The little harbour convoy

The little harbour convoy

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After our little beach party, we all wanted to move anchorage to find somewhere slightly flatter and to explore the BVIs some more. Some of our boat friends such as Danae and Vela had already spent quite some time in the BVIs and had recommended a spot called Little Harbour, come to think of it SV Zoe whom we met back in Portugal also recommended this anchorage to us, as we have a waypoint set form them.

So our little convoy set off to Little Harbour.

Despite our best efforts, Blue Note, Extress and Escapade all beat us to anchor, but no worries, there was plenty of space to anchor and tie to shore (though that wouldn’t be the case in the coming days).

Escapade put their drone up and got what might be one of our favorite shots from the whole trip so far…

The water in the BVIs is super clear, as you can see in the drone shot above. The one downside of Little Harbour is there is not much beach, and what beach there is is rather stoney.

To get around this while enjoying the cooling sea we created a floating SUP bar for 8!

Little did we know, this was the start of a magical 4 days anchored in Little Harbour, including joint meals switching between the 4 boats, and 3 day trips out all on 1 boat per day.

Outing number one took us to The Indians aboard Extress where we picked up a buoy and snorkeled around some lovely rocks. There wasn’t much wind so motored there and back again, so taking one boat really made sense!

The snorkeling here included a bit of a drop-off filled with sea life, and a cave that we could swim through.

The second outing took us to Salt Island to snorkel around a wreck. The weather for this sail wasn’t so nice, and we ended up sheltering down below aboard Escapade to hide from the rain for most of the journey to the moorings.

Once getting in the water at Salt Island we found a fairly strong current dragging us past the wreck (just about okay to swim against), but snorkeling on the wreck was quite a bit of effort and it was fairly deep.

The wreck is of the RMS Rhone, which was a Royal Mail Ship that sank in a hurricane in 1867. The size of the propeller on this wreck was rather insane.

Thirdly we headed to Road Town aboard Blue Note to visit the chandlery, throw out some trash, do some shopping, and fill up a bunch of water jerry cans. To make this easier, as we would be shopping, we actually took 3 dinghies with us!

We even managed to sail on the way back to the anchorage!

That night the dinner was Paella aboard Hannah Penn for 8, one of the largest paellas we have had to make ever, let alone on board Hannah with smaller hobs and pans. It was delicious, but we were also apparently enjoying ourselves too much to have any foody pictures.

Fun was had, and as the night continued many hats came out…

Escapade were the first boat to leave Little Harbour, setting sail once again to Saint Martin where they would be restocking, picking someone up from the airport, and also leaving for the crossing from.

Extress and Blue Note also headed off to other anchorages one by one over the coming days.

For us aboard Hannah, it’s boat job time…

  • Rig check
  • Fitting the water flow switch for the UV light
  • Adding string to mast steps
  • etc…

Some of this will be covered in future posts, and we can wrap this post up with the great turtle we saw with a shark sucker on its back in the bay.

We also went snorkeling and saw some Yellowhead Jawfish under the boat. These little fish swim backward into their holes in the sand when you approach, but also have these funny little faces.

Night sail to the BVIs

Night sail to the BVIs

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We restocked in Saint Martin before heading off, also doing laundry on land, collecting some full gas bottles and filling up jerry cans with water a couple of times. We were having so much “fun” doing these chores that we almost missed the bridge opening on the French side to let us leave the lagoon.

Just a few minutes before the bridge opened we made it into the queue, though it felt list a lot of rushing around on land, and we didn’t manage to tumble dry any of our laundry like we wanted to.

Not the most exciting of pictures, but with all of the rushing around we didn’t take many.

We headed out through the bridge at 5pm and anchored just outside so that we could start getting the boat ready including stowing the shopping, and eat some dinner before starting to sail.

The plan was to mostly run (straight downwind) all the way to the BVIs.

Ideally, we would do this with 2 headsails up, our genoa and larger ghoster, so before the sun set we also prepared the poles to keep these sails more stable and stop them from flapping around on the crossing.

There are no pictures of this amazing setup that night, however, there are some from the following morning but with the ghoster already lowered, and also some great shadow puppets on the sails from the middle of the night.

