Antigua update

We arrived into Jolly Harbour Antigua on Tuesday 12th March, towed in by a fishing boat, and have been living here alongside the wall of the boatyard ever since. This coming Tuesday we’ll have been here four weeks. It’s been a pleasant place to stay, but still frustrating not to be moving anywhere. Someone once told me that sailing is fixing your boat in exotic places, and that is all too true.

It has proved very difficult to track down either spare parts or a replacement gearbox, as ours is so old that they don’t make them any more. After two weeks of Will searching for solutions around the world, he was informed that a new gearbox had been found of the exact size and gear ratio languishing in the Nanni warehouse…in Bordeaux! (A big thank you to AR Peachment and Ash). DHL have shipped it to us via a very circuitous route – from Bordeaux to Antigua, via Paris, Leipzig, Cincinnati, Puerto Rico and finally Antigua. It has now arrived in the boatyard at last and work to fit it starts tomorrow. Fingers crossed that it will fit!

In the meantime, we have been getting on with schoolwork, enjoying the marina swimming pool, and seeing various friends come and go. We said farewell to Swedish family boat Lady Ellen, who began their trip back to Sweden with a passage to Bermuda. We waved goodbye to Dutch family boat Sonas who stopped at Jolly Harbour for one night. We bade a fond farewell to our good friends on Saltair, not knowing when we would see them next. Meanwhile Valent is still in place in the boatyard.

Still, there are worse places to be stuck, and while we are here we have embraced being tourists. We visited English Harbour and Falmouth Harbour, including Nelson’s Dockyard where Nelson was in charge from 1784 to 1787. We also had a sleepover onboard Epiphany who were anchored in Falmouth harbour, which was great fun for kids and parents alike!

While in Nelson’s Dockyard we visited the Galley Bar where tradition dictates that you sign your boat and crew names on the ceiling.

Happily my sister Alex and younger niece Tilly were able to come out to join us for a week over Easter, and we hired a car and explored the island together. Tilly’s 17th birthday coincided with the weekly Sunday barbeque at Shirley Heights, an Antiguan institution with steel bands and a fantastic view of the sunset over English Harbour.

With Alex and Tilly we took a speedboat to a reef where stingrays come to be fed. The water was shallow and very clear and you could see the huge stingrays up close, swimming and swooping around our feet. It was even possible to stroke them, and their skin felt smooth and soft. Unfortunately one stingray mistook Sophie’s leg for food and took a bite out of her thigh – although painful, this has not put her off stingrays which are still her favourite animal!

We also went ziplining in the rainforest together, which was exhilarating and great fun. We don’t have any photos of us in our harnesses and helmets unfortunately as a phone or camera could be dropped from the zipwire and lost forever.

On another day we travelled to the east side of the island and visited beautiful Long Bay, where Tilly, Lucy and Sophie swam with a turtle for at least fifteen minutes. There were dinghy rides, sunsets and lots of swimming. All too soon the week was over – thanks to Alex and Tilly for coming over to see us.

So we are now hoping that work on the gearbox will progress during the coming week, and that once all the other jobs related to the gearbox are completed, we can then make some further progress north. In early May, Valent needs to start her passage back across the Atlantic to avoid hurricane season over here, so we only have a few more weeks left of our Caribbean adventure. There are many islands still to visit just north of Antigua, including Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Barths and Saint Martin, and we hope to be able to see at least a few of them in the time we have left over here.