Position: 17:38:61N
61:51:26W
Well, we wanted to make the most of
our final few days together, and we also wanted to give me a little test to
ensure I was still fit enough to sail the boat and see where I was going (joke,
Mum!) So we set off for Barbuda, a
large but very low-lying island 30M north of Antigua. It
is a little off the beaten track as it is normally a stiff beat to get there,
and it’s not really on the way to anywhere. However we had heard what an amazing set
of beaches and reefs it had and it sounded like our kind of place, so we left
Falmouth Harbour early, said our goodbyes to Blue Juice, and
sailed off round the lee of Antigua.
It was a lovely sail although the
winds were fairly light, and we didn’t really get clear air until we were off
St John’s on the NE side of Antigua. From
there it is about 25-30M through bright blue water, never more than about 30
metres deep. It was fairly calm,
and the girls sat on the cabin roof and played with their
teddies.
Girls en route to Barbuda
About 10M short of Barbuda, I looked up from my book to notice what looked
like a medium-sized rocky island off our port bow, about 100 metres away. There was white water all around it and
I had one of those shake-the-head moments where your brain can’t register what
it is you’re seeing because it is so unexpected. There are no rocks round here, only
reefs – then the rock moved, and the shout went out –
“Whales!!”
We were treated to about 20 minutes
of an absolutely mind-blowing display of boisterous behaviour from 2 possibly 3
HUGE whales which we later identified as humpbacks. They swam all around us, apparently
oblivious to our presence, but only a couple of boatlengths away from us on both
sides. You could see the white of
their undersides clearly through the water, and they kept breaching and blowing
then dipping back under. The
turbulence and eddies they caused were spread over about 150ft of water and
looked like a small tanker had just put its engines into hard
reverse!
Humpbacks off Barbuda
We did get a bit nervous at one
point and Sarah and I were both independently thinking about what we would do if
the worst happened and Nutmeg suddenly got lifted and dropped by one of these
monsters. These were 50 to 60 feet
long – that is a lot of whale when you see it up close and you realise how
utterly small and vulnerable you are in a small yacht.
Humpback going for a jump off
Barbuda
At one point, one of the whales
rolled on its back and waved its flipper in the air, and its flipper was at
least six feet long and whitey-grey in colour. At other times they breached then did
the classic tail-lift before sinking with graceful ease back into the
depths.
Humpback tail off
Barbuda
Gradually the depth shoaled until
there was just a couple of metres of clear turquoise water beneath us and we
could see the sandy seabed slowly passing beneath us. Barbuda
only came into view about 4 miles off – just a couple of points of trees,
gradually joining up as the low-lying ground rose above the horizon. It reminded
me of sailing off Southport in the 80’s, where
the land is flat as a pancake and you lose sight of it a few miles off. However, the water here is not brown and
there are no Scousers on the beach!
We decided to head up to Low Bay, which is less of a bay than a
straight line on an eleven-mile stretch of sandy beach. As we approached, you could see the base
of the clouds reflecting turquoise from the miles of shoal water – an amazing
sight. We anchored and just gawped
at the raw beauty of the place.
Barbuda is one of those places
of sea and sky and sand, where the sky just seems to stretch far further than it
does in other places and you can see clouds dipping below the horizon. It’s something that I’ve only really
seen on the ocean and in the desert.
It feels as if the sky is somehow bigger and more expansive. There were also incredible cloud streets
running off to leeward of the island.
I taught Millie about them and for a few days she’d say “look – cloud
towns” whenever she saw one, mixing up her words.
Nutmeg anchored under a cloud
street, Low bay, Barbuda
The beach was effectively a long
spit of sand, separating the sea from a large lagoon which runs for about seven
miles within the island. The
capital, Codrington, is on the other side of the lagoon, so to get to it you
either have to haul your dinghy up and over the sand spit and re-launch it in
the lagoon, or you do the 21st-century thing, and ring for a
water-taxi.
Eleven-mile sand
spit
Taxi on the lagoon, Barbuda
The sand was just incredible. For a start, it was made up of billions
of tiny pinky-red shells, giving the whole beach a pink hue, which went down
well with the females in the crew.
But best of all, it was the
cleanest, softest sand I’ve ever walked on – it felt like walking on lambswool!
The water was milky green with some
swell and rollers on the beach, but we’re getting good at shooting the waves in
the dinghy without getting a soaking.
It was here on Barbuda that we finally saw our first green flash from the
sunset; and since then, we’ve seen them several times. It happens just as the sun sinks below
the horizon, getting bigger and redder as it goes. The rim of the sun changes from red to
yellow to bright green, just as the sun dips below the horizon, and you get a
green “flash” (although flash is not the best word to describe it) as it
disappears. Now I can die happy,
knowing that it’s not a load of old cobblers.
Barbuda has the largest colony of
frigate birds in the Western Hemisphere. There are not many colonies around the
world; the other large one being in the Galapagos
islands. Frigate birds
are large, and fly for weeks at a time, and for hundreds of miles. I remember seeing them in
mid-Atlantic. However, they come
back to Barbuda to breed. We visited the colony with a local guide
who has been watching the birds for over 40 years, and he punted us into the
area of the lagoon where the birds nest.
The birds were totally unafraid.
The unique thing about these birds is the big red “balloon” that the
males puff up under their beaks to try to attract the females.
Frigate birds, Barbuda
Baby frigate birds watching their
parents fly
Are you looking at my
bird?
We then took a trip to Codrington,
which is the only settlement on Barbuda. We decided to combine an explore of the
town with the opportunity to clear out from Antigua and
Barbuda.
This, however wasn’t quite as easy as it could have been – having got to
Codrington from your yacht (over the beach; 2 miles across the lagoon), the port
authority, customs and immigration offices are at triangular opposite corners of
the settlement, necessitating lots of hot and dusty walking.
The best office was Customs, where I
clearly woke the official up by knocking on his door. He let me in, found a blank form,
stamped all six pages of it with his official stamp and told me to fill it in
while he went back and slumped on his settee in front of the
TV!!
Codrington is a very sleepy little
place and I heard it described as what the rest of the Caribbean looked like forty years ago. It was certainly a privilege to visit
somewhere like this – so different to the rest of the islands we’ve
visited. There were goats and
horses freely wandering round the place.
I couldn’t help but think of a hurricane blowing through here – it just
had that semi-destroyed look about it.
Codrington – capital of
Barbuda
