Leaving Antigua

We are on Guadeloupe in Deshaies at the moment and a lot has happened since we left Jolly Harbor. We've been without internet and phone for about week now, so there's some catching up to be done :-) 

We left Antigua on Friday, the 2nd of March. All of the time till then we've spent in Jolly Harbor and did a lot of work on the boat - we finished installing mast steps (stopnice na jambor), all together 24 of them, 5 were already in place. We managed to install forward looking sonar and connect the probe with the instrument. That was really a hard work, as the probe is in front of the keel (access through front cabin floor) and instrument is of course by the steering wheel at the back of the boat. Installing the cable required to saw through part of the bed in front cabin, pushing the cable behind the front bathroom, behind the kitchen cabinets and sinks, we had to remove the stove to get the cables behind both of the refrigerators, then behind left back bathroom and through left back cabin. Hope it was worth it! Next we repaired buzzer on the engine switch that died a while ago. And then there was a biggest project - to remove the instruments from mast, remount them on custom plate, together with the new wind instrument - the old one started dying on us already on Atlantic. Then we connected all the instruments together and voila - now we can tell the autopilot to sail also on wind angle not just on the course. Captain did a great work on all the project and i tried to be as useful assistant as i could.

With all these projects there was not very much time to do anything else - we did swim occasionally and eat of course :-) And some animals came to keep us company.

One day two pelicans came to rest on our boat. I was happy to see them so close, and captain was worried they will make mess. And they did :-)

 

This was a biggest surprise - on three evenings couple of dolphins came right into the anchorage and up to our boat. Of course by the time we got the camera out, they were already far. The dolphin is the datk spot between the boats on the photo.

 

The terns were sitting on the channel marker every day, although our boat was only 10 meters away. They got used to us, i guess. They only got a little bit upset when we were working with drills (bor masina) and riveter (pistola za kovice) and made some more noise than usual.

This one actually didn't came to visit,  we caught it on our way back from Nevis a while ago. It was a big barracuda, unfortunately we were not able to get it off the hook alive (it had biiiiiig teeth) and we couldn't eat it because of the chance of ciguatera poisoning. We asked the local fishermen and they confirmed that barracudas of over 1m in size were not safe to eat and they don't eat them either. What a pity, what a beautiful fish!