Sunday Feb. 8th was a very stress free day because we had lots of time to get “crossing ready” before the 4 pm outbound bridge opening. We had everything stowed, prepared and organized by 1 pm so we pulled up anchor and headed to the lagoon fuel dock to fill our starboard water tank. Unfortunately it wasn’t open so no water for us!! We still have water so it’s not a big deal. We dropped anchor again, close to the bridge and waited for the opening. We were last in line to exit but quickly made it into Simpson Bay.
All the weather models were predicting a north east wind, under 15 knots and 1-1.5 m waves from north. This was a good prediction for our 90 nm trip south east to Antigua. We put up all three sails and tried to sail away (south east) from Sint Maarten. We quickly discovered that the island was shadowing all our lovely wind so we ended up adding a bit of engine power to the sails to keep our speed up. We finally got away from the island’s influence after an hour or so but found out that the wind truly wasn’t there. By dusk we decided to take all the sails down and just motor. We motored alongside St. Bart’s and we were seeing east/south east wind 😳! Not what we wanted at all! At around 10pm the wind started to come around to north east so we pulled out the jib and motor sailed until about 3 am. It was definitely a strange wind night that beared little resemblance to the predictions. We had almost straight south wind at one point and a lot of east/south east (which meant it was on our nose). Fortunately the waves and swell did match the forecast and they helped us move along from mostly behind. By sunrise (around 6 am, Feb. 9th) we were within 2 hours of Jolly Harbour, Antigua. We had a bit of rain as we closed in on our destination but at least the wind didn’t pick up with the rain. We were entering the harbour channel around 9:30am. Tired but super happy to be in nice, calm water.
We’d both read a few stories about clearing in at Jolly Harbour – it can be a challenge. The Customs and Immigration office was easy to find but there was no room on their dock for us to tie up (they want all vessels to be on their dock to clear in). We decided to anchor right beside their dock and as we were setting our anchor this woman on a trawler told us we couldn’t anchor in that spot (we found out later from a fellow cruiser that she had no authority to make us move and we should have stayed there – live and learn). So we pulled up anchor and moved beside one of the Jolly Harbour marina mooring fields. We lowered the dinghy and off Mark went to clear us in. There were already 4 dinghies and a sailboat ahead of Mark so he knew it was going to take awhile. As he waited, he watched the sailboat captain (who was German) get in trouble for his docking – not 100% sure what went down here but the captain seemed to have angered the customs folks – they made him do a “time out” and wait to clear in. Very strange. Anyhow Mark got through the process relatively unscathed and he was back on the boat by lunch.
We were both very tired so we decided to just stay the night anchored by the mooring fields. It was a good spot and it was very calm. We had some lunch and then went to take a nap. We weren’t there for more than 2 hours when 2 men in a dinghy came by and knocked on our hull. We believe they were from the marina – they told us we couldn’t anchor where we were but could pick up a mooring ball (for $35 US/night). We decided to leave and find another place to anchor. Just as we started to raise our anchor, the skies opened up and it poured!! We slowly made our way out of Jolly Harbour. Visibly was bad so we put on our range (steaming) light to be more visible in the heavy rain. Slowly we made our way the 4 nm north to Five Island Harbour. We are now securely anchored in this very calm and relatively empty bay. We’re very happy to be here even if our first encounter with Jolly Harbour was not very “jolly”. It now time to relax!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 