“Wylde Swan” at the dock in Galisbay Port, St. Martin. (Caribbean Sail Training photo)
Students help with provisioning for “Wylde Swan’s” departure from St. Martin before the COVID-19 outbreak. (Caribbean Sail Training photo)
HARLINGEN--Wylde Swan, a Caribbean Sailing Training member vessel with 25 students on board, arrived safely in the Netherlands on Sunday after spending several weeks sailing back from the Caribbean.
The students, between 14 and 17 years old, had left the Netherlands for St. Maarten just before the coronavirus crisis. They were to board the Wylde Swan, a Frisian two-mast tall ship built in 1920, in St. Maarten for an educational programme about nature and sustainability.
For a period of six weeks, the ship would sail through the Northern part of the Caribbean, past the Windward Islands, Jamaica and Cuba. After 2½ weeks the corona crisis hit and it became clear that the students would not be able to fly back to the Netherlands from Cuba at the end of the programme as planned.
Organisers decided the ship, including 12 experienced sailors and three teachers, would have to sail back across the Atlantic to the Netherlands, a 7,000 kilometre trip that took them five weeks. Before embarking on crossing the ocean, Wylde Swan stopped in St. Lucia to take on provisions. Also bought were warm clothes the students would need for the Atlantic crossing.
Initially, the students were a bit disappointed that they would not continue to sail through the Caribbean. However, their slight discontent turned into a positive spirit shortly after. “They were proud to do this,” Christophe Meijer of the travel organisation Masterskip told the Dutch broadcasting company NOS.
“You have to learn to adapt, because you don’t really have any choice,” said student Anna Maartje in a video interview released to the media. “My first thought was: how am I going to do this with the clothes I have, and is there enough food on board?”
With social distancing rules and bans on public gatherings in place in the Netherlands, the students departed the ship one by one in the port of Harlingen, where parents waited in cars to pick them up. During their previous stop in the Azores, off the coast of Portugal, they were not allowed by local authorities to leave the ship.
The students were kept busy during the journey back. They learned and did homework using the schoolbooks they had bought in St. Lucia, and the rest of the day was filled with adventurous learning, such as whale-spotting and the observation of other sea life.