The sail itself was a breeze, setting off at around 7pm once away from the weird wind that was happening near the shore of Saint Martin we put both head sales up and wouldn’t need to adjust until after sunrise the following day.

Overnight we once again tried our 6 hour watch cycle which also worked a charm and we both managed to get plenty of sleep.

We headed straight to Spanish Town where would do all of the normal formalities checking into the country. and spent the night in the Spanish Town anchorage.

Just south of Spanish town there is a tourist attraction called “The Baths” which we were keen to explore.

The Baths are a popular tourist attraction and are known for their unique geological formations, including giant granite boulders that form natural tidal pools, tunnels, and grottoes. The area is also home to white sand beaches and crystal-clear waters, making it a popular destination for swimming, snorkeling, and exploring.

We moved Hannah slightly down the island, anchoring around what felts like hundreds (but actually just 10s) of catamarans and swam over to the beach from which you could enter the baths.

It was great fun exploring the boulders, walkways, sandy beaches and little pools.

Off we went again, to a gathering on a beach we had organized with some other boat freinds.

In total 5 boats and 10 people were in attendance on a beach on Peter Island (Hannah Penn, Danae, Blue Note, Extress, Escapade)

Once again, there was lots of catching up to do as some of us had not seen each other in some weeks, or even months.

We did a potluck, which is where each guest brings a dish of food to share with everyone. In a potluck, the dishes are usually not coordinated or pre-planned, so guests may bring anything from appetizers to desserts. The idea is to create a shared meal where everyone contributes something, and there is usually a lot of variety and abundance of food.

There was bread, dips, pate, cheese, a cheesy spinach bake, potatoes, tuna salad, pasta and more.

And of course, there was a fire!

Much more to come from the BVIs, and we are happy to report that the night of the fire was 20th April, and at the time of writing this it is the 2nd of May, so we are nearly caught up. We might even be setting off back across the Atlantic in as little as 3 days, but only the weather can determine that!

An engine service

An engine service

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Our last engine service was just before crossing the Atlantic east to west in Cape Verde. Part of any long crossing is making sure everything on board is in tip-top condition so you don’t get any surprises in the middle of an ocean, so, for us, it was time for another engine service.

For us, this meant doing the following on our Volvo Penta D2-40:

  • Changing the raw water impeller & filter
  • Changing the fuel pre-filter & filter
  • Changing the oil & oil filter
  • Changing the coolant (but we will leave that for another day)

The engine in Hannah is beneath the cockpit floor, which in some cases is quite convenient, but reaching some engine areas it can be a bit of a challenge, but most boats will have this for some part of their engine…

Although we picked up a new fuel pre-filter in Gibraltar, we didn’t fit in on our last service, so time to change the fuel pre-filter for the first time!

The fuel pre-filter is made up of multiple parts:

  • A metal mounting plate, which includes the connections for fuel in and out
  • A cartridge that contains the filter medium itself
  • A collection housing for various bits and water that are filtered out of the fuel
  • A metal base and bolt that holds all of these components together and also includes a small screw release valve to drain water from the bottom

First, we unscrewed the drain plug to drain the excess fuel from the filter into a little container.

Then we unscrewed the top bolt that held all of the components together, and they all came apart in a little tower.

The fuel that we drained from the collection housing was already quite full of bits. And the filter itself was also clogged up with all kinds of gross stuff.

The raw water intake can get all kinds of stuff coming in from the sea. On Hannah the through whole is not covered by any sort of mesh or filter, instead, the filter lives inside the engine bay. But this makes it very easy to regularly clean.

The filter had all kinds of bits of seaweed and plant life in it, probably not enough to impair water flow. The impeller also looked like it could do with a bit of a rest/replacement.

The oil change also went smoothly after heating the engine up and making use of our 12v oil pump.

Both the main fuel filter and oil filter were replaced, the air was removed from the fuel system using the small manual priming pump on the side of the engine, we started her up, and everything sounded great!

We will get back to sailing in the next post 😉

Island water world, West to East Seminar

Island water world, West to East Seminar

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Right after dropping off our quad bike, we headed across the lagoon by dinghy to Island water world (a chandlery) which was putting on a free seminar about a west-to-east Atlantic crossing, including free drinks and snacks, so naturally we had to attend.

