Stranded in Tahiti, man sails 6,000km to reach Australia

SYDNEY: Stuck in Tahiti with no available flights, Paul Stratfold was running out of time to get back home to Australia and renew his residency visa. The Briton decided his best option was to sail 6,000km across the southern Pacific Ocean, a solo voyage that took almost a month.

A professional sailor, the 41-year-old had done nothing of this magnitude before. Stratfold’s 50-foot yacht was battered by a storm for two days and he slept no more than 40 minutes at a time to reduce the risk of collisions. “It was the only way I could get home,” he said in an interview. He reached Southport in Queensland on July 3.

Desperate journeys like this, along with tales of tragedy and separation, are increasingly common as the pandemic wears on, especially where governments persist with hardline quarantines and border controls.

Nearly two years into the crisis, tens of thousands of frustrated citizens of nations such as Australia and New Zealand remain stranded overseas, unable to secure flights back to their homelands and one of the few slots allocated for compulsory hotel quarantine.

Mandatory quarantines helped insulate so-called Covid Zero nations from the worst of the pandemic by keeping out the virus. But as other parts of the world start to move on and reopen, maintaining these costly systems is becoming less tenable, and cracks are starting to show.

Under siege from an outbreak of the delta variant after a single case evaded its border curbs, Australia has repeatedly slashed its quarantine quota, with fewer than 3,000 overseas arrivals allowed in each week. That’s for a nation of 25 million known for its widespread diaspora.

The lengths taken by those stranded are in stark contrast to many other parts of the world, where vaccinations are ticking higher and border restrictions are easing, or were never really imposed at all.

Locking down countries and eradicating the virus domestically should only be a stop-gap measure until vaccination rates increase, according to immunologist Graham Le Gros, director of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington, New Zealand.

“Elimination has run its course,” he said. “It’s destroying the fabric of society.”