We arrived at English Harbour, Antigua

Timeless
Wed 19 Feb 2014 19:22

The dockhands and the dive team were very helpful I have to say. 

A few minutes later were secured with the help of 4 dockhands as we looked on. 

Our arrival greetings with the skipper of the sail boat next to us was returned by a huff and a shrug of the shoulders as he turned away sort some ropes.





Another country – another ton of paperwork. 

It seems to me that the amount of paperwork and administration required by countries for their immigration, customs and port police is inversely proportional to the size of the country – and this is certainly true here too. Everyone was very friendly and helpful but those stamps and initials are so important and have to be done in the right order. As it happens, all the government agencies are in the same building and on-side in Nelson’s dockyard. I think a bout 12 pieces of paper were printed, stamped, dated and filed.

It was snip.  The check-in with the various agencies and the marina took less than 2 hours.



We then tried connecting the boat to the dock power socket Agh! we found another ‘new’ power outlet. It seems to me that the world has got together and standardized on ‘marine power outlets’ – about 5 standards!!   The marina didn’t have adapters so we then needed to get to somewhere that sold them and re-wire our power cord – and cross our fingers and toes that we wired it correctly.  We found power plug in the chandler just up the road so it was a simple job of wiring it. It was a good job the dockmaster was on hand because I wired it for 110V as opposed to wiring it for  220V. He made a simple job of rewiring it for me. That plug cost  $140.

Our smiling boat neighbour re-appeared after a few hours to tell us that he was worried that our boat (being so much larger than his) might squash his boat if the wind moved. 

He huffed, he mumbled, and went away again.