Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Antigua Mini-Blog

Enough mega blogs for now.... here's a mini blog just to say we're in Antigua. We left St. Martin around 3 AM with a forecast of light northeast winds - perfect for our passage east southeast to Antigua. Instead of "forecasting" perhaps it should be called "foreguessing". We ended up motor-sailing into east to southeast winds and squalls for the entire 20 hour trip. Someday we'd like to actual be sailing down wind and not directly into the wind.

Squall near Antigua
Skip should really be writing this blog since I was either sick or asleep through most of the passage. I guess hanging around for three weeks in St. Martin pulled the rug out from under my sea legs.

We tried our luck once again with our fishing gear and actually caught a good sized mahi. He got away before we could get the gaff into him though. Very disappointing!

About 8 hours to go until Antigua I thought I saw a white boat in the distance - but then it seemed to disappear. I thought that was odd until I looked again and saw whales breaching and crashing back down sending up huge sprays of white water. We followed the spray from their spouts as they came closer to us, but they sounded and this was the only photo I got. 

WHALE!!
A passing sailboat in the evening
We arrived in Deep Bay Antigua late Sunday night, dropped the hook and dropped into bed. In the morning we sailed around the corner into Jolly Harbor to clear in.

Captains only please.... Skip takes our ship's papers and passports into Customs & Immigration
A revived first mate hoists our homemade Antigua/Barbuda courtesy flag. It's been pointed out that it looks a bit like the Days Inn logo.
Saralane (center) anchored in Jolly Harbor
Our first day here was a public holiday (Easter Monday) so we walked around just to stretch our legs but found almost everything closed. Even this vaguely familiar looking coffee shop!


Now that we have the conversion from dollars to euros down pat... we have to switch to converting dollars to EC. The local currency for Antigua, Barbuda and several other Eastern Caribbean nations is the EC which is worth roughly 38 cents. I'll need my calculator....

2 comments:

Leslie said...

How many little curtesy flags have you made? Don't forget to let me know what you find on Garbage Beach.

yfs

Madeline said...

Hi Les - So far I've only made two courtesy flags... a French one and one for Antigua/Barbuda. The French one will work for several islands though, including St. Barts, Guadaloupe and Martinique, so we've got a lot covered. Montserrat's flag is going to be a challenge though so I'd better get started on it!