LinoCat

The admiral Lani and skipper Michael steering towards the Jolly harbour anchorage. This is the anchorage from a distance. Nice water in front of green hills. Lani getting tired :-) Time for the skippers and admirals nap!

Some people have asked what happened to the Tuna. Well, he gave nice steaks yesterday evening and this lunch he participated in a tomato-tuna salad with toast bread and tonight he was again our guest star in good indian CURRY! YUMMYYY So we still expect him to be with us (partly) tomorrow with another rounds of steak. Maybe this time on the grill insetad of the pan. This is our anchorage at the moment. The beach is right behind to the right and there are almost no waves since it is also protected. So Lani had fun altough she managed to fell in the saltwater in a way that she was completely submerged. Well, she did not even cry. What a tough cookie! This is the beach and one of the boats in the back is LinoCat. The dark part in the water is sea grass. Lani enjoying playing in the sand. One of the classic boats which participated in the regatta. Athena, the worlds biggest private owned gaff rigged schooner. 90m long she belongs to James (Jim) Clark, Founder of Netscape and Silicon Graphi...

This the flag of Antigua. In Jim´s Locker, a local bookstore they sell nice flags, which are not pöainted but stitched from different colored clothes. Looks nice! English harbour still has preserved many of the old buildings and around Nelsons dockyard these can be seen. It is by the way THE Lord Nelson which is the famous admiral of the UK. It is nice that these buildings are kept in good shape. In Nelsons dockyard you can also find immigration, customs and port authorities. Clearing in was not a problem at all. The guys from "Northern Star" wer ejust checking out in front of me. I mentioned this huge motorboat yesterday. The customs guy asked: is these a motor boat? And the guy answered: "I think so" :-) When Lani saw the "Northern Star" she said it was a ferry :-)

The Northern Star, a german built Lürssen yacht is just in Antigua. In german you can read a nice abstract: http://www.luerssen.de/presspics/Pressebericht_15.pdf The other Megayachts here i might cover the next days. By the way, the charter for this one is only 600.000USD per week.

WOW what a nice welcome. All racing yachts came out just greet us! Even a helicopter! Well, not exactly, there is the Antigua race week going on and we saw some of them pretty close. First we checked out English harbour but that was pretty full. Now we are just a few miles west in Falmouth harbour and acnhored near St. Annes point. So after checking the WiFi possibilities the next thing to do is customs, immagration and port authorities. Have you checked the tuna pictures which we added in the last post?

We woke up at 06.15 and decided to have breakfast at the anchorage. So at around 7 we brought the anchor up and set sail to Antigua. The wind grib files said the wind should be around 20 knots in the beginning and then slow down a bit. So we started with a reef in the mainsail and did around 7.5 knots of speed over ground. At around 09:00 i took the reef out and we are now udner full sails doing 7 knots since the wind already eased to aroun 15 knots but with a convienent 90 degrees angle. The waved are around 1.5 to 2m and are coming from a 45 degree angle to the main wind direction of the last days. So far conditions are as they were predicted. It is now 09:02 local time and we have around 3.5hours to go (28miles). The sun is shining and so the solar panels are producing power but it is to bumpy to let the watermaker run. I am always afraid that it might suck in air and cause problems so i do not switch it on if it is to rough. We still have around 2x200liter of water in our tanks. Cu...

This is Deshaies when you start walking up to the botanical garden. It is only 1.5km but up hill and it took us roughly 30minutes to walk up. LinoCat is still anchored in the bay! GOOD :-) Lori parrots. They have a vending machine for food and the Loris just fly up to you and eat the food. Lani liked it a lot. The garden itself was very beautiful with plenty of flowers, waterfalls and other things to watch. Our mums would have enjoyed it here! These are little bananas. OUTCH Some goats. How many can you find on this picture ? ;-) They were not at all shy and then bit on your trouser, tshirt, even the handle of the camera. MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU YOUNG YEDI!!!