Christmas 2023 and New Year 2024 in Antigua

Happy New Year!

We love Antigua, in fact I could live here. I think the mate might feel the same.

As soon as we arrived, we went up to St John’s (the capital) and after a roti at Roti King, we caught the bus to Jolly Harbour. Our friends David and Trudie came with us and we had a pretty grand day out. Taking the bus in Antigua is definitely the way to do it; you see all the local areas as you travel with the Antiguans through their lovely island. It seemed clean and fresh to me, nowhere near as sophisticated or European as Martinique, but nevertheless a nice place to be and an island truly in the West Indies. Mind you, you didn’t have to look far through the cracks to see the English heritage of the island. Lovely Georgian buildings and so on, in fact at one point when on the bus we were at a crossroads and the whole thing, traffic lights, walls, countryside reminded us of 1950’s Britain (no, we weren’t alive then – but we’ve seen enough TV).

Back to Christmas and New Year… We’ve had some ‘complaints’ that there have been no photos in the previous two blogs. Honestly, do the mate and I know difficult people or what?! Luckily, in this blog, it’ll be mainly about photos – I’ll let you know the basics of what we’ve been up to and then hand over to the mate for the photos (the software is on her laptop)…

Christmas Eve swim off SG

SG’s Christmas decorations – spot the mini tree!

SG at anchor in Falmouth Harbour

Christmas 2023! Wow, I have never been in a sunny and warm climate for Christmas, I loved it. We had drinks onboard Persephone (David and Trudie’s lovely Sabre 402) on Christmas Eve. The first thing I saw on Christmas Day, as I opened the hatch, was a low flying pelican and sun – plenty of it. We met up with David, Trudie, Greg, Sue and others in Nelson’s Dockyard. I had a Christmas dinner in a baguette – literally turkey, stuffing and all the trimmings in a baguette – excellent. Sadly there was no veggie option for the mate but she did manage to find a cheese and pickle sandwich later on, although it didn’t really matter because there was a champagne charity ‘do’ on earlier to which the mate (aided by funds from her sister, yes my lovely sister in law sponsored the mate’s behaviour) consumed so much fizz that she barely knew she was eating said cheese and pickle sandwich*. Mind you, prior to all this, we’d had our first ‘tot’ at the Royal Naval Tot Club of Antigua and Barbuda. The tot was a full gill (1/8 pint) of 46% rum. *I admit I had rather thrown myself into the charity work and was surrounded by beer drinkers so had no-one to help me out… [Mate].

Nelson’s Dockyard Christmas tree and Christmas Day steel pan band

Charity champagne boat/bar – very chilled!

Christmas Day drinkies with David and Trudie – cheers!

I’ll explain the about Tot club later, but suffice to say that the mate and I are now full members of the RNTCAB and proud to be so…

After a very warm and sunny afternoon in Nelson’s dockyard, we went back to Stargazer who was lying nicely to her anchor in nearby Falmouth harbour. As the mate slept off her fizz, I had a very nice, relaxing late afternoon in the cockpit and drank a little beer (not having consumed any fizz earlier), before cooking as reasonable a Christmas dinner as I could (well, potatoes, carrots and whatever else I could find – sadly no cranberry sauce, so I made do with rhubarb jam) including a veggie option for the mate. It was a wonderful Christmas day, to me, although I was well aware that the mate missed her family quite a lot.

New Year saw the mate and I going on a fairly decent walk/scramble over the hills to Fort Berkeley at the entrance to English Harbour. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day and we walked back through Nelson’s Dockyard catching the end of the annual Nelson’s Pursuit race (many boats had entered). There were fireworks in the Dockyard that evening but after a long walk, a nice dinner and some drinks onboard the mate and I were asleep by 2200!

Freeman’s Bay and Galleon Beach from high above Fort Berkeley

Amazing cactus!

En route to Fort Berkeley

Looking out from Fort Berkeley

Racing for the line in the Nelson’s Pursuit Race

We’ve enjoyed a relaxing first week of the New Year with only a couple of boat jobs, namely cleaning out the water tanks and doing an oil change on Puffin, our plucky little suitcase generator.

Our plan is to head up to St Martin/Sint Maarten next, which is about 90 miles to the NW, so an extended day sail, probably leaving at 0630 and arriving around midnight. Apart from seeing St Martin, we aim to upgrade our solar supply and to find suitable fittings for a small bimini for the mate. The only problem is finding a weather window. As I write this blog no such window seems to exist for the forecast period (ten days hence); still we have the Oyster World Rally and the Round Antigua Race to look forward to. It’s quite important though to get up to St Martin and get our jobs done because we have to be back in Antigua before mid-March as we have some very important guests arriving. Yes, the mate’s parents are coming over for two weeks. We aren’t subjecting them to life afloat though and they’ve booked a nice apartment belonging to the Antigua Yacht Club, we can see it from our anchorage here in Falmouth harbour.

View astern as the sun sets

Before the mate adds the pictures, I’ll just fill in a little about the Royal Naval Tot Club of Antigua and Barbuda. The club was formed in 1991 to continue the tradition of the Royal Navy issuing tots of rum to the crew onboard their ships. The RN only stopped doing that in 1970.  The club nowadays has a traditional nautical history reading every evening followed by a tot of rum of course. You also meet a ‘decent sort’ of likeminded people. One of the first people we met was Richard Matthews (Sir Richard) the founder of Oyster Yachts. Since then we’ve chatted to all sorts of people and liked them all… We had to meet up with the club for seven nights before joining, having a tot on each of them (which I suspect is why the mate wanted to join in the first place). Next we had to do an exam – yes, an exam! In the end we swotted up for a few days (there is little we don’t know about Lord Nelson now) but we both passed with flying colours.

The club has also been granted permission by the Admiralty to fly the 1801 white ensign, and Stargazer eagerly awaits hers, which should be with us in two weeks (unless we go to St Martin first, in which case in will be in March).

I’ll let the mate loose with the pictures now & we’ll keep the blog posted as to our St Martin (or not) passage…