Friday Flips the Table.
Friday started off pretty great. We swam a mile at lle de Ronde, saw a lot of fish and multiple turtles. We had a 3pm deadline to get to the fuel dock in St. Louis Harbor in Grenada, so we had to keep moving if we wanted to get in another swim on this last day of our trip. We set sail for the big island of Grenada.
After the swim Heather wasn't feeling great, and one of our guests who had been having some mild cold-like symptoms was feeling worse. We tested Heather en route and found that she was positive for Covid. I gathered the crew and guides on the bridge, and we all agreed to immediately inform the guests, get back to the dock as soon as possible, and offer to test everyone aboard. Our guests handled the news with grace, cooperation and support of the plan, and everyone agreed to be tested.
A total of 4 people aboard tested positive, and as a group we decided it was best for them to isolate themselves in a hotel, which they all did, obligingly. Some guests who tested negative also decided to spend the final night in a hotel. The remaining (negative) crew, guides and one guest stayed the final night aboard the yacht, docked in the marina. In the morning we packed up the boat, and made our way home, a little stunned and saddened by the abrupt ending of such a fantastic trip, and the sudden splitting of our group that has grown so close this past week. The people who had tested positive, as of this writing, are in various stages of recovering from mild to moderate symptoms. Heather, in particular, spent an extra 3 days in Grenada with moderate cold symptoms, isolated with a big comfy bed and a beautiful view of the sea that has been our home for these last two weeks. She’s had a lot of time and space to reflect and is contributing to this post.
We stand by our commitment to require our crew and guests to be vaccinated against Covid 19, even as the virus appears to be getting milder with each new strain. We will continue to follow CDC guidelines as well as the protocols of our host locations before and during our travel there. That everyone aboard was fully vaccinated and had tested negative immediately prior to travel to the islands and still, we had a few cases, is an indicator of how ubiquitous the virus is, and how it has become not only more common, but harder to accurately detect in a world where humans are on the move, driven to connect.
For those of us who want to travel, there are no guarantees of avoiding a virus we are now learning to live with. Each of us will make the decision about whether the gain is worth the risk.
Many of the places we travel to have now dropped the testing requirement for entry. This includes Grenada, which dropped its testing requirement during our stay. As of now, testing is still required to re-enter the US, which adds a complicating layer to the risk of travel we all assume. We feel good about the system we have in place for assisting our guests and crew with testing 24 hour prior to their return home, and will continue to do so as long as it is required.
As this is our first experience with Covid both on a trip and for Hopper and I personally, we are both grateful for a few things:
This unfortunate disruption came very late in our trip - at the 11th hour of two fantastic weeks in Grenada. It cannot erase the moments and memories we have made, and we are so grateful that our guests have echoed this sentiment.
Everyone - our crew, guides and guests - let their conscience and compassion for one another guide them as we navigated new and complicated waters together.
Everyone is now home, and while it certainly wasn’t the final Friday we had planned, it won’t be the defining event of our time swimming in Grenada’s beautiful and welcoming waters.
These two weeks in Grenada have been fantastic. The swimming, the culture, the flavors and spicy aromas that make this place so unique. Hopper wrote earlier about the conch midden we stumbled upon in a little bay on the southern point of Carriacou. An exciting development - he reached out to an archaeologist who has excavated midden sites around Carriacou. She wrote back to him with interest as she has yet to investigate the area we identified, slowly being uncovered by erosion on that part of the island. How exciting to have one of our swims tap into the rich seafaring history of this place, and what a bonus to have stumbled on an as of yet, unexplored chapter of the story.
These islands, and all the islands we are so fortunate to visit, have been here throughout the millennia, the waves lapping perpetually no matter the troubles - large and small - of the humans coming and going from them.
And so it seems that almost as hard as going into a pandemic is coming out of one. Our challenge is to find comfort with a new, uncertain, normal, in life and especially in travel; to balance our fears with the benefits of spending time with people in new places and new waters. As a tiny travel company committed to special experiences, we will continue to weather these waves, adapt and keep our focus on what we do, and why our guests love to swim with us.
In just a few weeks we’ll head back to Hawaii, where ohana and wondrous things await our goggled eyes. We will keep striving to make our time in the water the best of what the sea can offer.
Love,
Hopper and Heather
Heather’s view. XO