‘Of all the things’: After navigating 885 days across the globe, sailors return to pandemic
When Eric Bihl and Kennon Jones quit their jobs, bought a boat and set sail in 2018 to circumnavigate the globe, they expected to hit a few hurdles.
Getting injured in a storm or having their 34-foot racing sailboat sink Titanic-style after hitting a semi-submerged shipping container in the ocean were on their list of things to avoid. They even had a plan B in the event of hitting a whale.
“But of all the things that could have put a wrench in this plan, a global pandemic was pretty low on the list,” said Jones, a former foreign affairs officer at the U.S. State Department, after he and Bihl, a wine merchant, docked their sailboat at Hall of Fame Marina in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday, completing the last of the more than 30,000 ocean miles on their journey.
Two months earlier, the 32-year-old sailors had become stranded in Saint Helena, a British volcanic island one-third of the way from southwestern Africa to Brazil, as countries across the world closed their borders to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
After a final 5,000-mile stretch across the Atlantic, Bihl and Jones finally reached Florida’s coast, where they were welcomed by friends and family. But being new to social distancing, face masks, shuttered storefronts and daunting pandemic headlines, they said they felt like they had been catapulted into a changed world.
Bihl and Jones, who met at Wake Forest University near Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2007, began planning their lifetime adventure in 2010. Five years later, they purchased their sailboat, the Temujin Tartan 34C — the second boat of its series to complete a circumnavigation of the world since 1967.
And in January 2018, the duo traveled down the coast from Annapolis, Maryland, to Fort Lauderdale, where their adventure began and where it ended 885 days later after crossing the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans and visiting nearly a dozen countries on four continents.
The pandemic was beginning to alarm the world when on March 1 they reached the coast of Namibia, in southwestern Africa. But with the bulk of cases still being reported from China, Bihl and Jones serenely continued their journey across the South Atlantic waters towards Saint Helena.
“And then, in the intervening weeks it took us to sail to Saint Helena, all the sudden the world had significantly changed,” Jones said.
The sailors had been receiving snippets of news via email from Bihl’s fiancée, Lauren Leifeste, 31, who said she constantly monitored the Temujin.
At first, Leifeste said she tried to tone down the alarm.
“I [drove] myself crazy, constantly obsessing over the news and what was going on. So I had to kind of walk the line of getting them information and [not] putting, you know, my own biases and fears in it,” Leifeste said.
But as the death toll rose in the United States, Leifeste realized she had to warn them that the world that they were about to return to had been radically transformed.
“You guys don’t understand. This is going to, like, change our lives,” Leifeste said she told Bihl and Jones, who remained oblivious to the effects of the pandemic until they anchored their boat at a port in Saint Helena, turned on the TV and saw it with their own eyes.
Bihl and Jones had planned to visit the Caribbean islands and continue their sail down the coast of Brazil, but in late March the country shut its borders to foreigners. So after waiting out the pandemic for five weeks and making a brief stop in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands, the travelers were forced to return to their homeland.
“All the buildings are still here, all the boats,” said Bihl, cracking a nervous laugh after docking the Temujin in Fort Lauderdale.
But “coming here is pretty sobering. You really see that it’s affecting a lot more people than you out in your little bubble” at sea.
While Bihl and Jones said that seeing their friends and family masked and standing six feet apart definitively broke that bubble, Leifeste stressed that the sailors missed the greater part of the crisis.
“I don’t even know if they still realize the impact of it just because they had such little access to information,” Leifeste said. “Coming back when things are now opening up. They don’t realize what everyone that was here went through for a few months. … I don’t know if they ever will.”
Still, with a second wave of the pandemic possibly approaching, Bihl and Jones said they are bracing themselves to do “a world of learning” about the social norms of this new pandemic-ridden world.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 1:16 PM.
