17:04.5N 61:53.6W

Sat, Sun & Mon – 1^st, 2^nd & 3^rd Feb

Well the great thing about a strong wifi signal is that it allows you to do important things like follow the Six Nations Rugby as it unfolds, however there are frustrations along the way…  It was only possible here to follow the game on the Daily Telegraph website and this was a text based service that updates every few minutes.  Very frustrating as you sit and refresh the page to discover a new score or situation, but cannot hear or see it unfold.  Added to the fun was that for some reason the wifi slowed up and so the pages took longer and longer to refresh, however I was a happy bunny as we entered the final minutes with England winning the game against France.  But the next refresh brought the news that the game was over and we had lost!  I had to speak very sternly to the laptop and gave it a couple of sharp taps to make sure that this was not a malfunction of some kind – but no, my day was ruined and being 4 hours behind Europe I still had a lot of day left to rue life.

The endless rain squalls are becoming frankly quite tedious now as we are up and down every few minutes, either opening all the hatches to let much needed air through the boat or shutting them to keep out the torrential downpours.  Sarah designed a brilliant wind scoop that goes over the front hatch which is robust enough to use out here in the 20 knot Caribbean breezes and easy to put up and down, but we simply cannot use it at present as it funnels the rain into the boat if you are even a few seconds late on getting to close the hatch.  So we are reduced to using the night time canvas covers that allow some breeze, but reduce the rain problem.

On Monday we took the dinghy over to a couple of beaches behind where we are anchored to have a look around and take some photos.  (More of this new photo project in our next posting)  There is a lot of tree clearance work going on and white marker posts springing up so it seems clear that this beautiful little promontory is about to become another building site and whether this will be the exceptional project that is ever completed, time will tell.  But the little beaches there are beautiful with lovely clear white sand and with no land access yet, they are quite pristine still.

So the reason we have been hanging around here has been that we are still waiting for a parcel that has been sent from the USA.  The US Postal Service tracking shows it passing through Customs here in Antigua and we were rather naively assuming it was about to be delivered to the address given which was Jolly Harbour Marina.  But of course it doesn’t work like that here. We gather from other sources that on a good day, a yellow slip is sent from Customs (or the Post Office) to the final delivery address to announce that the parcel is in Customs at the Airport (or the Post office in St Johns) and we need to go and show our boat papers in order to retrieve it. So nothing much happens until the slip shows up and we have been phoning the marina office daily to check this. On Monday again we were told that nothing had arrived, but since the tracking insisted that all was fine, we phoned the main Post Office who after a delay came back to say that they had definitely delivered the slip to the Marina.  So another call to the marina in which they checked and again said there was nothing.  I was a little more insistent this time explaining that the PO were clear that they had delivered it and so another search elsewhere in the office yield the correct result - hooray.  So on Tuesday we plan to go ashore, pick up the slip and spend the day travelling around the island on buses until we can locate and pick up the package.

Watch this space.