Couple at sea for 25 days had no idea about coronavirus till they docked

A British couple said they were stunned to learn that the coronavirus had escalated into a raging pandemic after returning from a trip on the high seas.

Elena Manighetti and Ryan Osborne, who live in Manchester, said they knew little of the virus when they set sail across the Atlantic in February from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, and told their family not to share any bad news during the voyage, the BBC reported. They had quit their jobs in 2017. Manighetti and Osborne had planned to travel to St Vincent from Manchester, a distance of 3,000 miles.

The first time they knew of Covid-19 was when a friend, who had sailed ahead of them, told them about the lockdown.

“In February we’d heard there was a virus in China, but with the limited information we had, we figured by the time we got to the Caribbean in 25 days it would all be over,” Manighetti said. By the time they reached their destination in mid-March, the couple was unaware that most of the world was in the grip of a pandemic.

“We told our shore contacts we didn’t want to hear any bad news, which was a difficult job as it was pretty bad news,” Manighetti told the outlet.

But the couple soon learned something was up when they ran into issues while trying to dock their boat in the Caribbean.

“We first attempted to land in one of the French territories in the Caribbean but when we arrived we found all the borders were closed and the islands were closing down,” Osborne said.

They instead diverted their boat to St Vincent, where they used their GPS system to prove they had been isolating for nearly a month, according to the BBC.