We left Guadeloupe from Deshaies for the nearly 50 mile trip to Jolly Harbour, Antigua and hope to catch up with lots of our cruising buddies who come to Antigua for the classic and race week regattas.
But before we get to that we do a little provisioning in Jolly Harbour at the Epicurean grocery which specializes in English brands. Unfortunately for us though they are all out of brown sauce! We have a good shop anyway and get our ice cream fix in, the first in a while since the French ice cream just isn't as good. We meet up with great friends Bill and Maureen on Kalunamoo as well as a Bill and Judy Charbonneau (IP40) for dinner out and to listen to a local band.
We also a manage a few walks around the hills of Jolly Harbour with Bill and Maureen as well as Tom and Denise from Epiphany. We get some lovely views of the surrounding hills and beaches.
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| Jolly Harbour nchorage |
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| Does it look like a Dolphin or a Whale? |
Well we love Barbuda so since we have a bit of time before classics, we take off on the 30+ mile beam reach to this island paradise. The sail is a bit boisterous with a fairly large swell and 20-28 knots on the beam so we avoid fishing but average nearly 8 knots.
We arrive at Coco Point off of the lovely resort and next to Princess Diana beach and the ruins of the K-Club. We love the beach so we take a walk to explore the ruins of the K-Club to discover they are renovating a few units and indeed some have electricity and residents. Who knows it might actually get rebuilt?
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| The tennis court at the K-Club |
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| The construction starting on this villa with storage at rear |
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| A refurbished villa with lights on. |
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| One of the original villas refurbished - lights on too! |
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| Still a stunning beach |
The next walk is along the total length of Princess Diana beach until the sand runs out. We find a trail behind the rocks and walk on the the Eco resort to explore the beach, a bit rocky but very secluded.
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| Villas on stilts at the Eco resort |
We also walk to other way around the point of the Coconut beach resort to the bay at the far side and discover the sand ends quite abruptly. We see a huge puffer fish in the surf and the clay pigeon launcher from the gun range over the reef, but there is no walking above the tide line so we make our way back.
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| The clay pigeon launcher |
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| The turns at the point are a little nervous |
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| Again a stunning beach |
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| A wild horse on the beach seen from our boat |
We take a few snorkel trips around the reef while we are anchored so close, we actually swam from the boat for a change too. We see quite a selection of small fish on the coral and rocks and although nothing big is evident we do think it's a great living reef. We managed to get a few shots of a small turtle swimming the reef but never managed to swim with the real big turtles that seem to swim through the anchorage all day :-(
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| A nice little chap on the reef |
We love Barbuda and want to stay longer but knowing a good weather window must be taken and not missed we catch a slight north hint in the forecast and are rewarded with a nice angle to reach to Green Island on the east side of Antigua. It is a lovely anchorage and we find it totally empty so we are able to pick up one of the two mooring balls here to preserve to reef. We get off for another good snorkel of the anchorage and are rewarded with a large spotted Ray and 3 medium size turtles. Again there are quite a few nice fish in the anchorage and I just couldn't get the larger Queen Angelfish to stay still for the camera, it just darted under the rocks!
We of course love the classic sailing regatta in Antigua as do a lot of our cruising buddies, so it's a great place to catch up and party with friends. There were unfortunately way too many boats to mention here so look at our face book page for posts of some of our visitors.
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| Carriacou sloops at the dock - very pretty boats |
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| Antigua Yacht club lawn with lots of visitors |
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| Some of our many friends here |
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| Maureen, Liz, Tony and Bill. |
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| Mike, Devin and Rene |
We also managed a few longer walks of the surrounding hills with friends and then a really long walk of around 10 miles round trip to the donkey sanctuary with John, Jo and Sheila. The donkeys are wild on Antigua since the cessation of cane growing and closure of the plantations and as such are a bit of a nuisance. So the sanctuary catches them and cares for them on their 45 acre of land. They have caught around 150 donkeys and have another 250 to try to round up. They have a couple of baby donkeys that come from pregnant donkeys being caught, boy do they look adorable!
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| The donkey sanctuary |
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| Feeding time - why they love it for sure |
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| Neli An adorable baby donkey |
We say our last goodbye to Bones and Anna who are here on a charter during race week, both Pluto and Moosie will miss each other until they return next year on the ARC rally to Rodney Bay.
Well the red hat party signals the end for most of us and we now just wait for a nice weather window to head out to Guadeloupe, so we move to Five Islands and our last BBQ before heading south for the summer.
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| Braii at 5 Islands Beach |
Our sailing season is now drawing to a close with another month of cruising before the hurricane season arrives and our insurance dictates we be below 12.5 degrees latitude for June 1st. We hope everyone is enjoying spring and looking forward to their summer.