We didn’t see Blue Note or Extress there, but did once again meet up with Saga who were anchored outside the lagoon on the Fench side.

The seminar was run by 2 people, one of which has done one of two crossings, but the other who has done 19 since 2003.

There were various approaches discussed by the 2 hosts and also the audience, but the one we are likely to follow (roughly already the plan) is to stick close to the Azores high so you have enough wind to sail, but you can always head further into the high to avoid any approaching low pressures.

One person in the audience promoted their option of motoring all the way through the high, this way you get lovely flat seas, but light winds and you’re going to be burning lots of fuel!! To motor 2400 miles on Hannah, we would estimate some fuel usage at around 1440 litres. This would mean something like 60 jerry cans on deck to be sure.

There were some useful sites discussed.

You can find all of the notes from the session on the Our Life At Sea website.

After the seminar, someone from Island Water World did their seemingly yearly liferaft demonstration where they set off some old and new liferafts to let people see what happens.

They lead with an old liferaft first, which experienced a similar set of malfunctions to the old liferaft that used to be aboard Hannah before we replaced it. These include tearing of the floor, tearing of some tubes, and lack of full inflation.

They also inflated a coastal liferaft. The most noticeable visible difference being the lack of an inflated roof/spray hood.

And last but not least an off-shore liferaft complete with a roof. (Obviously, there are other differences., but that’s for the technical specs of life raft manufacturers to tell you.

We had a quick beer with Saga after being in the sunshine for far too long, cruised back to the boats and started to think more about our upcoming crossing.

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The Adventures of Saint Martin

The Adventures of Saint Martin

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On recent islands, we hadn’t necessarily explored everything the islands had to offer. It’s been a long time since we rented a car, and we knew we wanted to explore Satin Martin more.

Our aim for this day was to go and see some parrots in the parrot park, we were prepared to walk the whole way, or maybe get a taxi, bus etc, but as we were walking to get some cash from an ATM we saw some quad bike rental!

For $100 USD for 24 hours, this seemed like a bargain, as it would easily get us to all of the parts of the island that we wanted to see. (Don’t worry parents, yes we had helmets and this is just a posed picture).

We lapped the whole island, but let’s take you through the journey step by step.

On the way to our parrot park, we found a lovely high viewpoint called Bell’s lookout point. Bell’s Lookout Point in Saint Martin is a popular attraction that offers stunning panoramic views of Philipsburg, the harbor, and the Caribbean Sea.

Heading further inland we made our way to Parotte Ville Bird Park, one of the main things we wanted to try and see on the island.

Neither of us has ever experienced something quite like the bird park. It’s kind of similar to a butterfly house, but bigger and for all kinds of parrots and parrot lookalikes.

You get a little cup of birdseed, and within moments of entering through the doors, you’ll have a bird perched on the edge of your cup nibbling away.

We took far too many pictures to show you them all, but here are some of our favorites…

We spent quite some time here and ate our packed lunch of tasty wraps here before continuing on a big loop of the island.

On our way we saw a rather beaten-down marina, we assume all broken due to the recent hurricane.

Looking it up online now, it’s called Oyster Pond Marina. It was severely damaged by Hurricane Irma in September 2017. The marina suffered extensive damage to its docks, facilities, and infrastructure, and many boats and yachts were destroyed or damaged.

Continuing around the island counter-clockwise, there were many other lovely protected and shallow coves with crystal clear waters.

One of the best ways to get a view of an island is often from the highest point. (The lowest points of places are also often great, but the lagoon ticks that box)

As far as we could tell the highest point was called Pic Paradis at 424 meters. We headed straight there and encountered an interesting sign on the way…

Lucky for us we are not in a car! So we continued on our all-terrain quad bike!!!!

It turns out a quad bike was perfect for this little trail and in around 5 minutes we had made it to the top.

Once again, some great views

From the top, you can see many neighboring islands including the Saba, St. Eustatius, and Anguilla.

Also, this very interesting round marina.

We were late for a drinks gathering with Blue Note, Extress, and some other Dutch boats, so sped back down the hill as the sun set meeting them at a bar, then dinghying to a br for some food, moving to another bar, and so on… Wanting to make the most of our quad bike hire we made sure to end our night early enough to get up and do things the following day.

