What a magical, magical island Barbuda is. It is an untouched paradise where the donkeys outnumber the people very easily and noone and everybody owns the land.  The nice manager at the Lighthouse Hotel very kindly arranged for Pat the water taxi to pick us up this morning by the container on the shore which turned out to be a bar.  We piled into Pat’s pirogue and headed across very bouncy waves, I had to adopt cross country position to stop being jarred, for the frigate bird colony across the 7 mile by 2 mile lagoon.  When we arrived it proved absolutely incredible.  The mangroves were loaded with frigate birds of every age and size, undertaking every stage of their life cycle with the males proudly blowing up their chests into great red balloons and drumming on them with their beaks, the females taking their time to make their choice of suitor including some canoodling and tests of prowess by sending the chap off to collect some twigs, full on sex and then the fluffy white chicks sitting up tall and taking in the world.  All this going on while others wheeled above the colony their 6 foot wide wing span making them look like pterodactyls and seeing a near miss where a bird landed on the water and nearly didn’t take off again because their feathers aren’t waterproofed.  Absolutely fantastic.

Pat then dropped us off at The Town, there is only one and it is just a village where most of the population of 1,500 live, where we were handed over to Loo$e the land taxi.  He took us to all the sights on the island, which are few and far between, but each exquisite in its naturalness from the spiky caves, the pink beach, the martello tower, the sand factory and lots of donkeys.  Loo$e kindly arranged for lunch at Uncle Roddy’s where we ate delicious barbequed grouper and plantains with rice and salad washed down with Antiguan beer.  Yum.  We were returned to Codrington and handed over with a lovely warm hug from Loose to Pat, who charged over the lagoon and put us off on the beach.  We made a very much better departure from the shore in our dinghy, Bob had remembered the kill cord.

Back on board, we put our heads in the gas oven, literally.  Unfortunately when Bob went to turn off the gas ring this morning it wouldn’t go off and we ended up having to turn the gas off at the bottle.  We consulted the manual, all in Italian and picturing a completely different model, and scratched our heads a great deal just trying to get at the guts of the thing.  We were stymied at every turn but after drilling out a screw that probably hadn’t been touched in twenty years, working up a dripping sweat we were in.  Despite much umming and aahing Bob couldn’t work out why it had suddenly seized.  The only thing we could do was come up with a way of stopping the gas getting into that burner.  There isn’t much a farmer can’t do with a spare valve and a good blob of superglue.  We will see if it works.

Meanwhile an absolute god with a sexy French accent arrived swimming alongside the boat.  This maiden was able to rescue him by letting him use our dinghy because his engine had failed and he had left his passengers on the beach.  He returned after doing the deed and Bob took him back to his boat, shucks!