Stuck at Sea in the Middle of a Pandemic

Wouter Heeremans: The plan was to fly back from Cuba, but all the islands went into lockdown. So we couldn’t go on land anywhere, and then we had to do the crossing, because otherwise we would never get home.

Beck: When did you board the ship?

Wouter: On the first of March.

Frederique: We would’ve been back on the sixth of April, if we took our flight home, but because of the coronavirus, we came back on the 26th of April.

Beck: When you first left on the ship, did you know about the pandemic, or were you expecting to have a normal study abroad at sea?

Wouter: It was already going on, but not like it is now. It was really small when we left.

Blanche Krabbe: It was like one person in the whole Netherlands who had the coronavirus.

Wouter: Like one week after we left, everyone else in the Netherlands said they didn’t have to go to school anymore. But on the ship, you don’t hear that much of it, and we expected to have a normal trip.

Jona: We didn’t expect it to come across the ocean so quick.

Beck: Before everything changed and you had to sail home, what was your daily life like on the ship?

Frederique: We had to get up at 7 a.m., and we had breakfast. At 8 a.m. we had to do self-study for our school, for four hours. You had teachers who could help you if you had problems. And after that, you had sailing training, or if we were on an island, you could see the island and visit it. And then in the evening, if you were sailing, you had to do two hours of sail watch and then you could go to bed. There was a real …

Blanche: Rhythm.

Wouter: It was the same every day. Also, after self-study, we’d have lunch, and from 1 to 2 p.m., we had happy hour, which was when we had to clean the whole ship. That was six days in a row—every day except lazy day.

Beck: That doesn’t sound like a happy hour!

Wouter: No. It really is not a nice, happy hour. Also they had really hard, loud music playing over the whole ship. For one hour, and then you could relax for a bit.

Jona: The loud music was a pretty bad influence on your effective work time, because I would do pretty much nothing, and just dance around. And on the deck there would be water fights. Everyone would be wet, and nobody was being serious, but the job eventually always got done. So it was happy hour for me.

Beck: What would you do on the sail watches?

Frederique: You had to do deck check—on the hour you had to check that everything was still all right, and you have to do the engine-room checks. It was with a group of six, so you could talk a lot with each other, and get to know them better.

Blanche: [Daily life] was like six days the same, and then you had lazy day, where you were actually doing nothing. That was the best day, because they always had nice food.