In the morning we got a SubWay (a rare occurrence) and headed to a beach called Maho Beach. This is a popular tourist attraction due to its unique location, as planes taking off and landing at Princess Juliana International Airport fly low over the beach, providing a thrilling experience. (You have probably seen videos of people here)

Fortunately, before needing to return the quad bike, we were able to see a plane landing.

And also taking off…

Now, that’s plenty of adventure for one blog post, so let’s leave it here with us returning the quad bike mid-way through the day!

The lagoon of Saint Martin

The lagoon of Saint Martin

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Saint Martin is a beautiful island in the Caribbean that has gained notoriety as the filming location for the TV show Below Deck. The show has showcased the island’s stunning beaches, vibrant nightlife, and luxurious lifestyle, making it a popular destination for fans of the show.

We set off from St Kitts as the sun was setting, ready for a night sail to Saint Martin.

This was the first passage that we tried 6 hour watches for. We knew that we would only need 1 night sail, so being able to get a full 6 hours sleep each sounded quite nice. Adam stayed up until about 2am, with Kathryn keeping watch from 2am until 8am (ish). The passage was smooth sailing most of the way, but with a fair few gybes in the first hours.

We decided to stay on the French side as clearing into and out of the country here would be easy (a similar experience to other french islands with a computer and little paperwork), so on arrival we anchored on the outside of the french bridge into the lagoon, as we would need to wait until the evening or following day to enter through the bridge.

This is not the only bridge option… The first bridge is located in Marigot on the French side (our choice). The second bridge is a swing bridge that connects the Dutch side of the island to the French side. The third bridge is located near the airport on the Dutch side.

We dinghied to shore to check in, and have a little look aroud, and found outselves at a delicious pizza place! No bridge activity for us until the morning (this one only opens twice a day).

We made it through the bridge just fine, though it was very tight for a catamaran infront of us…

While contemplating where to anchor, the monohull 1 boat ahead of us decided to go north and imediatly grounded on the bottom. So rather than follow them into what seemed like shallower waters, we headed south.

The Navionics chart with sonar chart overlay is pretty good for the channel that should be dredged. On top of this, we added some fresh depth soundings to te Navionics “active captain” community overlay.

We anchored close to a small bit of land for a little bit of shelter in around 2-3m of water, so not much space under Hannah keel, but also we were back in a flat anchorage! (with the exception of the odd incosiderate motorboat that would drive through the lagoon too fast).

Next it was time for a long awaited boat job. Parts of the cabin top had some old holes form old rigging hardware etc that needed re filling. They were filled in the past but in the UV sun light whatever was in them had started degrading. We have had some fresh filler onboard for some time now to use, and this was the perfect oppourtunity.

We don’t have a comparible before pictures, but here you can seen the holes nicely filled with a gelcoat filler.

We havn’t seen Blue Note in quite some time (except for a brief chat in Antigua), but we once again found ourselves anchored next to them as they came through to the French side of the lagoon from the Dutch side.

We made a pasta bake, had some beers and a catchup as the sunset.

The following day we were also once again joined by Extress, all anchored in a little triangle.

More catching up, eating, drinking and chatting.

But the rest of Saint Martin will come in future posts!

Remember, you can subscribe to these posts by email! It’s not long until we start sailing in the Atlantic again heading back to Europe, and this time we will be trying to blog along the way!

St Kitts & Zora

St Kitts & Zora

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From Pinneys Beach where we experienced some very interesting weather, we headed all the way to St Kitts.

The weather still wasn’t perfect, but in this anchorage, we made another boat friend that we would spend the next few days on St Kitts with. Sailing Yacht Zora.

Interestingly while we had some severe westerly winds the night before, they had some severe easterly winds that had actually caused them to drag anchor out to sea a little. We can only assume that the small stormy system passed right in between St Kitts and St Nevis, causing the swirling wind on both islands.

In theory, there was a wreck in the anchorage to snorkel on, so we headed out together, but couldn’t locate it. But the snorkeling was still pretty good.

This seems as good a post as any to say that you can actually follow along with most of the nature stuff that we see on a site called iNaturalist on adams profile.

