AQUAHOLIC

Nick Burnham: It was like living in an apocalypse movie - high streets were wastelands, people began stockpiling toilet roll and we had to queue to visit empty supermarkets

In March the world as we know it imploded. With a pandemic sweeping the globe, entire countries went into lockdown. In the UK we were introduced to exciting new words like ‘furlough’ as businesses went into stasis and employees were sent home with the message “don’t call us, we’ll call you”. The FTSE 100 plunged 25% in the three months until the end of March. It was like living in an apocalypse movie – high streets were wastelands, people began stockpiling toilet roll and we had to queue to visit empty-shelved supermarkets. Now imagine telling a Uk-based yacht broker, against that cataclysm of doom, “Don’t worry, in three months’ time we’ll still have the virus amongst us, but boat sales will be busier than ever!”

And yet, against all odds, and any sane prediction, that’s exactly what has happened. Every broker I talk to (and between MBY and Aquaholic, I talk to quite a few) is saying the same thing. It’s not just “better than expected”, or even “busy”, it is “off the scale”. I spoke to one last week who has been in the business for 35 years and has never known it so crazy. Another pointed to a long and normally full sales pontoon, devoid of anything but tumbleweed. So what is going on? Well, recently I went to Mallorca to find out. Or to be accurate, I went to Mallorca to film boats but found out in the process.

I quite enjoy travel. After spending two decades living and working in the same place, the novelty of discovering new places, of stepping out of an airport into the kind of warm, dry air we don’t seem to ever get in the UK, of sitting outside a restaurant to eat in the evening, still hasn’t gone away. But it’s all changed.

The trip got off to a bad start when, the night before I was due to fly, the Balearics, which had been exempt from Foreign Office advice to only travel to Spain if essential, was brought under that banner alongside mainland Spain. Your travel insurance will be invalid, screamed news sources. As the world’s greatest worrier, I immediately began cancelling the trip (into which I’d invested over £1,000). I decided to check my 33-page policy. And there I found it, the section stating that cover would only be excluded if the “travel advice unit of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) or regulatory authority in a country to/from which you are travelling has advised against all travel”. They hadn’t advised against all travel, they’d advised only essential travel. We were back on, but stress levels were through the roof.

The following day I headed for Heathrow. Obligatory mask on, I braved the airport. It was surreal, this normally thriving hub was a ghost town. Many shops and restaurants were shut. BA were flying one plane out and back a day, and it was half full. If they cancelled that flight while I was there, I was stuck. More stress.

I got the job done, seven boats filmed and back 48 hours later but it wasn’t much fun. And if that had been part of my normal summer holiday routine, well I just might have decided to buy a boat in the UK instead…