Jolly Harbour Antigua

The Jolly Harbour anchorage

We arrived at Jolly Harbour at 1020 on Saturday 30 November and after a pretty speedy and efficient check-in moved out to the anchorage just outside the harbour.  We didn’t have plans to remain near Jolly Harbour for more than a couple of days and so took the opportunity to replenish our stocks at the excellent Epicurian supermarket; the food shopping in English Harbour is nothing like as good.  As we returned to the marina to try to find a bar with reasonable wifi, we spotted Ruby Tuesday with Lionel Sole and his crew Mads and Lotte Poulson aboard.  It was good to catch up with them and to hear about their journey south from Bermuda and to find out about their plans for the next few weeks.  Elise had had flown home from Bermuda for a visit but would be rejoining Lionel shortly in Guadeloupe, Ruby Tuesday's next stop.

Castaways

To our surprise, the search for wi-fi in the marina bar was pretty fruitless, so the following day we tried again. But 1 December was a Sunday and most places around the marina were closed (a further surprise) so we headed a little further afield to Castaways.  Castaways is a 10 minute walk from the marina dinghy dock, a pretty organised beach bar on a lovely white sand beach with great views out to the islands west of Antigua. Great views of the sunsets too according to their advertising blurb.  We were a bit more successful with wifi access here and managed to clear most of the backlog of emails (primarily junk) but the connection was in no way fast enough to upload the blog.  So we sat and relaxed, drank our beers and enjoyed the view.  Not exactly a hardship!

The Greeks would call this and ‘organised’ beach

Valley Church Bay – Castaways behind us.  Top left and bottom: views looking south.  Top right: looking north towards the entrance to Jolly Harbour

Back aboard BV we saw a large aluminium yacht pull into the anchorage just behind us.  It was Pleione with David and Roberta Hobbs on board whom we had met at Gary and Greta’s party in Norfolk.  Zwailer had arrived a little earlier in the day and we had already invited Richard and Jane over for sundowners and to compare passage notes, so we widened the invite.

Welcome to the Caribbean.  Sundowners on BV with a spectacular sunset which was far better in real life.  Left to right: Jane Kingsnorth (Zwailer), Roberta and David Hobbs (Pleione), Nicky and Richard Kingsnorth (Zwailer)

We had a lovely evening with the other 2 crews, accompanied by a spectacular Caribbean sunset.  However, fun evenings make early starts the next day somewhat emotional, but we were keen to move on to English Harbour and with the trade winds building we felt that getting going for the beat to windward was the right move.

Jolly Harbour, Antigua