A few years ago when we were in Shetland a brand new gigantic super-yacht arrived. At 150 ft long it not only dominated the pier but also the skyline, its enormous mast reaching high above Lerwick's hill top town hall.

Fast forward a few years (or slow forward as we only average 6 or 7 knots) and Lady B turns up in St Maarten.

Through an Ocean Cruising Club connection we were offered the chance to "babysit" Lady B in the evenings at the St Barts regatta while the crew partied ashore. And get paid for it!

However, I've a suspicion this isn't really the kind of babysitting we should be practicing for so we declined and got back on plan.

We definitely screwed ourselves in our passage planning by missing the point that BA don't fly out of the BVI.

Consequently we've been beating for neatly 24 hours now in an effort to get back upwind to Antigua.

Overnight stops in St Kitts and Montserrat with 06:00 starts have all but got us there with just another 6 miles to go.

Montserrat's volcano blew up in the mid '90's and is still smoking today. We anchored just outside the exclusion zone. The only boat for miles in a pitch black night.

The town of Plymouth, destroyed in the eruption and now abandoned lay just over the hill from our anchorage and we could smell the sulphur in the air.

The devastation was apparent when we sailed past with buildings just empty shells or buried in ash to their roofs. modern day Pompeii.

Theres not much tourism but judging by the number of fancy villas with their rolling lawns it seems the smart money moved in pretty quickly after the volcano quietened down.

We will be in Falmouth Harbour for a few days to do some varnishing and hill cleaning. After that we will move round to Jolly Harbour for some "marina therapy".

You can only take so many nights at anchor!