Tower and Town, November 2020

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Colour Supplement: On A Mediterranean Yacht

First I have to admit that I felt very blessed to be in the circumstances I found myself in for the lockdown. I am part of a crew that live on a 125ft superyacht, with home berth in Mandelieu la Napoule, an upmarket port just west of Cannes. Mandelieu la Napoule is very beautiful, with steep mountains plunging into the sea and a castle right on the water's edge. Being so close to Cannes allows you to be as connected as you want, but the village has only a couple of boulangeries, tabacs, pharmacies and post office, so in the winter it's quiet, which is perfect for us.

Lockdown hit in France about a week before the UK with Macron informing us we were all at war with Coronavirus. At that time we had five crew members onboard, three women and two men, including two couples and ranging between the ages of 25-35, all of whom had spent the last year living and working together. Normal life in season on a Superyacht is a tough environment, you are working 14-hour days, the work is physical, there are no weekends and you cannot get off. It's safe to say it takes a certain type of person to survive in those conditions, let alone thrive. Fortunately, though, we do like our own personal space. Years in the industry and a light heart had made us all able to cope with living in a tin can, though some more than others. When lockdown hit that Tuesday, not a lot changed: it was the winter period, a relaxed time for us yachties as work was Mon-Fri 9-5, so work Wednesday was very similar to Monday. Lockdown never altered how we worked at all, so we all worked till 5pm and then scattered around the yacht to entertain ourselves. I have to reiterate, we were extremely lucky, the yacht has a lot of outdoor space which we are free to use for our own activities: our young deckhand would practice poi on the forepeak, or headstands on the swim platform, I would work out on the flybridge and our captain would read the newspaper on the main deck aft.

The situation off the boat, however, was drastically changing as we now needed to fill in a form to go anywhere, including saying where your home was and the time that you left it. Spend too long away or wander too far and you were fined; over 350,000 fines were given out in the first two weeks. Exercise off the boat was prohibited by our captain, for a number of reasons a) you couldn't go far (1 km) so no proper running b) crew were being stopped by the police for working out on the dock, opposite the boat, so he didn't want to risk us being detained as only one of us was a French citizen. On that matter, five of a neighbouring crew were fined for just sitting on the dock three metres from their boat. For us crew the most we saw of the outside world was the supermarket and that was only once every three weeks (we had a rota) and occasionally the Capitanerie for post, although that was closed within the first week, so no post. When we ventured out, we would don our masks (efficiently ordered by our stewardess) and traipse through the aisles checking and double checking we had everything we needed for the next week, whilst the rest eagerly waited for the expedition party's return, hoping for titbits of human life e.g. any fights over toilet roll, or were there enough baguettes. To be fair to the South of France, our local supermarket always had food and that was never an issue. You had to queue on occasion, but that was only in the first month. No fights over any item were witnessed and of course they never ran out of baguettes!

On the food perspective, it is always interesting cooking in the winter for yacht crew as we take pride in getting through the random supplies left by the chef from the previous summer: gluten-free flour, nori seaweed and zanthum gum were a few of the titbits left behind. This makes for experimental cooking. There were a lot of fancy grains this year and quite a few packages of flours with Turkish or Spanish labels, so when the flour shortage came, this made for interesting baking! Lockdown brought cooking to the fore front as I think it did everywhere, but we developed a weekend tradition based around it: every Saturday we had a BBQ on the flybridge or a big meal of some description, usually one person would make a complicated meal or multiple people would aid in a bbq, then we would settle into drinks and listen to music whilst putting the world to rights. One afternoon we even passed a plate of tapas to our port security man, which he gratefully accepted while declining the rosé.

Our interaction with the other crews was always a joy as it was the only real human contact off the boat, and it was one of these Saturdays we decided to get out our three-man slingshot and blast our friendly neighbour with water balloons.

Celebrating VE Day in La Napoule

Maybe Blitz spirit is how one would describe our months in full lockdown on board the yacht. Mon-Fri we would work, then we would quiz, have a big Saturday meal and Sundays were movie days. We even managed to watch the entire Star Wars series. Although we couldn't go anywhere, life was good and when France opened up again we soon slipped back into normal boat life, but with a few more friends.

Sophie Carmichael

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