We understand that it has been snowing and raining in Scotland during the last month. The weather here has been rather better with temperatures in the high twenties (Celsius), and at present in the high thirties, which is too hot. We are tied alongside the dock belonging to the land we intend to purchase. At least we have made an offer and it has been accepted in writing. So now instead of a dock with a house at the end of it, we are looking like having a dock with a raft foundation at the end of it.

We thought of pitching a tent meantime, but the boat is far too comfortable, so we are able to call a jetty ‘home’ for a while. It is our intention to build two, three bedroom houses and to sell one of them off and use the other. The idea is to make the two houses look like one ( a la Edinburgh). The model is the Governor’s house, about half a mile from here, although ours will be better of course!

With two large bedrooms upstairs, en suite and with balconies, and another en suite bedroom, kitchen with open plan dining room and sitting room downstairs. There will be verandas around three sides of each house. These will be used for outside barbeques and for patio furniture, to generally lounge about on! We are thinking of installing a couple of infinity Jacuzzis as well! We are keeping our fingers crossed that this time the deal concludes, and we are badgering the lawyers to make sure they are registering it all correctly. We have discovered that the law in Antigua is based on English law, which isn’t very good when it comes to property, but we hope to have a conclusion in July, when we can start building.

Needless to say, we have been enjoying ourselves in the sun, although you can never tell when it might rain. All of a sudden a black squall cloud might appear over the hill and let loose a thirty knot gust and a downpour of wetness. It is difficult to know whether to put on full oilskins or to take all our clothes off and parade in swimming costumes! Either way seems to be equally acceptable here.

We have been helping some British friends to decide on the possible purchase of a property here. They have decided they like the view to the East of the island, over Nonsuch Bay, which is protected by a reef and has a perfectly beautiful turquoise colouring. There may be a better view from a house in the world, but we haven’t seen it yet.

We are going to help them further, if they are to proceed, to make sure they get what they want. The upshot of our investigations for them, is that we now know a lot more about property outside Jolly Harbour in Antigua, and thoroughly believe that if the roads are attended to, then Antigua will become a major holiday attraction. At present it appears a little like Britain in the 1950’s, in its attitude and general ambience, but without the class structure, which was crumbling in Britain, even then. There is a considerable amount of scrub and waste ground here that at one time grew sugar cane.

This is gradually being cleared for building as well as agriculture, and despite the sheep and goats that wander freely, some of the land is being fenced, and we see sheep and goats inside the fences instead of outside. Some of the world cup cricket is to be played here in 2007, so there should be no goats on the pitch!

We can class the roads from, absolutely appalling, nearly impassable, potholed five mile an hour jobs, to, in one case of about three miles, a well paved two lane highway. They did say that if the road passed through an area where the local politician was in power, then the road was good, otherwise…..!!! This may explain why the paved road suddenly stops and potholes suddenly appear. There may be other reasons for this however, and we are generally promised that paved roads will be ‘coming soon’!

We have spent a little while in English harbour on the South coast of the island. This is where Nelson’s Dockyard is. In 1947 a Commander Nicholson, straight from the Royal Navy, entered English Harbour with his schooner yacht for charter. The place was apparently like a ghost harbour, a little like Gavin Maxwell’s house and shark oil factory on Soay in Scotland, but bigger. Disused houses and wharfs were everywhere, and the only sound was the eerie banging of the hurricane shutters in the almost constant wind that blows here, from the East between 10 and 30 knots.

The British had abandoned their important naval base in the mid nineteenth century, and nobody had thought to use it or restore it until the Nicholsons came along. Regrettably, Desmond Nicholson, who had lived here with his family since those days, recently died here. He was much mourned by the local populace and yachting community alike. Nowadays the harbour is thriving, although they have put up the charges for staying there, which has driven some people away. Sometimes at two in the morning, you can even hear the 500 megawatt speakers of the Galley Bar, in Montserrat, 25 miles away. It was slightly louder where we were anchored, less than a cable (200 yards) away. Even the boat was jumping in the water!

We anchored next to Hornblower, which is the 42 foot home of a delightful lady, Maiwenn Beadle, who is a Commercial Sea Captain as well as being an Artist. She is having an Exhibition at Falmouth from April 2nd. We recommend you go along. She asked us to bring a rich friend to the opening, so if you are coming over then, bring your chequebook! Apparently she paints in the cockpit of her boat, in between skippering the ferry to Barbuda. She has to stop her cat from sitting on the palette though!!

When we were in English Harbour, the final rower came in from her transatlantic crossing. Roz Savage had spent 103 days at sea, and was the only single handed lady rower to complete the course. In other boats, the number of rowers varied from one to four, and both genders. Roz is but a slip of a girl, and we took out the rubber dinghy to the harbour entrance to welcome her in. She was quite brown and looked very fit, even though her cooker had broken down before Christmas. Her ordeal looked like the scaling of Everest in comparison to our own crossing of 22 days, which felt like a stroll up Arthur’s seat with black lab Ben. She said she had wanted to push herself beyond her comfort zone. She had certainly done that.

