Position: 17:00.691N 61:46.586W

Date: Friday 27th December 2013

We had originally planned to only spend a couple of days in Bas du Fort Marina, but after waiting for days for the Suzuki engineers to try to fix our outboard engine, we decided after 10 days that we had been there long enough.  So on Monday 23^rd December we paid our bill and left.  We retraced our route down here sailing around the western half of Guadaloupe, dodging the lobster pots and anchoring for the night at Deshaies. On Christmas Eve I rowed ashore to complete the checking out process, and after stopping to buy a few baguettes and delicious almond tart (until we next visit one of the French islands we’ll have to make do with the awful American style, sweetened, machine made bread that is all that is usually available), rowed back to Ocean Gem.  The anchor was raised and we sailed back to Falmouth Harbour in Antigua arriving late afternoon.

So we spent Christmas in Antigua.  The forecast was for lots of rain and this time the forecast was splendidly wrong as we had lots of sunshine.  The islands south of us were not so fortunate with some receiving prodigious proportions of precipitation.  We had a great day.  Being Christmas we decided that a slap up lunch was in order, so we went ashore and found a table in one of the better restaurants in Nelson’s Dockyard, where we enjoyed turkey with all of the trimmings and a deadly chocolate pudd heavily laden with booze.  They even laid on some reindeer (at least I think so, there was a lot of booze in the pudd).