Jolly Harbour Antiqua

Leaving Green Island

After a couple of lovely days at anchor off Green Island, we up anchored at 0800 on Monday 2 April for the 23-mile passage around Antigua to Jolly Harbour. With greyish skies above us, we’d certainly had the best of the place over the weekend.

There was very little wind to start with but there was just enough to fly the MPS for the first time in over 6 months, probably longer. It didn’t stay up long though as no sooner had we got it flying than the wind picked up and we had to get it down again!

We sailed clockwise around Antigua, past English and Falmouth Harbours, the reefs on the island’s southwest tip and up the western shore, to get to Jolly Harbour which is half way up the western side of the island. The waters off this side of the island are very shallow and so, despite the grey skies, the sea was a beautiful colour. The developers obviously agree: as we approached the harbour we saw lots of very nice villas perched on the hillsides above beautiful sandy beaches and clear turquoise seas.

In the entrance channel to Jolly Harbour

The outer approaches to Jolly Harbour are an interesting maze of shoals and shallow channels and the main ‘deep water’ channel is actually not that deep. Having crossed some of the deeper shoal areas we picked up the buoyed channel into the main part of the harbour and then found a suitable spot just outside the channel in which to anchor. We had to pick our spot with care, Mosquito Bay [Ed: perhaps not the best place to anchor?] is also very shallow and we dropped in about 2.5m. There was a good number of other yachts anchored in the bay, and more arrived after us. It is clearly a popular spot.

We’d come to Jolly Harbour because there is a Customs and Immigration office from which we intended to check out in the morning. There is also a Budget Marine chandlery and a supermarket marked on our map, so we set off in the dinghy to take a look at all of those and, specifically, to confirm the opening hours of the Customs and Immigration office.

Holiday homes in Jolly Harbour, nearly all with boat lifts

We hadn’t really known what to expect and I guess had assumed that Jolly Harbour would be like most of the other Caribbean harbours we had seen. However, it is clearly a major holiday home development. There were hundreds of small pied a terres and villas, nearly all of them with a stretch of waterfront and a dock. We’d seen private boatlifts before (eg in Rodney Bay in St Lucia) to keep smaller boats out of the water to prevent them fouling up, but in Jolly Harbour there were boat lifts everywhere. There were even 50ft motorboats on lifts! Either the fouling here is terrible or there is a significant amount of keeping up with the neighbours going on.

We made our way in to the marina where we could leave our dinghy and headed off to the shops. It seemed quiet for a Monday but marina was very full, we think with boats that stay there all the time. We also quickly realised that Jolly Harbour was very popular with Americans; certainly it was the predominant accent that we heard.

The large marina in front of the, now closed, Casino

The opening times for the Customs and Immigration office worked for our planned departure in the morning, Budget Marine was sold out of 1” stainless steel tubing so the solar panels project remained on hold, and the supermarket we’d expected to be a large corner store turned out to be one of the best we had come across. Jolly Harbour was not what we had expected at all!

Unexpectedly, when we went to a bar to grab a beer and check our e-mails, we bumped into Ade and Sam from Neva. We had met them in Las Palmas and last seen them in Le Marin, so it was a nice surprise to see them again and catch up. They plan to head north too, once their job as delivery crew for Dream Yachts has finished. And they plan to take part in a couple of the same OCC rallies as us in America, so we will certainly see them over the summer as well.

Jolly Harbour, Antigua