The ride home

8th of August 2020

It took us a while before completing the story of  Easy Rider’s return to the UK. This is not related  to any hiccups or mishaps during the road transport.

In hind sight, we are very happy to have decided to ‘go for it’ as soon as the lockdown was eased at the beginning of July. At that time you were not obliged to go into quarantine after travelling to Italy and France. Today it seems ‘touch and go’. In the UK, spikes of new infections mean regional lockdowns and who knows when or if there might be a second lockdown in London.

Easy Rider is now in Lymington, after only three days on the road across France. She is now having some much needed repair works before being launched back into the water. The final destination will be in Bucklers Hard on the Beaulieu river, where we had Easy Rider for 10 years before we moved to the West Country.

what a huge truck!

The day when Easy Rider was hauled onto the transporter was very exciting for us. The logistics in Port Napoléon and Global Nautic were perfect. The enormous lorry arrived in the morning and the boat was lifted straight onto it. The mast, which measures 18m had been prepared for transport, the spreaders taken off and everything well wrapped. Next we had to make sure that nothing remained loose on deck.

the mast all wrapped up

When everything was ready and the ‘Convoi Exceptionnel’, together with the safety car were  about to leave, Patrick spotted a leak in his lorry’s hydraulic steering system. He reacted immediately and parked the lorry out of the way of other boatyard traffic. The big question for him was where he could find a mechanic to repair the leaking hose? France was not only in the throws of covid but  everyone was on holidays as well. Fortunately Van De Wettering is a very big company with a very good support network and instead of possibly having to wait for days, Easy Rider went on its way only six hours later. Would the truck get to Caen in time for the ferry booking?

It did occur to me that someone might climb on board and try to hide… I asked Patrick, the Dutch driver whether he had experienced that before. He told us that people tried to jump on lorries in Caen all the time. Apparently there is a particular roundabout just before boarding the ferry where migrants wait and look for opportunities.

waiting for the mechanic

We flew back to the UK via Paris. Nothing noteworthy happened. The airports were extremely well organised. Wearing face masks was compulsory, sanitiser gel bottles were available everywhere and social distancing was achieved by having the tables in the café 2m apart. Seating in the departure lounge as well was allowed on every second seat. Yet the flight from Marseille to Paris was absolutely packed!  No social distancing there… apart from a compulsory face mask.

We have been back for 10 days now, and assume that we didn’t catch the virus.

Easy Rider crossed the Channel on the 29th of July. When we asked Patrick how the journey had been, he told us that three migrants had been spotted and had hidden in our cockpit lockers. We had not locked them just as you are not supposed to lock your suitcases when you travel. The padlocks were there but not locked in case the customs officers wanted to inspect the boat.

Caen ferry port...

The migrants were seen and photographed by the safety car. Patrick sent us also video clips of the migrants being ‘asked to leave’ by the border control.

What is striking is that in these clips no one seemed particularly alarmed or angry or aggressive. The border control ordered the migrants to get off the boat. You see them climbing down a ladder and just walking away.

The more I think about this incident the more I am troubled by it. At first I thought that Easy Rider had had an ‘adventure’. But now I think about the migrant crisis all the time. What are our attitudes to the problem? We live in a bubble where we are not affected by the plight of refugees in any way. We never come into contact with anyone who needed to flee their home and left everything behind to seek a safe future...