As of 30 April 2020, we will no longer taking deposits for trips until the situation with COVID becomes clearer. You can still send us booking enquiries and we’ll confirm availability and hold the berths for you, but will only take a deposit and confirm your berths when it becomes clear that we’ll be able to run the adventure.

We have cancelled trips now up to June 7 2020. If our visit to Guernsey for the Set Sail Trust is cancelled by the Trust then all of our remaining June trips will also be cancelled. The Trust have told us that they will be reviewing their position in the next week or two.

Both the Brest International Maritime Festival and Temp Fete Douarnenez have now postponed their 2020 editions until unknown future dates. We are in touch with the organisers of both events and will update you when we know more about when the postponed events will take place. This essentially means that our July Schedule is now empty and we are looking at possible replacement adventures should we be able to get back to sea during this time.

If the disruption continues into August 2020 then we will likely cancel the rest of the season in order to save money on vessel preparation, insurance etc, with limited ability for us to recoup this in the remaining season.

The situation here in the UK is still very unclear and uncertain. Even if the UK lockdown is eased, we don’t know whether we will be able to recommence operations as none of the UK government regulation specifically mentions what we do.

Our intention is to follow advice for pubs/restaurants – if they are allowed to open their inside areas without restrictions on the numbers of customers (apart from fire limits) then we will think about restarting our sailing operations. What restrictions we will have to put in place vis-à-vis testing etc. are hard to fathom right now.

What is clear is that airborne transmission IS thought to be possible for people within 2m for more than 15mins. It seems clear therefore that if anyone comes on the boat with undiagnosed but infectious COVID-19, then everyone aboard without immunity is likely to catch the disease, regardless of how much we clean surfaces and wash our hands.

Other elements we will be looking at in determining our ability to restart operations include the viability of provisioning the boat (this would be extremely difficult with the restrictions in quantities and product ranges at the moment), and the current status of ports/harbours in the areas that we are due to visit (e.g. Scilly is “closed” right now).

Even if the lockdown is lifted and we believe that we are going to be “good to go” we will still have a lot of work to do to prep the boat (we have now down-rigged and put the winter covers back on). There is also the risk that we could do all of that only to be confronted by another lockdown if the UK experiences a second peak.

Read the Topsail Adventures Primary COVID-19 Response Article here…