English Harbour (4) Antigua

Amongst the superyachts in Falmouth

We had fully intended to return to BV for an early night to sleep off the excesses of the day but Richard Fear announced that the captain of Ariadne, one of the superyachts on display at the Antigua Charter Yacht Show, had invited Tot Club members to the end of show drinks party on board the yacht.

Drinks on board Ariadne

Through the Tot Club we had become friendly with Mike Nelson, Ariadne’s First Mate/XO, so we headed down to Falmouth Harbour, keen to have an opportunity to see aboard his charge.  We were surprised to get through the security gate as easily as we did, later learning that Richard and Zoë had paved the way, with some considerable difficulty, for us.  Mike was manning the gangway and welcomed us aboard and we had a thoroughly enjoyable evening chatting to crewmembers and to other guests.  Eventually, the crew stopped having to host ‘proper’ guests and we were able to chat at length with Mike and Ian (the captain) and other members of the crew.  It all ended much later than we had intended and, the following day we had much more poorly heads than we would have wanted but we had a hugely fun evening and a close-up look at how the other half (halves?) live in the superyacht world.

Top row and bottom right: views of Nelson’s Dockyard.  Bottom left and centre: Ariadne when she had moved into Nelson’s Dockyard a few days after we went aboard

So, Monday 9 December was a lazier day than we had originally planned.  I added an anti-chafe cover to the No 2 reefing pennant which we had noticed was chafing inside the boom when we had the second reef in the mainsail.  It was a job that took me longer than it should have done but then Nicky’s tasks also took her longer than she might have anticipated and generally required her to be wearing dark glasses – even down below.

Zwailer anchored with a line ashore alongside BV

But we recovered in good time for lunch aboard Zwailer with Richard and Jane hosting us and David and Roberta (Pleione).  And an excellent lunch it was too, though Jane had had life made difficult for her by delays in the local supermarket’s delivery schedule.  The hectic social whirl continued into the evening when we were invited aboard Anura for drinks.  We spent a lovely few hours catching up properly with Stephen and Katherine and, of course, spent a fair proportion of that time crawling through their machinery spaces and oohing and ahhing over generators, fuel polishing units, fridges, freezers, batteries, charging systems, you name it.  Yachties love peering at other people’s boats and to have the opportunity to crawl over our friends’ new pride and joy, to ask questions and to hear something of all their hopes, dreams and frustrations is absolutely fascinating……..and Anura is a fabulous vessel.  We can absolutely understand their delight in her.

Views of Nelson’s Dockyard

Amongst the boat chores we managed to find the
time to eat well with some great BBQ kebabs

By this point we had been in Antigua for 10 days and were beginning to feel that we should move on but the weather wasn’t really playing ball and wasn’t forecast to do so until Thursday.  So we set to with the boat chores again, this time changing the capacitor on the generator again which had a marked effect on the output voltage.  We had changed this capacitor about a month previously and it had initially produced 240V. However, after a month of use we were seeing the voltage drop off again.  With a new dive tank compressor on board (which requires 230V and which works the generator very hard) we probably need to buy a several more spare capacitors in St Martin/Sint Maarten.

English Harbour, Antigua