Short trip to Guadeloupe

Sailing to Guadeloupe was nice and quick, with no big waves and average sailing speed of 7,8 knots. On Thursday Jana, Grega and captain went hiking up Deshaies river and I did some snorkeling. On Friday we rented a car and did a tour through Guadelope.

First we visited a Cacao museum. Cacao trees grow in beautiful garden.

We saw the whole process of making chocolate - from fermenting the cacao beans...

... to frying and grinding them, and were also given some recipes to make a chocolate. The best part of course was sampling the locally made sorts of chocolate.

After stopping at some smaller waterfalls and eating a conch stew in St.Francois, we drove to south east point of the island. It was much wilder than when we were there with Laura, Nejc and Mitja in December, the waves were big and loud.

Next day we sailed to Cousteau wildlife sanctiary, Pigeon Island, to snorkel. It was a perfect day for it, visibility was awesome, and turtles seemed to pose for the photos.

On Sunday we headed back to Antigua. But in the morning, while captain and Jana went on shore to do clearing out and bring some fresh baguettes, I went snorkeling once more. I discovered this pretty Yellow encrusting sponge.

Before we sailed away, we were boarded by French customs officers. It was routine thing, they were very nice and we were making jokes and laugh with them. So it was already 11.30 before we sailed off. Sailing back to Antigua was nice, we were afraid there would be too little wind, but forecast was fortunately a bit wrong this time. We reached Antigua before sunset.

To Barbuda and back

It's been busy two weeks! After picking Jana and Grega up in Jolly Harbour we did provisioning, then sailed to Deep Bay on Wednesday. Next day we sailed to Barbuda. 

We did some coconut "hunting" in Coco Bay.

From Low Bay we did a tour to Frigatebird sanctuary in mangroves in the lagoon and to the caves on the west side of the island. Our taxi driver Salomon took us to the birds.

There were Upside down jellyfish in the lagoon.

Although there were many chicks in the branches, some Frigate males still tried to attract females with their noises and big red pouches.

We visited both of the caves. It is entirely different world than at the south of the island.

There are some Indian paintings in the caves.

On Sunday we sailed back to Nonsuch Bay on Antigua. On the way we caught this Cero.

On Monday we sailed from Nonsuch to Falmouth Harbour. On Tuesday we snorkeled and visited Trappas in the evening for a nice dinner. We sailed of to Guadeloupe on Wednesday.

An uneventful week

Last Sunday we were watching Valentine's Regatta from our boat in Jolly Harbour, the boats were starting and finishing right to the west of the anchorage. It was a pretty sight, all the boats on a bright sunny afternoon.

On Monday we did some shopping, and on Tuesday we moved to Falmouth Harbour. After some snorkeling at Bishop's reef we sailed to Nonsuch bay on Wednesday. We did the laundry on Thursday, we htoroughly cleaned the boat on Friday, and did a few little boat projects every day.

There was still enough time for lazying, book reading and my favorite activity besides snorkeling - bird watching. I was happy to see that all three ospreys were still there, I even think to have seen the fourth one. They were flying over the Bird island, scanning the sea for fish (I actually didn't see any of them dive for the fish) and a female came hovering very low above our boat for couple of moments, so that I could see it was a female, since it wore a "neckless" - females have darker colored feathers around the neck. Now that I recognize their cry I rarely miss one, I even saw some in Jolly Harbour at the beginning of the week, and one had a fish in his claws.

But what I was looking at in the photo was a pair of American Oystercatchers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Oystercatcher ), that landed on Bird island while making a lot of noise. I've been seeing Oystercatchers in Antigua and Guadeloupe before, but they are very shy and I was not able to take any photos. But they are still fun to watch.

 The biggest project we had was maintenance of two winches on Saturday. First was the Harken 53. We've done it before, so we were not overly nervous.

First the compete thing came apart, until only the base was left ...

... and several hundreds of parts.

The parts got a thorough wash in the oil ...

... and were then greased with special winch grease.

We did peeked into the manual occasionally to get the parts assembled in the  right way, and it all came together well.

And in the end there was a final test.

Then we did it all again on a smaller Harken 40.

We sailed back to Jolly Harbour on Sunday, after watching the RORC Caribbean 600 Regatta boats pass by to the east, we were very impressed with the Phaedo catamaran that sailed by with 21 knots of speed! 

We caught a Barracuda on the way. We were happy, since our new lure caught it and captain hates to invest in fishing gear that doesn't do it's job.

 We changed our plans and stopped in Fryers bay for the night, it is only two bays south from Jolly, but the water is nicer there for bathing. Today we moved to "our" marker at the entrance to Jolly Harbour and we are picking some of our friends later in the afternoon. And then the new adventure begins.