Passage to Antigua
Thursday 7th Dec 2023
We really enjoyed our stay in St Martin but it was time to move on. We have family and friends coming to visit in Antigua and so we were looking for a decent weather window to make the passage. Antigua is south-east from St Martin and a little less than 100 nm away. The forecast was for a brief lull in the trade winds, caused by a frontal system pushing south. After this it looked like stronger winter trades, what we think are referred to as the Christmas winds, would become more established.
After dinner on Wednesday we caught a few hours of sleep and then got up for a midnight departure. The dinghy was stored on the foredeck, we had some food / snacks prepared and we hoisted the main sail whilst still on the mooring. The conditions were calm and it was an easy departure. We can overlay the radar image with the chart on our plotter and we had pre-marked target waypoints as well as a couple of navigational hazards within Marigot Bay. It was actually super-easy to drop the mooring and head out to the north-east up the Anguilla channel. Once past the eastern point of St Martin we headed south east, passing to the north of St Barts and almost directly towards Antigua.
The winds were really light (< 5kts) and the seas were relatively calm. We got to see a beautiful moonrise and the sunrise. We mostly motor-sailed, but the winds gradually increased during the day and backed to the north-east, and shortly after lunchtime we turned off the engine and were able to sail the final four hours into Jolly Harbor. It was a pleasant and uneventful passage. Highlights included seeing several masked boobies that are quite rare (a threatened species) and we did some fishing. We actually hooked three fish, the first and third got off the hook, but the second we hauled in to the stern of the boat. This was a large barracuda with scary looking teeth. We didn’t want to keep it, so I grabbed some pliers to try and get the hook out without being bitten. As I attempted to do this, the fish wriggled and snapped the line and was gone, unfortunately with the hook still in his mouth.
The most challenging aspect of the journey was avoiding the lobster pot floats. As we noted on a previous blog, we had snagged a float during our approach to St Martin and we were worried about getting tangled up. Much of the ocean between St Martin and Antigua is > 1000 ft deep, but there are many areas, like underwater plateaus, where the depths are around 200 feet, and we were stunned to see lobster floats along the whole journey. Some of these were 40 nm from land. It was hard to spot them looking into the sun, so in the end we decided to navigate around the shallow areas and stick to the deeper water.
We arrived in Jolly Harbor just before sunset, dropped anchor and raised our quarantine flag. Tomorrow we will start the check-in process, which is likely to be long and tedious … in the finest traditions of British bureaucracy.
We are really excited to be here! We think we nailed the timing on this passage and possibly caught the last decent weather window before Tasha and Mac arrive on the 17th Dec. The cruising between islands from here on is more north-south and should be easier going and less dependent on specific weather conditions.
17 04.500 N, 61 53.860 W
Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment