Stargazer - Still in Antigua, but heading to points South

Still in Antigua, but heading to points South

Stargazer

Andy & Jo

Wed 7 May 2025 13:49

Still in Antigua, but heading to points South.

Antigua Classics was a great event, slightly down on numbers, but the theory is that weather this year meant a few boats couldn’t make it. Nevertheless, it was a spectacular event – the mate and I really enjoy it and being ‘experienced’ dinghy wranglers we saw quite a lot of action and sadly, some idiocy, but we’ll leave that by and by…

The pictures below are random shots of the Classic Regatta albeit not taken by us as we had to stay in the harbour ready for duties.

Onward to other matters: it’s been super being back in Antigua and largely due to our involvement with the regatta and our membership of The Royal Naval Tot Club of Antigua and Barbuda we’ve felt very much at home. It’s quite something to be so far from home, but to have a network of like-minded (mostly!) people around. Many of whom you know would help you out if you needed it. Thanks Antigua, we’ll be back..!

So, what’s next for us? Well, we’ve been sitting in Falmouth Harbour waiting for a weather window to head to points south ready for Vicky to come out. If you’ve been paying attention (and I wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t) you’ll know that Vicky is my lovely sister in law – the mate’s sister. We’ve been lucky to have had a visit every year from Vicky and we’re very much looking forward to seeing her again. As I write this, the mate is completing her Boots order ready for Vicky to bring (for non UK readers, Boots is a chemist in the UK that specifically ‘targets’ women in their advertising, luring them into spending unnecessary money – oops the mate’s just dug me in the ribs (I have actually ‘saved’ more than I have spent! – Mate)).

Vicky will be arriving in Martinique (we love Martinique) on 20^th May and as it’s now 7^th May and Martinique is 170NM away; we don’t want any night sails this time if we can avoid it and we want to cross the channels between islands in daylight plus we want the weather to be reasonable – is that too much to ask? This time, maybe not. We might have a decent weather window on Friday morning, so the idea will be to head to Guadeloupe on Friday, Dominica on Saturday and Martinique on Sunday. Once in Martinique, we’ll anchor up for a few days and head into marina Z’Abricot on the 16^th where we can get Stargazer spick and span ready for Vicky’s visit. Once Vicky arrives, here’s what always happens – the sun comes out, the weather’s perfect and the mate is always happy – well done Vics!

Okey Dokie, I’ll leave you with the beautiful pictures of some really nice yachts at this year’s Antigua Classics. If you are interested, you can copy this link and it’ll take you to last year’s video review (only 4 mins long)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f85zI1CRzRM