Sunday 15 Mar, Cayman day 1, George Town: Complete check-in formalities and relax onboard reading the world news. Looks like we will be locked down here for a while.
We sleep like babies after our overnight passage. We wake to clear skies and find we are surrounded by beautiful blue water, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Bahamas. We also now see the orange mooring balls that we could not locate in the dark last night. A row of them near the shoreline.
At 9am we call port security on VHF and they advise we need to tie up at the port warf to clear-in. We had hoped to just go in with the dinghy. Port warfs are normally nasty places, so I inflate our 2 large Avon fenders, then drop the mooring line and motor in to the warf. We’d already seen a Swiss catamaran that was also flying the Q-flag, heading there too. But when we get there, the decent part of the warf is only long enough for one yacht, and the cat is already taking that space. So we hang around for the next 30 minutes while they get cleared in.
After tying up we enter the customs and immigration office and fill out the usual forms. Well “usual”? Not really the case because each and every country has their own requirements and their own set of forms. All different but all needing the same usual information. As we are completing the information, the officers tell us we have arrived just on time. Tomorrow, Cayman Islands will be on Convid-19 lock-down with no one allowed to enter. They also tell us that Cayman already had one death, an Italian from a cruise liner. Cruise liners are also banned going forward. It’s a bit of a shock for us to hear.
Just 2 days away from the internet and we find the whole world is locking down. Well, at least countries seem to have finally woken up and are taking the necessary actions at last. We are just thankful to have got here in time. We could have found ourselves stuck in Jamaica or worse still, in limbo, stuck on the high seas with no place to go! Later in the day we do manage to connect to a WiFi signal and we discover Panama and many other countries are now also banning entry. So the in-limbo scenario could be very real for other yachts currently on passage. We wonder where the hundreds of cruise liners in the Caribbean will be doing?
Once cleared in and having paid the $70 overtime fee due to being a Sunday, we motor back into the bay and this time correctly pick up one of the free orange bouys. Then we just relax. What’s going on in the world has Oana and I starting to get a bit rattled. Grand Cayman should be as good a place as any to be marooned, with a good medical system. But it still feels weird not to be free to travel. All plans for the coming months are going to be up in the air. Later on, Ian, our Canadian friends from s/v Mahina, lets me know that he has cancelled his transatlantic to Europe. I fully understand, but it doesn’t stop me being disappointed. I had been looking forward to helping him do the crossing in June 🙁
The rest of the day we spend pottering on board with no desire to go ashore just yet. We manage to get a weak WiFi signal and look intensively at the news, then continue doing some more video editing. Looks like we will be having lots of time on our hands to catch up on those in the coming weeks.
I also take a swim around the boat. So lovely to be back in crystal clear water again. The bottom of the hull still looks good. A few small barnacles to knock off but otherwise it just needs a wipe off.
On deck we take down the cockpit tent. It’s so nice to have fresh air flowing in the cockpit. It’s a lovely temperature here. A couple of degrees cooler than Jamaica and much less humidity. More like the lovely climate of Bahamas.