I can’t remember the exact timing here. According to the timestamps on the photos, we were still under the watchful eye of the government on Dec. 13th and we needed to be in St. Martin on Friday, December 18th to pick up Sydney.
I believe we had a couple of days of things we had to get done in the BVIs after we were out quarantine – getting the GPS wristband tracker removed (another good story), taking a sailing test for the insurance company, provisioning, etc.
One of the items was to figure out what we needed, from an official immigration perspective, to leave the BVIs. While in quarantine, we had heard differing accounts of what was required (things were very fluid at this point, as we got to understand is just part of the Caribbean culture). So one day, when we were out of quarantine, but still at Nanny Cay, we took a taxi into Road Town, the main town, to talk to some officials. We went to the Ministry of Health, who pointed us to the Department of Health (different), who insisted that we didn’t need any health form to leave. This was contrary to what the website said and also to what rumors had told us at Nanny Cay. But these were the official government agencies, so we took that to be the final word. We then talked to someone at immigration in Road Town and they also said we didn’t need anything except the standard departure documents. They did tell us, however, that the only port that was open for departure was Soper’s Hole.
So on the 15th we went to Soper’s Hole to clear out of the BVIs. We still had 2-3 days before we needed to be in St. Martin, so we had plenty of time – or so we thought.
We went in to the immigration station in Soper’s Hole, started filling out the paperwork, and told the officials that we were all set from a health/COVID perspective. The officials weren’t so sure about the health clearance, so they called the Ministry of Health (the official on the dock called a friend who knew the direct line to the Secretary for the Ministry of Health). When the official from the dock got hold of the Secretary, they literally got into an argument while I was standing 5 feet away, about who had what authority. It was a Caribbean, cross-department, bureaucratic, power-struggle and I was standing there watching it unfold. At one point, the secretary (a woman) became very condescending to the dock official (a man) and basically told him to “stand down”.
The dock official finally just handed me his phone and said to talk to the Secretary. She informed me that, because the BVIs were officially closed to all sea traffic, that I needed a special form filled out and signed by the Governor of the BVIs to create a special exception to leave. Without this clearance and the coordination of many government departments, including the coast guard, we would literally be physically prevented from leaving. And, by the way, this couldn’t happen overnight – it would probably take a couple of days. (On the phone, she was extremely professional, understood our timing issues, and was very empathetic. Over the next couple of days, although I was very frustrated, she continued to be professional, was clearly trying to do her best, and was going out of her way to make it happen at the senior most levels of the government. And, although it took two days which wasn’t optimal from my perspective, it was greatly appreciated.)
So we stayed in Soper’s Hole, enjoying the beautiful weather and the clear water, but unsure whether we would make St. Martin on-time and unable to track any progress of our paperwork through the system. Oh, and we had to time all of this with the COVID restrictions where we had taken a PCR test and gotten a test result that expired in a couple of days.
As I recall, we got our paperwork two days later, on the 17th at about 11am, an hour before our PCR test expired. We went in, cleared out, and set sail for Hallover’s Bay to spend the night.
