A group of 25 Dutch high school students arrived home on Sunday after five weeks of sailing across the Atlantic. The students had been on a sail-study program in the Caribbean when the Covid-19 pandemic scuppered their plans to fly home.
After travel restrictions introduced to control the spread of the virus made it impossible to fly home from Cuba, trip organisers instead decided to sail back to the Netherlands on the ship the students had been learning on.
“Well sometimes it’s difficult that a boat is a very tiny space and you’re with a lot of people. So sometimes it’s very difficult that you can get annoyed very easily,” said Lotte, one of the students on board, who are all aged 14-17, told Reuters. “But it’s very quickly solved because you are in such a small space so you have to solve it quickly.”
The Netherlands’ social distancing rules meant students had to leave the boat one by one before finally being reunited with their families.
