17:03.96N 61:53.01W

Tuesday 1^st March

Woke up to a lovely morning, blue skies, fresh breeze and a hot hot sun!

We got ourselves sorted out quite quickly and headed off out of Falmouth Harbour and made our way very tentatively through a shallow and quite tortuous route along the inside of the coral reef that runs along the southern and south eastern coastline of Antigua. Really we should have sailed but we are still a bit cautious about sailing through reefs etc. and were content to motor today in depths that frequently went below 3 metres under the keel. Sailors from the east coast of England will scoff at this and declare this as deep, but in our defence I should say that we are not talking about a muddy or sandy bottom, but rock and coral! And we have seen far too many derelict wrecked hulls of yachts as we have passed up the island chain to take any of this too lightly.

As we approached today’s destination Jolly Harbour, we were suddenly reminded why we had gone to so much trouble to sail out here. The wide open bay was the most wonderful turquoise blue with crystal clear blue water over an unblemished white sandy sea bed. With the sun overhead the blue of the water was straight out of the tourist guide and we did well to find our way into the entrance of this purpose built complex along a rather poorly marked and extremely shallow channel as our attention was constantly distracted.

William came out to meet us in a dinghy and showed us into our berth in the marina with rather less explanation than needed. It was quite late in our approach that we realised that we were going to be mooring between poles (after a fashion) and Sarah coped brilliantly with the late adjustments to deal with this situation and we were soon moored up safely stern-to a high quay. First issue was that we needed our passerelle to get ashore which was fine except that we last used it in Gibraltar and I had only recently cleaned and polished all the stainless fittings in preparation for storing them away for a few years.

It did not take us long to find that there is an excellent chandlery here and Sarah soon located a laundry service to help us get all the bedding sorted for our guests who arrive on Thursday. We plugged into the mains, but although it is 220 volts it is only 60 cycles, but we did not think that was an issue for us. However when later we ran Kenny (our washing machine) he suddenly protested in mid cycle and started making some very unpleasant noises. We panicked a little as we could not contemplate life without Kenny and after several attempts to resolve the problem, I suddenly twigged that it might be to do with the 60 cycles issue. As an experiment we ran up the generator and disconnected from shore power and we were greatly relieved when Kenny performed faultlessly.

Moonbeam (David and Lyn) arrived about an hour after us and tied up on the opposite side of the same pontoon as us. We have invited them for supper on Wednesday.