Preparing to leave Antigua
Saxon Blue's Blog
Harvey Jones and Andrea Stokes
Wed 23 Feb 2011 01:46
It's going to feel strange to get underway again tomorrow - we've really got out of the habit. We're looking forward to it, though, especially as we'll be coming back here again.
I went over to Baileys Boatyard this morning to pay them for the cradle in which Saxon Blue will spend the summer. I'm renting the cradle for a season so it's now reserved for us and we can put her in there whenever we want. Antigua Rigging are going to organise looking after her and doing some work so it's all coming together.
Having arranged all that, Andrea and I went down to Grace Before Meals again for lunch and then back. Andrea spent the afternoon upstairs in the restaurant working on her art while I organised the photographs since Bermuda and then uploaded a selection onto the web. It's a right pain to get them uploaded and sorted but it's great to look back over the places we've been even in this relatively short section of our voyage. The islands have all been so different and so particular. It's a shame that we landed on St Martin first as it's anything but the most charming. I think if we'd come to Antigua first, we'd have got into the Caribbean a lot more quickly.
After uploading the pictures, I spent some time looking over the charts for the next bit of our voyage and reading the pilot book. Hopefully, we'll get good winds tomorrow and PassageWeather gives decreasing swell so it should be a good trip over to Guadaloupe.
We went out for dinner with a woman called Bea who Andrea met a few days ago. She was selling raffle tickets for a great charity on Antigua which gets the local kids out sailing, having first taught them to swim. It's run from the Antigua Yacht Club and sounds like a fantastic way to bridge the gap between the yachting fraternity and the locals. They want to end up with some of the local kids becoming Yachtmasters and working on the big boats. We met in the Greek restaurant in the marina in Falmouth and had a good time chatting about boats and ecological issues and whales. Bea has put us in touch with a whale researcher in Dominica so we're going to look in on him when we get down there.
We'll be off to bed early tonight to make sure we're frosty for tomorrow. We've got a lot to sort out in the morning, what with diesel and clearing out and still trying to get going at a reasonable time as I don't want to arrive in Guadaloupe in the dark.
Harvey
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