And then COVID happened

Can’t believe it’s been almost 2 years since we last posted an update here on our blog, and what an utterly bizarre and unpredictable 2 years it’s been.

Let’s go back a bit. On the 14th October 2019 we winterised Bon Bini and hauled her out in Marmaris, Turkey. We needed to get some work done over the winter so got in touch with Jes Holman, a super yacht surveyor and project manager with great connections. We met with him and shared the looong list of what needed doing, a new solar arch, new solar panels, a full engine service, a life-raft service, repair of a damaged stanchion, new guard wires, to name but a few things. Jes was wonderful and got straight to work.

It’s always sad when a fabulous sailing season comes to an end, but with our launch date in the diary already (23rd April 2020), Bini on track with getting her upgrades and two jobs in Munich lined up for the winter months we were feeling good as we packed the last of our bags and got a taxi to the airport. 

Arriving in Germany, we quickly settled back into land life and got back into the swing of corporate life. Munich itself took a little more getting used to as it was a far cry from the relaxed easy going pace of life we’d experienced in Greece for the last 6 months. People everywhere, routine, rules, structure, long sleeves and coffee costing a whopping €6 each! After staying in an Airbnb for a few weeks we found ourselves a cosy one bedroom apartment which was nice enough, and only a few minutes walk from the Isar river. What it lacked in terms of space and light (to see the sky you needed to lean right out of the kitchen window) it made up for in location and easy accessibility to everything we needed.  

We were also fortunate enough to be working for the same company so we commuted together every day, opting to walk the 5km to the office and back through the middle of the city, come rain, wind or snow. We signed up at a gym too and managed to get into the routine of going 3 times a week as well as running along the river. All in all, life was good. I also finally took the plunge and decided to get my teeth straightened and was scheduled to start with my Invisalign braces in March. Invisalign are these clear, removable aligners which slowly move your teeth and which you change every 2 weeks. How any of this was going to work on the boat, in Greece, miles away from my orthodontist I had no clue, but I figured we’d sort something out.

During the remainder of 2019 we squeezed in a couple of trips to Prague for my birthday, a “Gathering” in the UK, Copenhagen for Tom’s birthday and for Christmas we divided our time between Germany and the UK.

Then COVID happened. As for many, it crept up on us slowly at first. In January we visited the Boat Show in Dusseldorf, my parents came to visit us in Munich, and it still felt like the disease was a long way away and if you kept washing your hands you’d be fine. In the office we were merrily making jokes when people coughed, “Haven’t been to Italy recently have you?”. It was when people in the office started to contract COVID, and the decision came in mid March to shut down the office that things started getting more serious. 

In Munich we were reasonably lucky with the restrictions and at no time were we completely housebound as many of our friends and family were in the UK, Spain and The Netherlands. We were allowed out for exercise with members of our household and we could still go to the supermarket together. Not that there was too much to buy when you got there though, the shelves were very sparse! The seriousness of the situation really hit home when my sister contracted COVID whilst working at an elderly care home she managed. Thankfully she didn’t become seriously ill, but it was certainly a wakeup call for all of us. It was closing in and was not to be ignored.

In our minds though, we (well, mainly me) still naively assumed the whole thing would blow over in time for us to get back to Turkey in April. So we remained positive by working hard (we did enjoy working from home), persevering with our Body Pump workouts at home (with weights which you fill up with water), running, watching TV, talking to friends and family and drinking wine. Lots of wine. We also got into a routine of walking along the river before work each morning in an attempt to get some fresh air, and we got on first name terms with the local wildlife.

It was one snowy morning a week after lockdown started that Tom said he thought our chances of getting back to Turkey were extremely slim. I refused to accept it and for the next few days also refused to talk about it (how very grown up of me 😉 Instead I did some scenario planning, to see when would be the latest we could leave Munich and still get a decent sailing season in, on the assumption we’d try to start contracting again in October. The other problem was that not only were we desperate to get back on boat, but that both of our employment and rental contracts terminated on the 15th of April.

It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that he was right. We were going nowhere. Our last season had been the best 6 months of my life, that’s really no exaggeration, and I’d been desperately looking forward to continuing where we left off. The realisation that this was not happening was mortifying. I appreciate this sounds very dramatic, and with the world going to sh*t around us we all had bigger things to worry about, but still, I was gutted.

After cancelling our flights to Turkey and indefinitely delaying Bon Bini’s launch date, we needed a Plan B. We were fortunate enough to be able to extend our work and rental contracts for one more month, so we were OK until the 15th of May. The question now was, do we stay in Munich or move, and if so, where to? UK, Amsterdam, Barcelona? We started enquiring about places to rent in Munich as that seemed like the obvious and safest choice. But then what about work? Would we be able to get contracts next winter, or would we still be in lockdown? What would the state of the job market be? Would companies even be hiring? We had no idea what to do.

Whilst I was still in denial and hoping it would all just go away, Tom sprung into action and talked to some recruiters. We asked their opinion about the job market and they reaffirmed Tom’s instinct – it was utter chaos and full with uncertainty. We concluded then that we needed to bite the bullet and find permanent jobs again. In sailing terms, we’d be better off weathering this storm in the (relative) safety of permanent employment and keeping our dock lines snuggly tied up until the COVID tsunami receded.

A few days Tom later started interviewing for two companies based in Barcelona. That was a nice option. We still had friends there, the weather was great and we loved our years living there between 2016 and 2018. We didn’t however want to commit to a move before securing a job so we decided to hop back to the UK, to our flat in Hastings, whilst the interviews continued and concluded. So on 1st June 2020 we packed our bags and flew to Gatwick, which was a very strange experience. The airports were ghost towns and wearing the pesky masks took some getting used to.

