BARBUDA - 017 32.83N 061 44.80W
OOJAH's AWESOME ODYSSEY
Peter & Christene Tanner
Sun 31 Mar 2013 20:15
This Antiguan island is very low lying, sparsely populated & mostly scrub inland with miles of sandy beach. Offshore it's surrounded by poorly charted reefs & great care has to be taken to get inshore. There are few transport links with Antigua (a good thing) & just a handful of small resorts with few guests evident. It's said that the 1,000 inhabitants are quite happy with this state of affairs so little has changed since the Codrington family leased it in 1685, supposedly to farm but in fact to use it as a slave park. Nowadays almost everyone has the same surname & the wild pigs & deer they introduced destroy most of the wild flowers.
The anchorage off Cocoa Point was attractive but required surfing skills to land - we got drenched in salt water getting off the beach which inhibited C's desire to make a second landfall further North to visit the Codrington lagoon, famous for its birdlife, the following day. We retreated to Grovenor Bay in the South & crept in amongst the Coral heads for some r&r.
Frustrated by our failure to reach Codrington & it's lagoon we tried again a day later, this time by taxi. Having misunderstood where we were to meet we we're an hour late but John Taxi was still waiting patiently. We would not normally spend £75 on a 5 mile return taxi even over dirt roads but embarrassed that he'd already waited an hour we went along with it - a form of philanthropy really! By the time we'd reached Codrington 30 minutes later it was raining very heavily & the water taxi man JR agreed it was pointless going out to look for the frigging frigate birds so we settled for barbecue'd chicken & chips with a Carib in the centre of town locally called 'Madison Square' before returning disconsolately to Oojah. It was not to be ...
Peter & Christene