[NOMADE DES MERS] Confinement onboard

With the hurricane season coming, we had to move forward at all costs. Repairing the indispensable on the boat and sailing south to escape the strong winds. With the help of Xavier, Low-tech Explorer, who has been cruising for 6 months in Central America, we worked tirelessly and sailed along the Pacific coast to the small sheltered bay of Zihuatanejo. A real postcard setting, perfect for a confinement that was starting to harden in the region!

Xavier left when all the local life was coming to a standstill. Impossible to go to meet low-tech actors in the region as planned. But, being two optimists, we found ourselves a new mission. Our new objective: to transform the boat by reworking every low-tech on board to make it more pleasant to live on. Indeed, for the past 4 years, stop after stop, we have tested dozens of low-techs on board and the boat had become a bulk of objects of all kinds. It was uninhabitable! Low-tech after low-tech, we have reviewed everything: the design, the ergonomics, their function in our ecosystem, from the low-tech kitchen to zero waste techniques, including energy production and living things.

The confinement has become even tougher to the point that we have been put in quarantine / fortnight. For 15 days we had to stay on the boat without being able to go on land. We only had an internet connection to make a few phone calls and the coastguards who delivered provisions to us.

After this period of quarantine, we were able to return little by little to land, go to restaurants where they let us work on computers. We felt a certain discrepancy with our French/Belgian friends: we could no longer go ashore when they were on “conditional” leave and vice versa when we were able to go ashore again our friends were restricted again. On June 23rd, as if the health crisis wasn’t enough, an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 shook the Crucecita, our anchorage point … and also the epicenter of the earthquake.
The most difficult thing to live during this period: to feel like we are missing a lot of beautiful encounters knowing that there were a lot of low-tech initiatives around us that have become unreachable for the last 6 months.

Finally, a progressive deconfinement started on July 1st.

We put the boat in a marina to complete our major refitting works. Since the end of August we have also been able to start travelling in the region again to meet low-tech actors.

At the moment the boat is gorgeous and ready to go back for new adventures. We have developed a very low-tech and at the same time enjoyable lifestyle, which we are looking forward to sharing with you in the coming weeks!

Caroline and Corentin