Antigua

We were glad to get to Antigua. Our original plan was to go first to St. John’s, the island’s capital, but with repairs to make we decided to go to Jolly Harbour instead - no park fees, as there are in English and Falmouth Harbours, and a chandlery right on site. And, as we found out, a well-stocked grocery store, access to wi-fi through one of the restaurants (Melini’s) and almost all the other necessities a cruiser looks for. The only disadvantage we could see was the lack of a bank which dealt with international accounts. For that we had to take the bus to St. John’s.

The bus was inexpensive, and it’s route took us out of the gated holiday/retirement community that is Jolly Harbour. Travelling along the roads to St. John’s we saw much that reminded us of the Jamaica we grew up in - goats crossing the road in search of food, a man riding a donkey loaded with sacks, cattle and a few horses grazing in a common. Street vendors sold fruit and drinks by the road, and school children dressed in uniform walked to school or took the bus with us. We passed local restaurants and small shops, and on a particularly bad section of the road a man holding a sign complaining about the state of the road standing beside various suspension parts he claimed had fallen off his car. Someone on the bus always had something to say about that.

St. John’s was also reminiscent of things we had seen before. We walked from the bus station along streets with open drains, the sidewalks either non-existent, very narrow or occupied by street vendors. Loud music blared from competing sound systems as vendors hawked CDs from their booths, and pedestrians walked along the roads with the cars and crossed streets wherever they could find a gap in the traffic. As we got closer to the harbour and the tourist area sidewalks became the norm, and the shopping area and boardwalk by the harbour looked like another world.

Back in Jolly Harbour it did not take long to find out that there was sailboat racing here as well. Our first weekend we saw sails jockeying in the harbour, and then the fleet came out and through the anchorage, using local knowledge to go where we cruisers would not think to. We had a close up look at a few of the boats as the raced past us - a great vantage point to take pictures from, and there were some beautiful boats racing. We were invited to join just before we left - though in fact we could have joined in at any time if we had not been busy doing things like sewing chafe patches on the sails and sewing our dodger windows back in. A month at sea is hard on a boat.

We spent a lot of our time working on the boat and on trying yet again to get our radio fixed, but not all of it. We had time to meet some of the interesting people who came in to anchor, and to visit with people we had met before in our travels and saw again. We benefited from the cruisers’ network - the passing on of knowledge about places we were going to or had been - and shared information with others if it seemed useful to them. If some of the local boats were annoyingly thoughtless as they roared through the channel by the anchorage, others showed themselves to be friendly and helpful; the marina staff certainly were, even though we were not in the marina itself.

If we had stayed in Jolly Harbour or travelled only by boat we would probably have left with a different impression of the island and its people. But because we took the bus, went into local shops and spent time listening to local radio we began to see a different side of Antigua. The feeling in some stores that we did not really belong there was uncomfortable, but even more uncomfortable was having a woman leave one of the buses we were on because she felt there were too many white people on it. Then one day as we listened to a local call in program we heard a caller saying that Jamaicans were unwelcome; we heard one Gwen Davies, a respected teacher, say that black people were out of order to vote with Syrians and white people against the Labour Party; another day we were in the supermarket, where cashiers rarely looked at or spoke to visitors, when a customer began ranting at a man in the line behind her, saying he should go back to Jamaica and all foreigners should go back where they came from. The irony was that the man was an Antiguan - he just happened to be wearing a “Jamaica - no problem” t’shirt!

So when we came to the end of our time in Antigua and the immigration official on duty at the time seemed to feel that we should go to the trouble and expense of leaving and coming back if we wanted to stay longer, we decided that it was time to go. We put the boat into sailing condition and said goodbye to Antigua with few regrets. Next stop: Nevis, a very different experience.