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| Nicky enjoying a view over the anchorage |
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| Top: English Harbour as seen from Fort Charlotte. Charlotte Reef is the white water at the bottom of the picture. Bottom: south coast path scenery |
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| Coastal path scenery and wildlife |
After that it was hard uphill to Shirley Heights where we joined a throng of cruise ship passengers and other tourists enjoying the views down onto English Harbour and over to Falmouth Harbour beyond.
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| View from Shirley Heights. English Harbour (foreground and right mid-ground) with Falmouth Harbour just visible beyond |
We had forgotten to bring our binoculars but we thought that we could still see Anura anchored in Falmouth, which surprised us. We later discovered that their propane bottle refill had not gone as planned the previous day and that the company was busy rectifying the problem – at the expense of delaying them a day. Just as well they hadn’t checked out in advance.
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| Left: Ruined buildings at Fort Blockhouse. Right: View into Indian Creek, with the St James inlet just beyond |
From Shirley Heights we followed the road and then a new trail past the ruins of the Officers’ Mess and the cemetery (which houses a regimental monument to those personnel who had died in the British West Indies on active service mostly, it has to be said, of ‘dread disease’) towards Fort Blockhouse. Fort Blockhouse was the main accommodation and headquarters area for the fortifications on this part of the coast but was, of course, a lookout point and military stronghold in its own right. We enjoyed the views east and west along the coast, particularly down into Indian Creek, a narrow hurricane hole just to the east of English Harbour.
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| Large land hermit crabs: the shell was the size of a grapefruit |
We’ve walked the Lookout Trail from Galleon Beach to Shirley Heights several times in the past, so we decided to return to the bay via the Jones Valley Trail and are delighted that we did. It’s a very different trail to the others we have walked, winding through dense, damp woodland, almost like rain forest. There are no views out but the trail does pass another 18th/19th century cemetery, a similarly aged dam across the stream in the base of the valley and more military ruins. It was a surprisingly cool walk out of the sun, though harder going than the Lookout Trail with the path damp and slippery underfoot in many places and much less well-defined, but certainly a pleasant and worthwhile walk.
In the evening Richard accompanied us to the Tot Club, his tot number 4 of 7 and time for him to obtain the crib sheet for boning up on Nelsonian history in preparation for his joining viva. Sadly we’d miss his final qualifying tot.
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| A truly miserable day, blustery, rainy and yuck! |
We had intended that to have been our final visit to the Tot Club this season and had expected to leave the next day but the weather was so squally and blustery overnight, with worse forecast to come that we decided to stay an additional night. And we’re very glad we did. The next day (Thursday 12 December) dawned overcast and grim. The wind continued to gust and swirl down off Shirley Heights and the rain poured down almost ceaselessly. With the solar panels on strike because of the weather and the wind generator not knowing which way was up because of the downdraughts and backdraughts, we fired up the generator to charge the batteries. Well, we tried to fire up the generator….. Cue much swearing. Happily, I found the problem pretty quickly: the low-tension cable had broken at its connection to the starter motor, probably because I had leant on it when I was working on the generator on Tuesday. A quick fix on that and we were up and running again to heat hot water and charge the batteries.
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| The previous week’s skippered-charter catamaran in situ (it doesn’t rain all the time in paradise!) |
By the time that job was complete and everything packed away again we were, once more, surrounded by skippered-charter catamarans. The last time this end of the bay had been so busy was the previous Thursday. Had we really been in English Harbour so long that we were getting to know the charter yacht schedule? Definitely time to move on!
At the Tot Club that evening everyone, Mike and Anne in particular, were keen to point out to us that sailing lore has it that it’s bad luck to leave harbour on passage on a Friday, which we guess makes Friday the 13thparticularly inauspicious. But despite our friends’ many entreaties to stay for longer, we knew that we should be moving on. But before we left we had one last social engagement……
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| The OCC coffee morning: (Left to right) Nicky, Ed, Jody, Jane, Richard and Bob) |
During one of the few breaks in the rain on Thursday we had spotted that 2 of the fairly recently arrived yachts in English Harbour belonged to OCC members and so had invited their crews over for coffee on Friday morning, along with Richard and Jane on Zwailer. As we put it in our short Roving Rear Commodore report back to the OCC: “What do you do when it’s raining hard in English Harbour, Antigua? Have a very British OCC coffee morning, of course. The crews of Zwailer (Richard and Jane Kingsnorth), Oyster (Bob Morris, also PO for Woods Hole and Nantuckett) and Contigo (Ed and Jody Chamberlain) assembled on board Blue Velvet of Sark (Reg and Nicky Barker). Tea and coffee provided by the latter, a variety of excellent sticky buns and cakes kindly provided by all the guests and laughter and conversation provided by all. Rain doesn’t stop play here!” It was an excellent end to a fab time in Antigua. We hadn’t done as many swimming sessions as Nicky had originally planned or walked as many trails as we had first thought we would but we had had a lot of fun with old friends and new, and even managed to tick off a number of jobs as well. And we will be back again but St Martin/Sint Maarten was beckoning so we lifted the kedge anchor, stowed the dinghy and at 1600 headed off to the northwest.
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| English Harbour, Antigua |
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