We also climbed up to Shirley heights to listen to the Steel Band.

Unlike the time we went en masse at New Year, this time it didn’t rain, and many couples were spread out on the lawns near the lookout, waiting for the sun to go down over the sea to the West. We didn’t see the green flash then, but have seen it recently with our good friend Reto, on Sterenn, from Switzerland. We first met him and Chantal, in Corunna, 2004. We are delighted to say that we have bumped into them again and again on our voyages. We saw the green flash from Sterenn, while at anchor in Jolly Harbour, as the sun dipped below the waves. Some people think that the green flash is a myth, but we can assure you that there is scientific truth in it. Nothing to do with the beer consumed as you wait for the sunset! Talking of couples, apparently three or four couples a day come to Jolly Harbour to get married. So if you are thinking about getting married, Antigua is the place.

We saw humpback whales just off English Harbour and Falmouth Bay last weekend. One nearly surfaced under the boat, but held his breath a moment extra, fortunately, as he surfaced a few feet from the boat and headed away from us.

We have had two trips this month. The first was to ‘Hawaii’, which in fact was the beach at Carlisle Bay, on the southwest of the island. The weekend was organised by the Antigua Yacht Club, which Will acted for, on the protest committee, at their open laser championship. He has also offered his services for the classic championship regatta in April. We think the offer has been accepted!

On the second day of the trip to ‘Hawaii’, most people wore very loud shirts and some people even wore grass skirts and coconuts.

Do our yacht clubs in Scotland have trips to ‘Hawaii’? The proceeds went to charity, and they raised $6000 EC for severely handicapped children on the island. The food and drink was donated, and we all paid reasonable prices for well cooked chicken stews and hamburgers, washed down with some rather blatant looking clear blue and green drinks. The taste of the drinks was a little indeterminate, perhaps like the ‘bilge water’ and ‘engine oil’ served in the restaurant at Blohm and Voss, in Hamburg, where Will worked in the late 1970’s. If memory serves correctly, they were pretty alcoholic too!!

We had another memorable voyage to Montserrat, in company with Tom and Marg in their Beneteau 50.

The voyage was memorable because the weather was just like it is in Scotland, wet and windy. It made for a fast passage though. Although the customs officer didn’t arrive in his office at Jolly Harbour until 0930, we still made it to the customs man in Little Bay in Montserrat, before they charged overtime, which begins at 1600 hours.

Sam, the taxi man, was waiting for us, and we arranged for an extended tour of the island the next day. We repaired to Mooses Bitter End beach bar for a beer, which costs about 80p for a bottle of Carib, possibly subsidized by the British Taxpayer, but more likely subsidized by the fact that, the bar is a shack with three large refrigerators in it, where you help yourself to the bottles. They only have glasses for the rum, which we didn’t have. We sat on plastic chairs, at plastic tables out of Wallmart or B & Q, under ferny leafed flamboyant trees, with huge phallic seed pods hanging between the leaves.

We watched pelicans and frigate birds wheeling over the bay, where Marg had just seen an enormous shoal of small fish, glinting in the sun, as they turned on their sides. The anchorage is a bit rolly in Little Bay, but it didn’t stop the party between Jabberwocky and Atlantia until the late hour of 2100, when we are usually in bed. We even celebrated our wedding anniversary on board Jabberwocky.

We jumped into Sam’s taxi, sharp at 10am the next day, and were off on our real tour of the real island. Sam’s commentary was interrupted by his fiddling with his air-conditioning switch most of the time, an intermittent fault. We saw the airport on the mountaintop and a plane landing. He looked as if he was going at 20 miles an hour. The 500 foot runway must look very short when you are 500 feet above it!

We passed the new town, where some of the people had been evacuated to, when the Volcano erupted. It looked more like a well laid out allotment, with larger than usual garden huts, as the two bedroom and lounge dwellings There was also a porch on each of them. They were all identical. We passed the town of the ‘Lookout’, which consisted of slightly larger houses, all on stilts, perched above the valley like eagles eeries, only we didn’t see any eagles, only a broad winged hawk.

The flowers were spectacular. We have never seen as many beautiful specimens as there are there. This one is a frangipani.

We went to a lookout on the East side of the island, and when the clouds cleared from the rim of the crater at Soufriere, we could see the rock falls and pyroclastic flows, as they sped down the upper part of the mountain.

We again saw this at night two days later, from our anchorage in Antigua, as a red glow. The Volcano is still truly erupting!

We drank at the burn where it is said that ‘if you drink from this burn you will surely return’. There is a poem on a poster beside the burn, which has been vandalised, so that one can’t read the whole of it. Probably just as well, judging by the first few verses. We motor sailed back to Antigua, which feels a bit like coming home nowadays. We swam with turtles and rays in Carlisle Bay before coming back to our dock. Only one disaster occurred. The furling line on the genoa snapped. To replace 91 feet of line costs nearly £100!!! We hope it lasts!

We expect you will like the photo of the flower. This one is a peacock flower. We hope you will like the rest as well.

Love Atlantia