February-March 2006

February-March 2006
Our next point of call from Guadeloupe was English Harbour in Antigua. We had a great sail across with one reef in the main and both foresails. A steady 7.5-8.0 knots was the result in a very confused sea. Mainly dry in the cockpit but not always so... We have a little video of part of the trip - sailors can think wistfully about the warmth and pleasure, land-lubbers may marvel at it all or express the opinion that we must be mad! It was taken from the dry companion way. If you want to play it again then just double-click the picture. You will need to allow active content.
We have caught fish again for the first time since crossing the Atlantic. This time a large Kingfish or Spanish Mackerel. These are just beautiful eating and we still have more in the freezer after entertaining and a meal to ourselves. Yum!! Hope to catch lots more yet!
As ever we met old friends and made new friends in Antigua and had two outstanding meals out at “Trappas” near Nelson’s Dockyard.

The old dockyard has been preserved as much as possible and most of the buildings have an active, modern function. The Officers’ Quarters houses a small but interesting museum with exhibits and artifacts which show the hardships and way of life for sailors in Nelson’s era.
English Harbour is very sheltered if somewhat crowded in the anchorage. We were all wondering what had happened to Oystercatcher XXV since losing her carbon fibre mast in tropical storm Delta at the beginning of the ARC. Well, she appeared here, sans mast, and now has a brand new aluminium mast, presumably ready for the season’s racing and entertaining.
We have had technical difficulties with the failure of the power supply to an external hard disk drive and were lucky to find someone here who could pull essential files off it, including the most up-to-date version of this website! A great relief since using the back-up would have meant some reconstruction from the HTML code on the web server.

We went with friends by local bus to St Johns, the island’s capital and undertook a luxury food shopping expedition. We had a great day out and then shared a laden taxi back to the boats.
We planned that our next stop would be St Barts and we set out at dawn. The wind proved lighter than expected and we would not have made the customs before closing. This would have lost us a day so we sailed on overnight to the British Virgin Islands instead.

While we are certainly enjoying the BVIs, they are very busy with charter boats and all the prime anchorages have been filled up with mooring bouys for which the charge is $20-25 per night. The charter boats are very noisy and not all of them are capable! Reasons for this appear to be inexperience and ethanol (or both). As I write this page we have just had to fend off an empty Sunsail boat left at anchor ahead of us with about 10 meters of chain in 7 meters of water. Ah well...