickets to the UK.
Then, shortly before we were due to fly, the UK closed the Portuguese door. We on the hard without any charging for her multiple expensive battery banks. I was beset by nagging concerns over this and the state of the all-over boat cover we were using. What would we find if it had been torn up by the weather?
