Ten months to Christmas, folks!

The wind in the Caribbean has finally dropped and we are back to a more normal climate, for about a week anyway before a weird weather system comes in off the US coast.

We finally left Nelson's Dockyard yesterday. It was definitely a great place to have spent some time in amongst the historic buildings, super yachts and race fleet. It was also a great place to end Dunx and KK's visit. It was probably one of the more expensive places we have spent time on throughout the Caribbean, with some of the most minimalistic facilities we've encountered, but in reality when you compare it to south of England marina prices it is not that bad.

The mooring arrangements in the harbour are really not ideal. Boats go stern to the quay, with bow anchors in the middle of the harbour; at right angles to the quay is the super-yacht dockage, with their long anchor chains laid way out across the harbour. So, there seems to be a constant knot of anchors in the middle of the harbour that get laid over each other. This in turn provides great profit for the dockyard divers who are constantly being summonsed to go down to untangle them at vast expense. We thought our anchor was clear, but as we exited in gap between gusts, we found it was in fact hooked onto a super yacht anchor so we had to quickly call the divers to sort it out.

The marina could use mooring buoys for bow lines, or Med-style lazy lines to completely solve this, for the smaller boats at least (and it seems they have done this in the past) but they now choose to have this ridiculous situation of chain roulette. I guess that employs plenty of divers and avoids any bother with maintenance! But still it was a fun and interesting stop and we had such a good social time with our friends on Jacky X and My Lady that it was well worth it.

We realised we were not ready to part from Jacky X and My Lady, so once we had all paid our divers and freed our anchors, we all sailed round to Jolly Harbour together for a last night of socialising and putting the world to rights over a BBQ on Barracuda. Today we took the decision to check out of Antigua and are now sitting at anchor in Mosquito Cove, ready to head off to Nevis and St Kitts first thing tomorrow morning.

Our forward plan: Nevis, St Kitt's, (possibly St Barts), then Sint Maarten (Dutch side). We completely failed to get either our dinghy outboard or water maker fixed in Antigua, so we will now focus on Sint Maarten for our nect technical stop. We know that St Martin/Sint Maarten suffered terribly in last year's hurricane so

Today's Photo: is from our last snorkelling trip - We think it was a barracuda but happy to take other suggestions