Green Island

We sailed to Green Island on the 21st of April. Green Island is a small private island almost surrounded by reefs with a couple of beautiful little anchorages. It is the sort of spot everyone dreams of, a few little sandy beaches with a back drop of tropical plants of all colours that look just like they had been specially planted, yet you know they weren’t, lizards running over the sand and hiding in the plants, a sea, warm and blue, with the odd turtle popping its head up to say hello. We could have stayed here a long time and it will be one spot I know will draw us back.

Tabasco arrived shortly after us and the children enjoyed getting to know one another again. The following day the other yachts in the anchorage moved on and for four days it is just the two of us. We decided to get both the kayaks out as this is an ideal place to let the children go kayaking on their own. We spent lots of time snorkelling over the reef; there are some beautiful corals and wonderful, colourful fish. On Wednesday evening we all got together on the beach for a beach Barbeque. The children had great fun playing with fire (supervised of course) and toasting marshmallows. On Thursday we all went over to Tabasco for August’s 6th birthday party, Lena had prepared a feast of sweet delights, consumed surprisingly quickly by all the children and helped by the adults. Our generator had been playing up that morning, Chris had changed the oil again and serviced it but it was showing low oil presser so we thought it was best if we leave the following day go somewhere more populated in case of problems.

Next morning the Generator was still being erratic and Chris had another look at it. We decided if we could run the generator long enough to give us the battery power to get out of the anchorage and passed the reef we could then sail all the way to Jolly Harbour and even anchor under sail if necessary. Everything was ready, off we go, or not, for some unknown reason the solenoid on the windlass had decided to stop working! We had a lot of chain out and I didn’t fancy bringing it up by hand. Chris shorted-out the solenoid, which meant Chris sitting down in the storage hold next to the junction box while Susie shouted out when to lift the anchor, while I took the helm.

The sailing became slower as we moved to the more sheltered side of Antigua. A few miles from Jolly Harbour we decided to try to motor-sail and the generator behaved its self all the way. We motored into Jolly Harbour as night fell with the main sail still up just in case and managed to pick up a buoy in the half-light, which saved messing about with the windlass.

Chris wanted to get to the Onan dealer in St. Maarten’s to sort out the generator as soon as possible. The winds were good for Monday and Tuesday, but then dropping to nothing for quite a few days so we knew we had to get going. We did a big shop on Saturday and decided to stick around on Sunday just in case ‘Norn’ managed to make it around, so we could all say our goodbyes. We ended up saying goodbye over the internet, but hope to meet them in the Azores. We left Antigua at 2am to sail to St Maarten.