When Elena Manighetti and Ryan Osborne set off to cross the Atlantic ocean on their 11-metre sailing boat, the coronavirus crisis was just one of many stories in the news. The disease was largely confined to China and the World Health Organization was yet to declare its spread a global pandemic.

They left Lanzarote on the 3,000-nautical-mile journey on 28 February, with the latest they’d heard being that deaths from Covid-19 were slowing. On 25 March, as they reached the Caribbean island of Bequia, after 25 days of no internet access, they switched on their phones.

“We bought some data and I remember Ryan reading out the news and our jaws just dropped,” said Elena. “It was hard to grasp the scale of it at first,” said Ryan. “If you were waking up from a coma now, I think it would be hard to imagine the scale of what had unfolded.”

Elena is from Lombardy in northern Italy, one of the regions most affected by the coronavirus pandemic. “If you don’t read the news for a month and then you turn on your phone it’s not like there’s a news feed that tells you exactly what has happened every day, so I could only really access the previous week’s news,” she said.

“It was about three days [after we arrived] that Ryan found a 10-day old article in the New York Times that said my home town [of Bergamo] was the worst-hit in the world. I had had absolutely no idea. I called my dad and he said: ‘Oh you found out. Don’t panic. It’s all right’.

“The news only truly sank in when we saw the pictures of the military trucks in front of the cemetery in my hometown because they had run out of space and coffins. That was the most shocking moment.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The couple, both in their early thirties, have been living on a sailing boat since 2017. Photograph: Handout

The couple, both in their early thirties, have been living on a sailing boat since 2017, documenting their lives on their YouTube channel. Unable to afford to buy a house where they were living in Manchester, they decided to buy a small boat and explore the world on a tiny budget, making a living from bits of freelance copywriting and graphic design work on their laptops.

The long journey across the Atlantic was a big challenge, for which the couple had done a lot of preparation. During the crossing the only means of communication they had was a satellite device capable of receiving 160 character messages, which they asked their family and friends not to use to send them bad news.

“It’s quite a common thing for sailors not to want bad news when they are on an ocean crossing because there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it,” said Elena. “All you can do is cry, scream, worry, but you can’t turn around because the wind is behind you and is very strong.”

They received a sign that something was seriously wrong as they approached the Caribbean. “We were about two days away when someone sent us a list of all the islands that had closed their borders, and we started to get worried that, by the time arrived, we wouldn’t have anywhere to go,” said Ryan.

“We thought they were just being especially careful [about coronavirus] because most of the islands don’t really have healthcare infrastructure,” said Elena. “We thought it was all a preventative measure rather than a containment measure.”

The pair are now safely anchored in Bequia, an island in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, on which there are no confirmed cases of coronavirus. “It’s a very surreal experience landing in a place where everything feels almost normal, while the news tells you that the world is shut down,” said Elena.

“We’re torn between these two realities. We are in this amazing place – we are super lucky and super grateful – while in the meantime people are dying and are in hospital.”

All the couple can do for now is – like many in their home countries – wait for the pandemic to pass. “We are just going to sit tight,” said Ryan. “And hope that by the winter and the end of hurricane season, the borders will be back open and we can carry on exploring”.