Soon we landed, picked up the hire car and drove down to the south coast, via a socially distanced cup of tea in the garden with Dom & Dan. It was lovely to be back at home, somewhere which was ours and where we could stay as long as we needed without feeling like we were on the clock. We spent our days walking along the beach, having little naps, watching crappy TV and just generally relaxing. Oh, and interviewing. Tom spent a LOT of time interviewing. Soon he had two offers on the table (clever boy!) both of which were excellent so we started endlessly discussing and deliberating which one would suit him best. Just when we’d made a decision the phone rang. It was a recruiter from Amazon asking whether Tom would be open to discussing a role they had. Why not, he thought, nothing to loose. Before we knew it the next four days were crammed full of interviews and on the fifth day, he received an offer. The role was a perfect fit, and to top it all off he could work fully remotely from anywhere. And that was when we decided we’d move back to Barcelona. 

On 26th June 2020 we packed our bags, again, and drove to Gatwick for our flight to Barcelona. We were nervous about whether we’d actually make it so we breathed a sigh of relief as the plane took off and headed over the English Channel. Our relief was short lived however as the captain came over the tannoy about 2 hours into the flight and announced the plane had developed a fault so we had to turn back, noooo! Due to COVID they weren’t sure whether they could get it repaired in Barcelona so they wanted to get it back to home base. So back we went, deplaned, waited a few hours for its replacement and started all over again.

We landed in Barcelona late in the evening and cabbed it to our AirBnB, which we’d booked for a few weeks to give us time to find an apartment. It was bliss being back in Barcelona! We spent the first week re-familiarizing ourselves with the city, taking long walks by the beach, meandering through uncharastically empty streets and finding the best place for a Menu Del Dia we’ve ever had. The food was wonderful and with a wink, the owner always left the whole bottle of wine on the table from which to help myself. Very dangerous! Tom had his first day at work on the 6th of July, sitting behind a tiny desk in our tiny living room, and then the search for a job for me began. Those of you who know me know this is not my favourite pastime! I find it really stressful and to make matters worse, every company I talked to wanted a case study completing. Not being content with “good enough”, I over-thought and over-worked all of them until I was exhausted.

We spent the evenings apartment hunting and we were lucky to find one pretty quickly. It was in Villa Olímpica, a few minutes walk from the sea, located in the little village built to house the athletes of the 1992 Olympic Games. The house was beautifully quiet with a nice outside space where we could weather another lockdown if it came to that. The only downside was that it was unfurnished so we’d need to buy a few bits and pieces, but nothing major. A week later we moved in then did about a thousand trips to IKEA to buy furniture. Due to COVID they had relatively little in stock and the home delivery timescales were weeks and weeks so we hired cars, got taxis, trains and busses and finally had a house which resembled a home. We even managed to repossess our 2 bikes having left them chained up in Badalona Marina when we left in 2018 – rusty but salvageable!

Meanwhile my interviews were progressing well and I had an offer on the horizon when my former boss from Schibsted contacted me asking whether I’d be interested in working for him again, this time remotely from Barcelona. I decided in under a millisecond and a few days later I was the extremely proud owner of a signed contract!

The final piece of this puzzle was of course Bon Bini. She was still hundreds of miles away gathering dust on her stands in Turkey. Considering we had no chance of returning to Marmaris anytime soon, we needed to get her back to us, and we missed her! We made a call to Van de Wetering, the fabulous transport company who brought her from Amsterdam to Barcelona in 2016, and asked whether they would do their magic for us again. Together with Jes, our project manager, they loaded Bon Bini onto the trailer, drove her to Istanbul, loaded her onto a “ro-ro” ferry across to France, unloaded then drove to Badalona Marina. Fun fact, this whole thing happened without us signing a single piece of paper or handing over any money!

Then the usual chaos ensued. The driver arrived early (in hindsight, I should have clarified what “We’ll arrive on Tuehursday” actually meant) then the marina claimed they had no record of us wanting to unload. After a few hours she was safely back in the water, and our friends had come to the marina to welcome her back so that was the icing on the cake! It was only when she was at eye level again did we notice how absolutely filthy she was – she had enormous black boot marks from the Customers Officers who had boarded her in Turkey. We went to start the engine to move her into our berth but it was a dead as a dodo. Well, the battery was but thankfully our friends knew where we could get a new one so we raced there before it closed, installed it the engine purred into life. A few days later the rigging went back up and she was a proper boat again!

The following months were for us, as they were for many, rather uneventful. Barcelona enforced a curfew from October meaning we had to be inside from 22:00 to 06:00 and all the bars and restaurants were closed (disaster for us!) The days turned into weeks which turned into months. We walked, worked out, worked, drank wine, watched TV, became day-care for our neighbor’s beautiful cat and that was about it. We managed a quiet Christmas with my parents, and had a lovely drive down from Barcelona to Malaga and back, stopping in a beautiful hotel for the night on the way home. 2021 started in much the same way as 2020 ended but in March the curfew finally lifted and Barcelona started coming back to life. We took full advantage and spent many a night eating out (outside) and took a few trips on the boat and by car, visiting areas of the coast we’d yet to see.

Hmm, now that I think about it, I actually started writing this post to tell you that Tom, Bon Bini and I have moved again, this time down to down to Andalucía in southern Spain. I’ll leave the details of that for the next posting 🙂