Ok ok ok… I know. I’ve completely neglected this blog for a while. But in my defence, since the last post, I discovered Tahiti is pretty awesome and got distracted by diving, surfing (badly), snorkelling and wakeboarding and then the whole world shut down and I was distracted by that! But I’m baaaaack and ready to catch you all up on life in lockdown in Tahiti.
Being on an island in the middle of nowhere, it’s probably not surprising that the coronavirus panic took a little while longer to hit us here. Our boat actually ended up being one of the very first here to take it seriously as some muggins (me…) thought it was a good idea to go for dinner with a couple who had newly arrived from Europe and who turned out to be Tahiti’s 4th covid-19 case. Doh. So we ended up going into full boat quarantine for 14 days. Which would have been fine – we’ve done loads of passages of that length – however the situation here started to heat up and before we were out of our quarantine, French Polynesia followed France’s lead and put the country into lockdown. Bum.
In all honesty I’ve lost track of how many days its been now, but that initial 14 days when weren’t able to leave the boat at all…. Well I’d be lying if I said it was easy. Its funny, we’ve done 35 days at sea without seeing another soul and not able to ever relax properly, but THAT felt much more mentally draining to me. In addition to all the normal stresses (worrying about loved ones, worrying about contagion, worrying if you have enough toilet roll…) I also had to struggle with letting other people shop for us during the quarantine…
I hadn’t quite cottoned onto how much of a control freak I am about provisioning. But oh my goodness, I didn’t not enjoy writing a shopping list for a dayworker. The problem being that here in Tahiti the stocks on the shelves are pretty sporadic, so I usually end up changing my list to adapt to what’s available. I needn’t have worried though as the lovely gentleman did a very good job and made some pretty sensible substitutions for us.
Although I usually only shop once a week anyway, the inability to nip down the road if we run out of something was a pain in the bum. However, the dock we are on has several other super yachts who were all willing to help out – whether it was us running out of fairy liquid, or someone offering to run and get a bottle of wine when our spirits were dangerously low!
My quarantine boredom baking! 
This was a mushroom and squash wellington… so good! 
Nevertheless, we got through the quarantine period (for me – mostly by attempting to improve my baking skills!) and then dropped back into “normal” lockdown life. French Polynesia have taken this very seriously thankfully and imposed some pretty strict rules to start with:
- Curfew from 8pm-5am
- All non essential business shut
- No sales of alcohol
- A certificate required to be carried at all times stating why you are out of your home.
Unsurprisingly, this made provisioning quite interesting!! But I’ll save that for the next post…
Stay safe,
Abbi x