English Harbour, Antigua

Saturday we started fairly early after a good night’s rest and read our Patrick O’Brien’s for a while before heading a shore to a much brighter sunny morning. We were quickly at English Harbour and had to attend to the formalities before we could start our sight seeing, first clearing customs and immigration and then getting some cash. We were mesmerised as soon as we walked into Nelson’s dockyard it is a beautiful oasis of the historic architecture of the Lesser Antilles’ brought all the more to light by the fact that we have both been obsessively read Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series of novels set in that era around the British navy which made it feel as if you had stepped into the story. Although some of the structures such as the Sail Loft have not survived the enormous pillars which it stands upon have. The buildings have been put to use as a museum, a couple of pubs, a restaurant, cafes, gift shops, bakery etc and there is a lovely village feel to the place. Nelson apparently was less enamoured when he was here called it a hole of a place after he fell out with the local merchants for his enforcement of the navigation Act which prevented their lucrative trade with the US, at that time an enemy, not to mention the epidemic Yellow fever and mosquitoes which killed large numbers of those stationed there.


Kevin admiring the Classic Yachts


The Copper and Lumber Store - now a hotel and pub

However as much as we wanted to explore first we had to visit the customs and immigration where the usual form filling took about 40 minutes though was fairly straight forward. Next we went to get cash from the bank, the ATM being out of order I had to queue, not realising that with a bank holiday the day before, the ATMs had been out of order for 2 weeks following a run on the bank caused by a fraud case against one of the directors which meant our simple cash withdrawal took an hour. However, the others in the queue were mostly local and it was quite fun listening to their local gossiping and cries of exclamation when they saw the queue very well managed by the very nice security guard. It was now well past lunch time and we decided to have lunch at the cafe housed in the old galley building and over looking the capstan used for careening ships (cleaning the hulls by leaning them over) plus two beautiful classic yachts presumably here for the world famous Classic Regatta in April. We were so enamoured with the place we decided to shift to the anchorage as soon as we had had our lunch and take our time with our sightseeing over the next couple of days.

We therefore went back to Falmouth harbour picked up our anchor and motored round the headland into English harbour finally finding a spot in the crowded anchorage infront of Freeman’s beach where we spent a pleasant evening onboard.