We have been back home in Bristol for about ten weeks …. so this post is just a little late. Here are some happy memories of what now feels like a very long time ago ….

Monday 24th April to Wednesday 17th May 2023

We had completed our circumnavigation! Approaching Antigua we crossed the path that we had taken when we first arrived here in January 2016, after we had sailed east to west across the Atlantic from Cape Verde. We had now completed the 21,639 nautical miles around the Earth at the equator as the crow flies (or more likely the albatross) but which was just over 30,000nm by the more convoluted route that we had taken. 

We strung up bunting using the courtesy flags of the countries that we’d visited en route, from France to Brazil, where they fluttered colourfully from the top of the mast. Approaching Jolly Harbour, at anchor in the bay were SY Endorphin Beta with Colin and friends Mel and Glenn, and SY Maia with Dick on board. There was lots of waving and photo taking and we felt elated to be there (thanks to Dick on Maia for the photos below).

After we’d tied up on the Custom’s dock Hugh did the checking in, filling in endless forms and joking with the initially rather grumpy customs officer until he had her giggling. It was lovely to hear the Caribbean lilt again. 

We had chosen to stay in Jolly Harbour Marina rather than anchor off, to make it easier to get work done on Vega. That evening Colin picked us up in his dinghy as he, Mel & Glenn had invited us and Dick on board Endorphin for  ‘The Closing the Circle Celebratory Meal’.  Mel had cooked a fabulous supper for us including my favourite pudding and much champagne was drunk with highly entertaining conversation.

Endorphin had put off their departure until our arrival and they left the next morning for the French Island of Saint Maarten to provision for their onward passage to the Azores – much cheaper there than here in Antigua, as well as having all that delicious French food and wine. 

Over the next few days we celebrated Hugh’s birthday with a meal out and a bus trip over to Falmouth Harbour. The touristy Nelson’s Dockyard was much quieter than when we’d previously visited in January 2016. Gone were all the superyachts, instead a row of wooden classic yachts visiting for Antigua Week, one of the top sailing regattas in the world, a highlight in the yachting calendar.

That evening we joined in a gathering of members of the Ocean Cruising Club (to qualify for membership you must have sailed an ocean passage of over 1000 nautical miles) in an Indian restaurant for a curry – very Caribbean!

We had arranged for a firm of riggers to check our rigging which Hugh had noticed was looking rather rusty, despite having been completely renewed only 18 months previously in Phuket using top quality (or so we’d been told) Australian stainless steel wire. Not only was it rusty but some of the shrouds, which hold the mast up, had broken strands of wire. It would need replacing otherwise we risked the mast coming down mid-Atlantic. It meant taking Vega over to Falmouth Harbour where the riggers were based, but they promised that if we got there over the weekend they would measure up the rigging and get the job finished on the Tuesday, then we could head back to Jolly Harbour. We enjoyed our last couple of days at Jolly Harbour marina with a swim in the pool, a visit to the hairdresser for me, laundry laundered, shopping at the Epicurean supermarket (an offshoot of Waitrose with prices to make your eyes water) and a Friday night meal out listening to a local reggae band. 

On the Saturday we motored over to the Catamaran marina in Falmouth Harbour, round the south of Antigua through clear, intensely turquoise water, past the wooded, hilly terrain with a few expensive houses on the headlands and small, upmarket resorts in the bays. 

The Catamaran marina was a misnomer as we only spotted a couple of catamarans there. Tied up on the pontoons were mostly very enormous and very luxurious looking monohulls, which made us feel very small indeed. We had to reverse in, stern to the dock, having dropped our anchor Mediterranean style from the bow. On trying to get a long straight approach we went aground on the reef but managed to dislodge the keel where it had briefly got stuck on the bottom. A few days later we enjoyed watching another yacht do exactly the same.

The marina is rather isolated with a 30 minute walk to the shops and restaurants of Falmouth Harbour. We spent most lunchtimes at Sweet-Ts cafe, a short walk down the lane to where there was also a small supermarket. Next to the marina is the Catamaran Hotel which has a Cuban restaurant adjoining it. Eating out one evening we both had the paella and it was pretty unpleasant. Hugh and I had visited Cuba in 2003 (it is where he proposed to me although it is a long-standing joke between us that I never actually accepted his offer of marriage). Anyway we decided then that the food in Cuba was the worst we’d ever eaten, anywhere in the world. This meal confirmed our opinion but to some extent the karaoke compensated for it in amusement value… the worse someone’s singing ability the more they wanted to sing it seemed. I was persuaded to sing one number but thankfully Hugh refused to join in. 

By the Monday Hugh was getting rather anxious as there was no sign of Shawn the Rigger who should have come by now to measure up our rigging for it to be replaced the following day. On the Tuesday the mast was supposed to be lifted off but we heard that the crane was busy all that day, although the electricians did turn up to disconnect the electrical wiring that runs down the mast. On the Wednesday we motored around to have our mast lifted off and then motored back, mastless, to the marina.

