I woke up to my cup of tea and Rowan telling me we were half an hour from Antigua. It was wonderful news. My shift had ended at 5 am and I hadn’t got a lot of sleep as the seas leaving Guadeloupe were incredibly choppy, always much more turbulent seas between the islands. The banging of the choppy waves and the bouncing of our dagger boards made it difficult, even for me, to drift off to sleep.
It felt very familiar coming into Nelson’s Harbour and setting anchor in Freeman’s Bay, around 9am, just like last year. You have to anchor up and wait to be called by the health official to dinghy over to Nelson’s Yard marina. Same thing happened last year, you arrive in the morning and wait hours and hours in the heat until called up. Of course you can’t leave the boat until checked in. An English couple in the boat next door had arrived last night and had not been able to check in as it was too late. They had a mid morning wedding to go to and missed it as we only got called in at 3pm! Frustrating, but it really is Island timing, all the big super yachts take priority we assume. The marina is full of enormous super yachts, plenty of oligarch’s loitering here. After filling out two bits of paperwork, even though it all has been done online in advance, we finally have our temperatures recorded and move onto Customs. Luckily for me only the captain goes into customs, as it is excruciatingly inefficient, Rowan says the lady was watching TV while uploading the info onto the system, so took forever! I went and had a little wonder and found one of our fellow Arc boats, MRS G, sadly they were out for the day. We were finally done at 4pm and rushed back to PolePole to get off anchor so we could get to our marina berth in the next bay along, Falmouth Bay. Rowan did some excellent manoeuvring, as the anchorage was so full we had gone very close to shore and had landed up amongst some buoys. Then we had to wiggle our way out between the boats.
Entering Nelson’s Harbour with the anchorage to the right
Nelson’s marina, full of lovely old buildings
It took about 20 minutes to get around to Falmouth bay and there we had to do a first time manoeuvre, we had to put an anchor out and reverse stern to, onto the pontoon between two boats, in a good bit of wind. So chuffed it all worked like a dream, Rowan’s nailing it, especially gratifying as we were under scrutiny from all the big boats around us!
We were pretty tired after our over nighter, so we just went to the marina restaurant with very low expectations. In fact we had a very good meal from the Italian chef and had a great waitress, Marsha, who is bringing us fresh rocket and lettuce from her mum’s garden tomorrow.
All the lit up masts of the super yachts
Discover more from sailingpolepole.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
