We are sorry that this letter is a little late. We had been hoping to bring you good news with reference to our purchase here, but regrettably, we are held up by bureaucracy at present, so have little to tell you on that score. Suffice to say, due to a legal technicality, we are unlikely to purchase the house we thought we were moving into, but may still get compensation for the trouble it has caused. We have an agreement to purchase a plot of land with foundations on it, not a stones throw away from the previous house we offered for, (we haven’t thrown any stones yet!), but this is where the local bureaucracy is holding us up. The problem is a bit like waiting for the feu holders permission in Scotland in previous years. It does help that the weather really is quite comfortable, although we seem to have had quite a lot of rain in the past month. They say that the weather here is unusual, in that it is not often so wet at this time of year. This is good for all the palm trees and flowers however and indeed for the individual house water tanks. Antigua, like Bermuda, requires each house to have its own rainwater collection and cistern next to, or under the house. This water is used for everything except drinking water. Since the government desalinated water is quite expensive, most people have large tanks, but use water less freely than we do in Scotland. We see cars being washed down beside the river occasionally; free water!

We went to Falmouth, which is the yachting centre of Antigua. It is a large bay with many marinas around it and set amongst hills. Some marinas berth sailing and motor vessels up to 300 feet long. This is where the classic yachts, such as the J class ‘Endeavour’, come alongside. The British training vessel ‘Tenacious’ was berthed there during our visit.

Fortunately, they have very efficient yacht services here as well. Regrettably, our old zodiac rubber dinghy was irreparable. In the end we looked like Fred and Thelma in the Flintstones, running along the seabed, with no floor on the tender! We replaced it with another zodiac, two years old, with an inflatable floor, through Seagull Yacht Services, who were very helpful. We also replaced our Plastimo life raft with one made by Avon. We saw the old Plastimo life raft out of its box. It wouldn’t have saved a duck from drowning, let alone six people, it was so riddled with holes. (A warning to all those with Plastimo life rafts, they don’t last!)

A Little Blue Heron, not a duck!

We were very pleased to meet Poul and Sophia Hoj-Jensen at Falmouth and enjoyed a meal with them at the Catamaran Marina. Poul is a double Olympic Gold Medallist in yachting and they had owned Petticrows in Burnham on Crouch. They had built our last dragon, ‘Merlin’. They are now semi retired and were enjoying a very up market holiday, which included chartering a yacht for part of it. It was very good to see them again, having sailed against Poul for so many years in the Dragon. (I don’t think we ever beat him in a race, although we have a picture hanging on the bulkhead in Atlantia of us ahead of him during a gold cup race!!)

Antigua rigging were excellent in providing our new roller furling gear for the staysail and M.P.S. effected some good aluminium welding on our mizzen gooseneck. They also remodelled our dolphin striker, which had been mutilated by the anchor chain, one wild night in Jolly Harbour. Franklin, from A&F Sails took away our Ratsey and Lapthorn staysail, to make it into one suitable for furling.

We are presently alongside our prospective dock, and our new neighbours, Tom and Sylvia Ashton, couldn’t have been more delightful. They welcomed us with champagne, as their prospective new neighbours, and have been kind enough to supply us with electricity from their house. They also have a house in the Isle of Man and a small castle near Dundee and we are very pleased to have met them.

Mark and Lorna came to stay for ten days this month and we had a great time together. Mark has just designed a new inflatable catamaran dinghy tender and he has also built the prototype. It looks as if it will be cheaper and more hydrodynamic than any other inflatable, so we hope the idea takes off and he receives multi sales. You will remember that Will and Mark worked together in the early 1970’s at Rendel Palmer and Tritton in London, and have kept in touch ever since. They worked together as graduate engineers on the design of Royal Portbury Dock in Bristol. Mark now has his own Civil Engineering Consultancy near Carlisle and Lorna works in Carlisle at the University Library.

After a whistle stop tour of Antigua in our hire car, our first visit away from Jolly Harbour, in Atlantia, was to English Harbour. We anchored high in Ordinance Bay amongst the mangroves and were very comfortable there. Mark and Lorna enjoyed sailing Dipper.

