Antigua April 2009

We arrived back to Antigua at about 5pm on Good Friday 10th April 2009, just in time for the Fore Deck Friday Happy Hour and the Easter Celebrations. Easter is a big weekend for all the locals to go out on their boats and/or go camping – it was just like the Cup Match holiday in Bermuda.

We spent the Easter weekend rafted up with Lewis and Eddy. Lewis had recently bought a big, powerful, loud, fast cigarette boat (Slingshot). About 1000HP and can go up to 80 mph!! He had recently driven it back from St Martin in 3 hours (beats our 14 hours!) He took us out for a ride on it – Jolly Harbour to Falmouth harbour in less than half an hour with roughish seas!! (versus our 3 hours!) – spot the ripples in Lewis’s cheeks from the wind/speed.

Easter morning Charlotte and Eddy did an Easter Egg hunt on the beach – Jimmy headed to the shop to get the real Easter bunny chocolate (no traditional chocolate smarty Easter eggs here – the closest is an Easter bunny or Cadburys cream egg.) We then headed up to Bird Island, on the NE coast, for a couple of days – Heat Wave 2.5 hours, Slingshot less than half hour…. Some of Eddy’s friends were spending the weekend there on boats. Many of the locals were also camping on Bird Island – complete with generators and the rumor is 42 inch TV!! All the tents reminded us of the Bermuda holidays.


We spent a couple of nights there – Charlotte and Eddy enjoyed all the swimming, fishing and ski-bobbing. Also went diving for conchs – amazing – we found about 5 around the boat in 5 minutes. One of the other boats collected about 25 conchs, and cooked them up into a very tasty conch curry – delicious but a lot of work getting them out of the shells, cleaning, pounding and preparing. Conch are very rubbery and tough and require a lot of pounding to tenderize them. Ours were thrown back in the water –Jimmy said he’d prefer to buy it than do all that work!!

Come Tuesday morning, the previously packed bay was now empty as everyone headed back to work. We headed back to Jolly Harbour after our 3 day vacation!!

Last Easter Charlotte had met and played a lot with Barnaby, also 5, who was on holiday from England. They had been emailing the last few months as he was coming out again over Easter. Unfortunately, it turned out they were leaving on Wednesday but we managed to catch up with Barnaby and his parents, Lucy and Jason, Tuesday night for dinner and then on Wednesday they came over to the boat – Charlotte took Barnaby out on her ski Bob – his words after were “That was Total Wicked!”

We then had a couple of days catching up on jobs (including schooling!). We went to check up on the geocache that we had hidden back in February, under the decking at the Fore Deck Bar, only to find that it was not there anymore! Scrambling on hands and knees under the bushes and decking, it was definitely gone. One person had logged a find of the cache in mid March, but that was it. On our last day we replace the geocache - hopefully this one will last a bit longer.

On our last night in Antigua, the Fore Deck Bar, at Jolly Harbour Marina, had a good band playing, with a packed crowd, but, as we were sailing the next day, we were sensible and were back on the boat and in bed before 10pm. By 10am the next morning we had left the anchorage and were heading south to Guadeloupe.