When the Covid-19 Pandemic struck the
impacts on people around the globe were immediate and significant.
Economies ground to a crawl, people died by the hundreds, global travel
stopped overnight with borders closing and countries imposing
restrictions on internal movement. Cruising sailors were not immune
to the impacts. To this day borders throughout the Pacific Islands
remain closed to travel, a situation that has led to some in the
sailing community crying wolf about a looming “humanitarian
disaster”.
The so-called crisis that has been
identified is the inability of yachts in French Polynesia to flee the
cyclone zone and find weather refuge in New Zealand or Australia.
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| Sunken refugee boats in the Mediterranean; a real humanitarian crisis |
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Now, I know that the very idea of the plight of world sailors reaching the level of a humanitarian crisis is
hard to wrap your head around so let us take a look at everything that
is wrong with this argument.
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| French Polyneisan Anchorage - February 2020 |
The risk of being hit by a
significant storm in French Polynesia is, in reality, low. The
islands are known by cruisers to have a much lower risk of cyclone
activity than other parts of the South Pacific, so much so that each
year increasing numbers of cruisers apply for long-sta
y visas to
allow them to remain beyond the typical 3 months and hundreds of
vessels spend each cyclone season in the Marquesas, Tuamotus, and Society Islands. While remaining in the Tuamotus and Societies
carries a somewhat greater risk, the Marquesan Islands are generally
accepted to be free of risk from cyclones in all but the strongest
El Nino years. See Livia Gilstrap's excellent article on the
risks
of cyclones in Ocean Navigator.
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Image: NOAA Climate Prediction Center
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In addition to the normally low
risk of cyclones, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has said that the 2020/21 cyclone season has a
60%
chance of being a La Nina year, due to ocean temperatures that
are cooler than normal. This suggests that storms will be less
frequent and less severe. In an article for the Blue Water Cruising
Association -
Panache
and the South Pacific Cyclone Season - Price Powell crunched the
numbers and of the 20 cyclones that even came close to French
Polynesia in the last 48 years only 2 occurred in La Nina years.
While much is said of the risk of cyclones in French
Polynesia, New Zealand is not necessarily the safe haven one might assume. Yes, it is technically not a tropical location so not subject to tropical storms like cyclones, but strangely enough cyclones don't know where the borders to their zones are and sometimes extend themselves into post-tropical storms. In fact,
using the same
data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology as Price accessed, we can see that in the last 48 years a total of 18 storms tracked within 300km of Auckland just 2 fewer than approached Tahiti.
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| Image: Australian Bureau of Meteorology |
The plight of sailors on their boats in the South Pacific
does not approach the level of humanitarian crisis, and any increased
risk from remaining in French Polynesia is not significant enough to
claim that life or limb is at risk.
Consider that as I write this, over 27
million people have contracted Covid-19 and nearly 900,000 have
died. The
Brookings Institute conservatively estimates that the number of
people in the world living on less than $1.90 a day will increase by
50 million, and 2020 will mark the first year of this decade that the
global number of people living in poverty has increased. In July,
Oxfam
estimated that over 12,000 people could die daily because of starvation caused by Covid-19 related economic disruption.
The disease and its very real, very significant impact on the least
fortunate in the world is the true disaster, and we would do well to
remember it and respect the measures put in place to limit its spread and impact.
