We posted our previous blog "Sailing North from Trinidad to Martinique" while we were anchored off of St. Pierre in Martinique. Last year we spent a little over 2 weeks in Saint Pierre and we did not have a good reason to stay in Saint Pierre besides our daily visits to the bakery, but we knew that Ellen and Martin sailing their vessel Acapella would arrive in Saint Pierre from Dominica. In April last year we met Ellen and Martin in Marina Bas Du Fort in Pointe-a-Pitre Guadeloupe. They sailed with their yacht from The Netherlands via Suriname to the Caribbean. They spent 6 weeks in Suriname and told us great stories about their visit. Encouraged by their experiences and the "Parbo Beer" incentive that Martin gave me we got a very big desire to visit Suriname with our own boat Island Girl and as you may have read in our blogs our 3 months stay in Suriname was the highlight of our trip. Ellen and Martin posted our get-together with some pictures on their blog: http://acapella-at-sea.blogspot.com/ and the pictures show that Dorothy and I had a great time with them.

The next morning we left Saint Pierre Martinique for a crossing to Dominica and we sailed straight to Prince Rupert Bay along the North/West coast of Dominica. This is a great place to use as a base to travel the beautiful island of Dominica, but we continued the next morning to make the crossing to The Saints and Guadeloupe. Again we sailed to the North/West part of Guadeloupe to a very popular but difficult bay called Deshaies. Most people visiting Deshaies describe in their blog problems with anchoring. The reason is that Guadeloupe is like a scoop that captures the wind from the east and blasts it over the mountains to the sea west of the island into the valleys and the bays. Deshaies is one of the most notorious with wind gusts of up to 45 kn. So if an anchor is not properly set or the anchor is too small for this kind of wind and/or boat the anchor starts slipping and since the bay is small and crowded many collisions or near misses are taking place. We stayed on the outside of the bay so we could leave early the following morning and had no problems anchoring in 40 ft. deep water.

We left the next morning at 6:00 with no wind which allowed us to use Mr. Yanmar to charge the batteries and to push us away from the island. As soon we cleared the island the wind picked up starting with 17 and close to Antigua with 24 kn. The Atlantic swell was from the NNE 6 to 8 ft. and the wind waves on top made the sea a little rough. But Island Girl knows how to handle this and gave us a good, however, rolling sail. We made good speed up to 7.5 kn and with an average speed of 6.2 we made the 42 miles crossing in less than 7 hours. It took us some time to find an anchor spot in the crowded English Harbour and the spot we found had poor holding so it took us some time to get the anchor set. After dark we started getting very strong wind gusts and the boats lying very close together were swinging in all directions but since we were tired we slept well and the next morning we went ashore to clear Customs and Immigration.

The marina in English Harbour was filled with an impressive fleet of 35 Oyster Yachts, flying the flags of Brazil, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States of America gathered in Antigua, West Indies for the 33rd Oyster Regatta. For non-sailors "Oyster" sail yachts are a top class of large luxurious quite expensive boats. The marina is built on the English Harbour Dockyard that was completed in 1745. The famous English Admiral Horatio Nelson was the naval commander of the dockyard for some time and it is now more known with the name "Nelson's Dockyard". All the facilities like offices, restaurants, sail loft, hotel, museum, bakery and other services are housed in the old buildings with very little changes on the outside and they are beautiful (see our pictures). We had our Sunday Morning breakfast in a restaurant called "Copper and Lumber Store" since that was the original purpose of the building.

We are anchored in Freeman Bay just after the harbor entrance with Fort Berkely and this place is known for winds that swirl around with strong gusts. This probably happened during our visit ashore, so when we came back Island Girl had slipped and was very close to a few German boats. We reset the anchor but slipped again during the night. Fortunately we did not cause that many problems like a large catamaran that completely lost its holding and hit one of the German boats next to us in the middle of the night with a loud boom and in the process its anchor got entangled with the anchor line of the German boat. I did not sleep much that night due to all the noise of the people working on the problem to separate the two boats and I wanted to keep an eye on our position. A brand new anchor snubber I purchased in Trinidad broke during the night to give an illustration of the force of the wind gusts that night. Despite these problems we intend to stay in this location this week before we start to move around the island to visit the other very well protected bays and beaches. At the end of the month there will be the famous Antigua sailing week and the Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta.

On Sunday March 17, 2014 at 6:00 PM we left Trinidad with the goal to sail to Antigua and with 10 days weather delay in Grenada (7 days), St. Lucia (3 days) and a stopover of 1 day in Saint Pierre to meet our Dutch friends Ellen and Martin we arrived Saturday April 4, 2014 at 1:15 PM in English Harbour Antigua after many very good sailing days and we realized once again that Island Girl is a perfect fit for us. We hope that she will give us many more sailing days.