Today was “Lay Day” at Antigua Sailing Week – which meant that most of us on the committee boat had a day off. As is now tradition (since this is the second year running that we’ve done it), I went with whomever in the crew that felt like joining to a destination in order to BBQ and relax aboard Zanshin. This year only Angela and Stephen were willing to join me and we loaded up the boat with foodstuffs and various alcoholic beverages and then Stephen skippered the boat along the shoreline of Antigua while I slaved at the winches (which reminds of the Dire Straits refrain about “get a blister on your thumb”). We had a nice sail, hitting 9.5 knots and not breaking the magical 10 knots sound barrier although I’m sure that Stephen really, really wanted to!
Deep Bay has a mostly submerged wreck in the middle but is otherwise a very pretty anchorage and I decided to revisit it some time in the future. I had gotten two bottles of Trivento sparkling wine and we celebrated successfully dropping the hook by opening a bottle, and unfortunately it had turned to cider – my first bad bottle of bubbly. But the backup bottle turned out to be still good and it quenched our thirst. We spent the day doing not much of anything except eating and drinking and repeating the process. After the burgers and hot dogs on the barbie we had to return home, in the dark. Again, just as during the previous year. The winds had died during the course of the afternoon and we ended up motoring the whole way back.
In all the eating and drinking I neglected to take pictures, the only ones I got were of Cades Reef, which lies quite far offshore and was certainly a big danger in the days before charts, chart plotters and GPS system and probably still gets bumped by the occasional unwary sailor.
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