By 6.30pm, Monday 1st March, 11 hours after leaving Statia, we were anchoring “back” in Jolly Harbor. We seem to spend so much time in Antigua, it’s like “coming home”! This time, (for a change!), we anchored off Jolly Beach for a couple of days before moving around to the anchorage. Boat jobs, Charlotte meeting friends at the pool, fueling and filling up with water, laundry – all the regular activities of life on board (Charlotte doing her dolls' laundry!):
At the weekend we headed to Bird Island in the north. It’s very pretty with lots of deserted islands. Charlotte and I went snorkeling - there are literally loads of conchs all around the anchorage. We could have dived down and easily collected enough to make a nice meal – but unfortunately this involves a lot of work, getting the conchs out of their shells and pounding them (and they are very tough) before cooking – BBQ burgers was easier!! While snorkeling we also saw many sea cucumbers, other interesting “breathing plant life” and a stingray – a little unnerving as we were in very shallow water and almost eye to eye!
Lewis, Sonja and Josh came over on Sunday, and Charlotte and I got to have a go on his very fast jet ski!!
I was keen to circumnavigate Antigua (and it being our last time here for a while….) – many times we’ve gone up one coast and then round and up the other, but never all the way round – usually because of sea and wind conditions as there are a lot of reefs in the north and its essential to have good light to navigate the reefs. Well, we had perfect calm conditions so after the weekend we continued round to Green Island on the east coast.
On the way there we stopped at “Stingray City” – a fenced off area on the reef where they take tourists to see the stingrays. Charlotte and I swam over from our anchored boat, and snorkeled. The area was no longer fenced in but there were still some stingrays there.
Green Island is in Nonsuch bay, a lovely big anchorage on the east coast, set behind the reef, with deserted islands around. We spent a couple of days there – Charlotte got to show off her water skiing talents to the anchorage and met a new friend on another boat that she invited to join her ”ski-bobbing”.
From Green Island we continued round to English and Falmouth Harbour in the south – home of the mega yachts. Charlotte got to play with Jack and Josh, 2 cruising kids that we met in Grenada about 4 years ago, and have been bumping into each year.
Some friends of Jimmy’s were renting a 65 foot crewed catamaran in BVI. Originally we were not going to see them as we were on our way south, but in Antigua we made the decision to turn around and go back up to see them. It had been some while since Jimmy had been able to spend a decent amount of time with Danny.
On Sunday, the winds looked best, to do the trip back up to St Martin – a 6am start and we were in St Martin by dusk.
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