Nothing much happened rigging-wise for the next few days. It was Antigua Week with races taking place every day and Shawn the Rigger was crewing on Sir Hugh Bailey’s boat each day and celebrating most evenings (Sir Hugh is a local Antiguan who set up the Catamaran Marina and has been active in promoting yachting in Antigua, especially for young people).

Hugh was in touch with our rigger in Thailand to see whether we had a claim against them for using substandard wiring. We are still waiting on this over four months on. We hired a car to get our gas cylinders refilled and to collect the replacement Duogen arm from customs at the airport, havIng had it sent out from the U.K. We drove out to a beach so I could have a swim. Antigua claims to have 365 beaches, one for every day of the year and this one was practically deserted apart from us and an elderly Italian couple getting married. Our route back to the marina took us around the south of the island, a wilder, wooded and hilly area of forest dotted with small settlements of colourfully painted houses. A part of the island we hadn’t seen before. 

The following day we drove up winding roads until the tarmac ran out. We then trekked up a path to the top of Monks Hill with wonderful views down over Falmouth Harbour and the distant yachts out at sea, racing in strong winds.

We headed into St Johns, the capital, and after lunch of jerk chicken at the Alligator restaurant (and no, there aren’t any alligators in Antigua) we went to visit the museum. It was closed. On to Jolly Harbour to meet up with Dick & Laura, Laura newly returned from a visit back home to Utah. The marina pool was closed so we went to the beach to swim, disappointed by the rather murky water full of sargassum weed. As the sun set we watched for a green flash which our friends assured us they’d seen many times, but we were yet again disappointed. I’ve seen it once and Hugh is convinced that it’s a complete myth. 

It was the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on the Saturday. Although he is the new head of state in Antigua there were no obvious celebrations  taking place here. Sir Hugh’s partner Helen, who runs the marina and is a formidable but humorous and warm-hearted woman, was not impressed. She had been terribly upset when Queen Elizabeth II died and had stayed up all night to watch the funeral, but has a low opinion of Charles, Camilla and ‘the rest of them’ and thinks that Antigua should now become a republic. The locals were more excited about the prize giving evening for Antigua Week and we didn’t expect to see Shawn the Rigger who was still recovering from his celebrating. Our Scottish neighbour at the marina had been crewing on another boat all week and we had heard daily complaints from him of breaches of racing etiquette by other boats, but he happily reported they’d come first in their class by the end of the week. We walked over to Nelson’s Dockyard to join in the celebrations which we’d been told would be going on until midnight only to find we were too late… the marquees had been taken down and everyone was heading home. 

On the Monday Shawn finally appeared and admitted that he didn’t have the right fittings to carry out the rigging work and would have to order them from the USA. Stan the Rigger, an Australian expat, who was working on the boat next to us did have the right fittings in stock or could order them in within 2-3 days, but he and Shawn were not on speaking terms. With Hugh as intermediary we managed to get the parts for Shawn to use in a matter of days.

You probably haven’t gained a particularly good impression of Shawn by now, but he’s an interesting man. A local Antiguan who worked for Stan the Rigger for some years learning the trade. He then worked on superyachts and racing boats in the UK and around the world as a general maintenance man, rigger, sailmaker and crew before setting up his own rigging business back in Antigua during Covid. He is an excellent and well-respected rigger and appeared to have done a good job for us in the end (although, of course, time will tell). His 16 year old son sails dinghies competitively and has travelled widely including to Turkey and Cuba to compete and will soon be competing in Brazil and hopefully the Olympics one day. Shawn is hugely proud of him. It’s good to see locals running their own businesses here whereas when we first visited in 2016 we had the impression that it was only expats and white Antiguans who owned all the yacht servicing businesses. We also noticed that there were more local people eating out in the top-end restaurants whereas on our previous visit it appeared to be whites only. Hopefully things are changing.

Life in the Catamaran Marina wasn’t so bad. Most evenings one of the local sport fishing boats would arrive back at the marina with crates of fish to sell to local restaurants and hotels. They would fillet their catch on the dockside and throw the entrails to the strange and huge fish which hung around in the water below (whose name I’ve forgotten). We bought fillets of fresh mahi-mahi from them, delicious simply fried in butter. A local woman sold roti-wraps and fresh juices around the marina which made a wonderful lunch. Our laundry was collected by Beverley and returned clean and ironed two days later. We had all our upholstery taken away to be professionally steam-cleaned by Lennox and brought back looking like new. Other work on the boat included getting the non-functioning blower fan which cools the engine compartment replaced, Trevor fashioning a new metal support for it. Hugh serviced the engine. The electricians replaced our shore-power battery charger which hasn’t worked properly for over a year, fitted a new cable to the anemometer (an ongoing saga) as well as fashioning us an extension lead to the freezer and they got the radio aerial working. We bought a sachet of cockroach killer at the local supermarket which we were assured was guaranteed to work… and it did! (Writing this some months later we seem to have finally eradicated the pests). It all got a bit chaotic on board……

