Covid-19 Lockdown in St Martin

Amazing to see how much a few weeks can change the world. I thought I would put out a quick update on our situation here in French St Martin. As a remote outpost of the EU we are now effetely part of the wider French government enforced lockdown that has been running for a week now. We are not allowed to leave the boat unless we fill out and sign a permit saying we are getting essential services or for the purpose of solitary exercise close to home and a few other exemptions. Only one person allowed off the boat at a time, although there seems exemptions for dependent children. That said when we tried to spend some time on a quiet beach for the kids to get some exercise we were told we had to return to the boat by the police.

Almost all the countries in the Caribbean have shut their borders now so it seems we will be here for quite a while to ride this out. The Australian government last week kindly issued an extreme Class 4 travel ban (previously reserved for failed states like Iraq and North Korea) over the whole world requesting citizens return home, which with the stoke of a pen has voided 99.9% of all travel/health insurance policies for the thousands of Australians travelling overseas. So unfortunately, despite taking out the policy 3 months before the virus even existed in China, we now have a void policy (not just for Covid-19 but completely void for all claims). We have since been unable to find any policies which will cover us even with a Covid-19 exemption due to this extreme travel ban. Returning home as requested by the government is not really an option for us even if we wanted to, as most of the airports are shut and all the surrounding countries borders are shut. In theory under the lockdown you can’t even get a taxi to the airport even if we could get flights somewhere. All we can do is wait it out.

The good news ? We are all fit and healthy and our boat is a super effective quarantine from society. There are only a couple of imported cases on the island (of ~80k people) which are being dealt with so the lockdown has as good a chance of working here as anywhere. The shops here are still fully stocked and the French have a good social welfare system to help deal with the economic fallout and hopefully keep social unrest to a minimum. We are provisioned up with fuel and food, enough to last us at least a month if not longer. I just upgraded the solar so we now have enough power (880W solar and 300W wind) to make fresh water using our small desalination plant without using the generator. This takes one of our main fuel dependencies away in case there are fuel shortages. Oh and boulangeries (bakeries) are classed as an essential service in France; so we can dingy right up to within a couple of meters of one and get some delicious fresh baked treats.

Stay safe everyone. If anything can be learnt from history, it is that things can turn ugly quickly; and I am not talking about the virus itself or the great toilet paper wars. The economic fallout and associated societal unrest from this pandemic is most likely going to be something the world has not seen for a very long time. You can’t simply shut down an interconnected global economic system without massive deleveraging which will take many years to gear up again. This on top of a global financial system which was already reliant on near zero interest rates to stay afloat that only has one option left. Print massive amounts of money, hand it out via so called quantitative easing, and deal with the repercussions of an ever-expanding money supply later (which historically has never ended well). Global share markets are down almost 40% in one month and the pandemic is only just ramping up. Between 1929 and 1932 the Dow Jones lost 89.2% of its value. So, we might still have a long way to go yet.

Oh and the photo is of us on SV Cirrus at anchor in our current locked down position. There are worse places to be locked down for sure 😉

If you would like to learn a little bit more about my background in photography you can read the interview @photofeed did with me here.

Robert Downie
Love Life, Love Photography

_{All images in this post were taken by and remain the Copyright of Robert Downie - http://www.robertdowniephotography.com}