We even went to the Admirals Inn for a drink. No frogs this time. We visited the museum and the Copper and Lumber pub. We will take you there if you come out. Great excitement was caused by collecting our staysail from A&F Sails. It fitted first time and now Will doesn’t have to go forward in huge seas to take the staysail down, it rolls up from a string in the cockpit!

There were the usual beautiful boats in English Harbour and also rowing boats that had recently raced across the Atlantic.

We were greeted by Grant Rintoul, who was working on one of the large yachts (Timoneer). He had worked on Atlantia when she was at Rhu! We never cease to be amazed how small a world it is.

We went foreign after that, to Montserrat. We were treated to a number of beers, at the beach bar by the locals, who were very cheery and were looking forward to the elections the next week. There are four thousand people on Montserrat, which is British, and, of course, as many opinions. We are only just getting to grips with the politics in Antigua, with its seventy thousand souls, but may learn more about Montserrat in the next year. We will report on this again.

We had visited Montserrat last year, but were unprepared to find that it crackled and glowed during the night we were there, and the following morning was billowing smoke and ash all over the land and sea to the West of the volcano. The locals said it was one of the most active nights in the last few years. The mountain must have been upset by something it ate! We were taken to the volcano by Sam, the taxi driver, and this year, he brought along his air-conditioned minivan, instead of the battered bus he used last year.

Having been covered by the ash, and washed ourselves down at the spring, we watched net fishing from the beach with the frigate birds wheeling around, ever hopefully.

The pelicans were also watching the proceedings, even more intently than ourselves, expecting fish to hop over the net and into the pouches under their beaks. In the meantime we also saw long tailed tropic birds soaring by the adjacent cliffs. The vulcanologists, say that Montserrat will continue to smoulder for the next few years, before settling down again. It is like a safety valve on top of a pressure cooker, so hopefully will save the region from other eruptions or earthquakes. We don’t think it will make much difference to hurricanes, or the weather generally in the region though!

The anchorage at Little Harbour is prone to swells and so we set sail in the afternoon for St Kitts with a fifteen knot Southeasterly behind us. We passed Redonda, which looks a bit like Ailsa Craig. It has its own King. The kingdom started before Britain claimed it in the nineteenth century, but nevertheless the kingdom lives on, subjectless. Although ‘the King’ lives in Antigua, he goes to Redonda once a year with his friends, for a lunch. He is historically a literary man. We think the visit is by helicopter nowadays since the cliffs are very steep and there is no real landing place.

We were very pleased to go to St Kitts (or St Christopher as it was originally called). Since 1982 it has been independent, and is linked to its neighbour, Nevis, by politics. Originally it had been populated by Arrawaks, prior to the thirteenth century. Then, by the Caribs, a fierce cannibal tribe that inhabited most of the Caribbean before Columbus. The Caribs on St Kitts, in turn, were murdered to a man, by the French and British in collaboration, in the sixteenth century. The island was divided in three. The French had the North and South ends and the British had the centre. A very peculiar division. Of course the British and French fell out and the result was a large fort built by the British in case of French attack, (which they did with success in 1782). Brimstone Hill Fort is an impressive structure, designed by British Army Engineers and built by slave labour in the eighteenth century. The external walls are mostly basalt, with some detailing in Limestone at the corners and arches. The main object of the fort was to keep the French or any other fleet from the British Capital, but it also had fortifications to the rear where the steepest cliffs are. In profile it is not unlike the plug and tail of Edinburgh Castle, although the tail is a little steeper since glaciers didn’t reach down this far. The name Brimstone Hill comes from the odour of sulphur, which could still be smelt there in the seventeenth century, from previous volcanoes.

We hurtled around the island in a taxi. We were not used to going so fast and told the driver so. Fortunately he did slow down a bit, otherwise the stugeron (sea sickness tablets) would have been needed for that journey as well. We had a brief stop to view the black volcanic rocks and to buy a drink at a local stall before being rushed off again.

