Antigua
andromeda of plymouth
Susan and Andrew Wilson
Sun 13 Jan 2013 22:47
17:00:855N 61:46:579W
We left Deshaies for Antigua fairly early on Thursday morning after a much more peaceful night and having raised the mainsail before we pulled the anchor up, something we had seen lots of other boats do and thought we would try this time. It worked really well and we were soon headed out of the bay to see what awaited us. The weather forecasts we had picked up predicted 15-20 knots of wind with 6-8ft seas, what we got were 20-25 knot winds with three really big gusts during the first half of our trip that pushed the wind speed up to 35+knots for several long minutes at a time. Andromeda took it in her stride though we were really pleased that we had put the two big reefs in the main and only a small amount of genoa out. We bowled along at over 6 knots for most of the way across, the 10ft choppy seas eventually smoothing out a bit, becoming longer ocean rollers about 2/3rds of the way, making it much more comfortable aboard.
We had a couple of little dramas, first of all after coming down off yet another wave with a big splash we heard a clanking from behind us and looked back and saw that the outboard had managed to work its way off the wooden board it is secured to and was swinging about on the lifting strop. Susan quickly grabbed some spare line, hooked herself on and went back and secured it to the rear rails only to find a while later that it was trying to escape sideways so needed another line to stop it. After recovering from this we then heard a clanking noise from the bow and eventually worked out that this was caused by the anchor moving about. Again with all the movement up and down it had worked a bit loose and sounded worse than it was. Once again Susan clipped on and went forward and tied it on some more. Going forward meant though that she got rather wet from the waves coming over the bow and of course it started to rain but she can report that the sea felt remarkably warm.
By now the conditions had improved, we could even see Antigua in the distance and the rest of the sail was very pleasant. We headed for Falmouth Harbour as the big gusts had knocked us off course enough that we would have had to tack to get to English Harbour and as we had spent 2 months there last year we didn't mind, this was just as well as a couple of boats ahead of us went to English Harbour and then came down to Falmouth, as there was no more room in the anchorage there.
Arriving in the bay just after 3pm we soon found a spot and dropped our anchor, put the sails to bed, put the canopy up and had a nice cold drink in very pleasant sunny conditions. It was too late to get to customs etc so the dinghy stayed on deck, we just enjoyed the sights and scenery, especially the fleet of lasers that came out for a couple of hours, really took us back to our dinghy days.
Thursday night was a revelation, we had almost forgotten that it could be so calm and gentle outside of a marina.....needless to say we slept well.
We have now had time to clear in, unwind a bit, and go ashore for some provisions and will enjoy a few more days here before we go round to Jolly Harbour on the west coast.
More in due course,
Susan and Andrew
Andromeda of Plymouth
Falmouth Harbour, Antigua
