The future of the cruising lifestyle

A crowded USVI anchorage during the Covid-19 pandemic

Bob of s/v Pandora wrote an excellent blog entry about whether cruisers should be planning to cruise the Caribbean next season.  His description of getting stuck in the Caribbean with his wife without being able to go ashore was typical of stories we'd heard all along. His plight of being with a relative non-sailor and making the decision to return home to the states without crew was also a familiar theme. These issues and others are making me wonder what the future of cruising will bring before the advent of an effective vaccine. There are already fears of a new H1N1 flu being able to jump from swine to humans and creating a new pandemic wave soon. 

Methinks there will always be two schools of thought: people who believe the risks are high and those who deny any increase in risk. Those who deny any increase in risk will continue to take risks by sailing across oceans to see what's over the horizon. Those who believe the risks are high may simply return to local cruising and gardening. Staying closer to home will at least mean that if a spike comes, you can be home to ride it out. 

What it means longer-term is to be seen. When enough people have had it and an effective vaccine is available, then we can see about returning to 'normal'.  Some things will be altered forever as they were after the Spanish flu. But according to Laura Spinney who wrote a book about the 1918-19 pandemic, there were quite a few changes that occurred as a result of that one in which 50 million people are thought to have died. Of course, we have lots more people in the world now, and we have lots more technology that gets us around the world faster than before, If we don't change that paradigm, we will continue to suffer. An interesting point from the book, we collectively tend to forget about pandemics. We write about and study wars ad nauseum, but we shut pandemic out of our minds very quickly. 

Perhaps if we went back to everyone slowly sailing around the world instead of jet setting around, we could still see the world in a safe way and save the planet, too. We could always still Zoom around the world while underway. Something to think about.

A Zoom family meeting during lockdown. 

By the way, Greta Thunberg has an interesting 12-part blog diary about her trips to the States and Davos published in Time magazine. An interesting read.