….. so we were grateful when Dick and Laura sailed over from Jolly Harbour to anchor in Falmouth Harbour and collected us in their dinghy to motor across the bay to the Falmouth Yacht Club. We managed to get the last table in a nearby French restaurant and had a memorable meal. With the hurricane season in the Caribbean from June to November, the owner would be closing the restaurant in two weeks time to take a 4 month holiday in Martha’s Vineyard in the USA and Provence in France. It felt very quiet and end-of-season as cruisers headed north to Europe or to the northern USA or south to Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago and beyond. Antigua Week had ended and most of the boats had headed off or been shipped back to Europe. Some yachts stayed on, out of the water in boatyards, strapped down in hurricane cradles. We had looked into leaving Vega in Grenada for another cruising season in the Caribbean but our insurance company would no longer insure us for named storms despite Grenada supposedly being south of the hurricane belt. Weather patterns here are changing and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more destructive as a result of global warming.

The following day I sailed with Dick and Laura on Maia over to English Harbour, the next bay along from Falmouth Harbour. We dropped anchor and snorkelled from their boat over the small reef there. Apart from a huge anchor on the seabed, some colourful parrot fish and a few shoals of small fish there was not much to see and the coral was disappointing. 

We hired another car to finally visit the museum in St Johns which had interesting but disturbing displays about the slave trade which had brought captured Africans over to work on the sugar plantations in the most horrendous conditions. We had bought scuba dive gear in New Zealand but decided that we were unlikely to be diving again in cold U.K. waters and so we sold it all to the Antigua Scuba School who were pleased to be getting good quality, little used equipment. Our biggest mistake was doing our provisioning shop at the Epicurean supermarket at Jolly Harbour – we were both stunned by the final bill for the full trolley. No more expensive meals out for a long while. 

Scenes of St Johns:

I had been agonising for a while as to whether I wanted to do the North Atlantic passage from Antigua to the Azores. I was tired of long sea passages and we’d completed our circumnavigation when we arrived in Antigua. We had been looking into getting crew to join Hugh on the next passage when his son Olly decided he’d like to do it, which Hugh was thrilled about.

On the Saturday we collected Olly from the airport. He’d taken three weeks off work… and we still didn’t have a mast and rigging! We had a couple of days for a speed-tour round the island. A quick look round the capital, St John’s, a walk round English Harbour and the by-now deserted Nelson’s dockyard, and then some of the local cuisine in Caribbean Taste, a nearby restaurant.

The following day lunch on the beach and a swim….

Sunday evening at Shirley Heights overlooking English harbour is a bit of an institution, with a barbecue and music. It was packed full. We watched the sun sink slowly behind the hills, ate jerk chicken as a reggae band played and the crowd danced to a covers band. 

On Monday we drove to Nelson’s Dockyard to check out of Antigua, with the complication of Olly joining the boat as crew and me leaving it. That sorted we motored Vega over to where the mast was lowered by crane onto the deck and Shawn’s team fixed the new rigging in place, the electricians reconnecting the wiring. It seemed to be done very efficiently albeit almost two weeks later than initially promised. 

Tuesday morning the electricians were up the mast still trying to identify the cause of our long-standing problem with the anemometer (which measures wind speed and direction and has been intermittently faulty since Thailand). They decided it was a faulty instrument and not the cabling so Hugh rushed off to buy a new one… another US$440 (and it then wasn’t fixed securely to the top of the mast so fell off within a day of leaving Antigua).

Shawn and his team joined us for a test sail out to sea where they could make final adjustments to the tensions in the rigging. By 4pm Hugh and Olly were ready to leave and with a goodbye blast from Helen on her foghorn they cast off the lines and headed off. I watched for ages until they disappeared out of sight behind the headland for their 2,400 nm journey to the Azores. I felt both sad to see them go with a tinge of regret that I wasn’t with them but outweighed by relief that I wouldn’t have to spend 18-20 more days at sea and excited that I would be seeing family and friends again soon.

My flight home wasn’t until the following day and I had booked into the Falmouth Harbour Marine Resort. I enjoyed the hot showers and aircon but it felt just a bit strange and lonely eating on my own that night. The next morning I had time for a swim on a nearby beach enjoying the warmth of the water and the beauty of the surroundings, feeling sorry that we were leaving the tropics and our big adventure would soon be coming to an end. A final taxi ride across the island to the airport past all the wonderful sights and scenes of Antigua then an eight hour flight to Heathrow and home.