Green Island in the morning
After coffee in the morning, we got the boat ready for sailing and headed out of the calm and protected waters off Green Island and sailed along the rugged east coast of Antigua towards Jolly Harbour. The conditions out at sea were a bit more than I’d expected, but it worked in our favour. I even risked the downwind sail through the inside of Cades Reef.
Jolly Harbour
Once again, I found shallow water far from shore off Jolly Harbour and ended up anchoring very far out by a large margin, but with only 3 feet under the keel I decided that I didn’t want to risk a ground. John and I dinghied in and went straight to the C&I offices. There were a number of people there, but all of them had various issues and I’d filled out the paperwork ahead of time and my clearance went without any problems and we were off in about 30 minutes. The others were all still there. One French couple had cleared in with 3 people but were attempting to clear out with only 2 and the missing crewmember had already flown away to Guadeloupe. This is not allowed, and they were trying to reach the crewmember by phone to get his departure details.
We stocked up on some supplies at Epicurean before returning to Zanshin.
Departing Antigua
We weighed anchor at about 16:00 and set off for Sint Maarten. The trip was only 90NM, but the wind was light and coming directly off the stern. Without the correct headsail, all I could do was pole out the mainsail and secure it with a preventer and then motor all 14 hours. This was at low RPM and our speed was about 6 knots, the apparent wind was only 4-5 knots so really wasn’t helping us along all that much.