Saturday 26^th, Sunday 27^th and Monday 28^th February

Late breakfast and headed ashore to check out the handful of shops and the chandlery in Falmouth before settling down in the Antigua Yacht Club to watch England play France in the rugby. Few French supporters present but they went a lot quieter after halftime! Shame we could not say the same for the elderly, possibly drunk, Englishman directly behind me who insisted on protesting all decisions very loudly and almost always incorrectly. There were times when I wondered if he was watching the same match as us, or thought that he was just 10 minutes behind the game we were watching! It was painful stuff and even my patience broke at one point when I had to explain what was happening. This did not help at all and he looked at me as if I was talking in a foreign language! Makes you proud....

After the game we wandered over to English Harbour and Nelson’s Dockyard. It is just one of those strange facts of nature that in an area where natural harbours were at a premium, Antigua has two superb examples that back onto each other. Sarah started chatting to a young lad (6) and his mum and it turned out that they knew some friends of ours and even knew about this blog and the musical titles! They are Catherine and Mark with their children Mia and Lachlan (Locky) who are on their way to NZ in a catamaran ‘Pegasus of Jersey’.

Made our way back to Serafina and spent the last hours of daylight doing a few of the jobs on the list that seems to have grown a bit lately!

Delighted in the evening to find an email from David and Lyn Wilkie on Moonbeam to say that they were anchored in English Harbour and had read our blog and seen that we had just arrived as well, so they suggested we meet on Sunday for lunch somewhere.

Sunday morning we headed ashore around 10.00am to meet Catherine and Mark for coffee in the yacht club. Scotland were due to kick off in their match with Ireland and Mark, being Scottish was already at the sports bar where the game was to be shown, so we went to join him. Sadly the game was not being shown after all and for a while it was all a bit surreal as I sat with an Irish couple who had got live commentary of the rugby on their Iphone whilst watching an Italian league football match on the TV! Sarah and Catherine managed to put the world to rights until they had to head off and collect their children from the yacht club where they had been out with the juniors sailing and we headed over to English Harbour again to be picked up by David and Lyn in their dinghy and whisked out to a restaurant across the bay.

Some three hours later we were back in English Harbour and made our way back to Serafina feeling a little guilty about not having done any of the day’s planned jobs. Still it was a Sunday!

Monday morning was a bit unpleasant with clouds and rain and still the strong winds. We got stuck into the jobs we had avoided yesterday and delayed going ashore to collect some goods from the chandlery etc. until after lunch. Even then we hung on a while until the wind eased and we felt more confident about leaving Serafina out in the bay unattended.

Some beautiful sailing yachts on the move today as well an outstanding and very large motor yacht that had to reverse all the way up the buoyed channel and into the super yacht bays as it was too large to turn round any closer!

Not very nice weather at all today but we did feel a bit better by the end of the day having achieved rather more than the last few days!