We saw the fields of sugar cane standing uncut by the roadside. The government stopped its sugar subsidy last year, since the World Trade Organisation seemed to be favouring sugar beet production and thus making cane sugar unprofitable. Quite where all the rum will come from is anybody’s guess. St Kitts was one of the last islands to carry on the tradition, of four hundred years, of growing sugar in the region. Study the photograph well. It is a dying crop.

We saw the tourist train, which uses the narrow gauge railway that used to carry trains around the island, collecting the sugar cane for transportation to the central molasses plant at Basseterre. Alas, no longer. Although the tourist train is very colourful, it is expensive. About £50 each for an afternoon’s trip around the island.

We had dinner in the main square of Basseterre, which was designed to be like Piccadilly Circus. Admittedly there is a British telephone box on one corner that has no glass in it, but there the resemblance seems to end! It was a very nice meal however, up on the balcony, overlooking the clock, which substitutes for Eros.

The voyage of fifty miles back to Antigua was all upwind. Since it was blowing between twenty five and thirty knots it was a hard slog, solely achieved under engine. When we arrived at Antigua we discovered a severe leak around the stern gland, which Mark and Will later diagnosed as coming from a broken stern tube clip. Fortunately the local chandler had a good stock of hefty clips, so we now have four of them! (Three left over after the repair.)

Of course, once we had been to Montserrat and St Kitts, we had to book back into Customs and Immigration in Antigua. Fortunately these people are at the harbour here and the Customs man knows us. He is very helpful nowadays. Regrettably, the regulations are such that Mark and Lorna had to pay departure tax on leaving for Montserrat and again on leaving for England. Although not a huge sum, it was a bit niggling for them that we didn’t have to pay the tax, since we brought the boat here as crew. We do however have to pay for a cruising permit. Very bizarre the tax laws here.

A bananaquit

We had two glorious sails at the end of Mark and Lorna’s time with us. We sailed up to Great Bird Island inside the reefs on the North East side of Antigua, and went snorkeling before the hoards arrived. We sailed off the anchor and then onto the mooring again at Jolly Harbour, no mean feat since Atlantia is positively hopeless at short tacking in light winds with no engine. We used the bow thruster however and Mark backed the staysail by hanging on to the self tacking boom. We avoided colliding with a sea wall and a multi million dollar catamaran. Since the stern tube is now mended we can use the engine again, with no leaks! We were sorry to see Mark and Lorna leave, they had been good companions on our voyages of self discovery!

We have found an excellent dentist on Antigua, Dr Sengupta. He studied in Dundee so he must be good! He gave Will a new crown for one of his teeth, without much fuss on Will’s part. He is not a cheap practitioner, but has paintings on the ceiling above the dentist’s chair, which depict colourful reef fish and other underwater scenes. It certainly takes the mind off the business in hand. The surgeries are very modern and have televisions and air conditioning as well.

We have been fortunate to be taken under the wing of Sue Davies, who, along with Desmond, has given us great moral support in the process of purchasing the land to which we are now attached by jetty. We have been together to Carlisle Bay snorkeling, which gave us sights of turtles, cuttle fish, eagle rays and Southern stingrays. Will dived for sand dollars, which are usually in twenty feet or so of water and are very delicate. They look like an old dollar coin, hence the name.

We all had a wonderful lunch at Harmony Hall yesterday, which is an Italian restaurant, almost entirely outside an old sugar windmill that has been made into a sophisticated bar. The food is excellent and Riccardo, the owner was sad that he had to turn away fifty people because there was no room for them. That on a Tuesday! If you feel like coming to Antigua to open a first class restaurant with reasonable prices and a lovely ambience, please let us know. It is bound to be a success, even on the covers Riccardo turns away!!

This weekend we hope to help Desmond sail his boat, ‘Tessa’, a Contessa 26, in the local yacht club race. It may be fun to race again, even in a handicap class, which of course you can never win, however good you are!!

Margaret has taken over the picture snapping almost entirely, and we enclose a selection. We hope you like them.

Love Atlantia