From this snorkel session, for example, we have all of these observations, and more, recorded…

Anyway, enough nerding out about fish…

We sailed with Zora to a new anchorage, had a walk around a town, did some shopping, and had some lunch. The anchorage was horribly rolley giving us memories of Montserrat, so we all agreed to head somewhere else to allow for a better nights sleep.

Here there was actually a wreck, but in the 2017 hurricane, it got washed up onto the shore.

One of the best parts of this snorkel session was the small group of Caribbean reef squid that seemed to like hanging out near the rudder of Hannah.

We had some sundowners aboard Zora where we also met 2 other boats and chatted about all of our very different travels through the Caribbean.

Wanting to move on to St Martin so that we could also move on to the BVIs we headed to another anchorage a few days later so that we could check out and set sail.

As often happens in the Caribbean there was a festival of some sort going on as we were walking through the town, which included some plank walking! Who can get the furthest?

The anchorage was even more rolly here than we had had in the previous week or so. So we decided to spend as much time on land as possible, using up our remaining XCD currency which we would no longer be needing in a nice restaurant. We made sure to have some leftovers to being back to Hannah for our night sail on to St Martin.

Here you can see how rolly the boat was, no chance of sleep on that.

St Nevis, the interesting weather

St Nevis, the interesting weather

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St Nevis was rather sunny on our arrival, just with a few very short passing bits of rain.

We moved up to Pinneys Beach where once again we took a mooring ball, though others were anchored around. As far as we could tell we had paid some sort of tax for the usage of the mooring bouys during our stay, so figured we may as well take advantage of that.

We had bought food ready for a BBQ in the evening, which we were planning on having on board, off th back of Hannha as we normally do. However, we looked at the weather, and it didn’t look good for dinner time, so we had the slightly mental idea of having the BBQ in the cockpit.

Now, ignore the smoke, it went rather well, and we are glad to have started it indoors as it poured down throughout the evening.

We moved the BBQ around a few times and eventually found the best space was on the starboard bench, where we could have enough wind catch the smoke and mostly blow it out of the cockpit.

Though throughly smoked, the BBQ was a delicious success.

The next day the rain continued. Infact, it almost rained all day, and was certainly cloudy all day.

But fresh water is valuable! so Kathryn got out and gave the deck a good scrub, one of the first time its been cleaned of salt water since St Lucia.

We spent the whole day on board, writing this a month later it’s hard to remember exactly what we did, but it probably involved food, films and relaxation… (and maybe some blog post writing)

We headed to bed, but at around midnight something didn’t feel right. It turned out that some localized weather was passing overhead, and this had actually turned out that our easterly wind (from the east) had changed into a strong westerly wind (from the west). This had meant that our totally protected anchorage where the beach and island was to the east of us, was now totally unprotected. And what had infact woken us up was the boat starting to go over ~1m waves that had built up out to sea as the wind had picked up to 30+ knots.

It was pitch black, so we have no good video of this, however to build up a picture, we were tied to a mooring bouy with the beach 50m behind us, crashing through 1m waves along with 10 other boats in the middle of the dark night in winds of 30+ knots. Water was spraying off each side of the bow, and the boat was properly moving up and down.

We were slightly worried that the mooring bouy might give way, and we could see people on other boats checking or adding lines, and this was the momment we would have much rather been at anchor rather than on a bouy!

After about an hour and a half the weather passed and the wind returned to light winds from the east. All a very odd occourance.

Our wind instruments actually gave up and just started reading 99, so we have no idea what the winds really got up to.

On the whole, odd, and not the sunny carribean we have gotten used to.

So lets end this rather grey and pictureless blog post here, and save more sunny weather for the next one!

Arrival in St Nevis

Arrival in St Nevis

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After leaving Montserrat in the morning we sailed in the direction of St Kitts and Nevis, which took us close to Redonda.

One of the most interesting aspects of Redonda is its large population of wild goats, which are believed to have been introduced to the island in the 19th century. These goats thrived on Redonda’s rugged terrain and became a valuable source of food for the island’s occasional visitors. However, in recent years, the goats have become an invasive species and have been damaging the island’s delicate ecosystem. They had eaten the island down to nothing and were starving due to too much breeding. In 2018, a team of conservationists worked to remove the goats from Redonda using helicopters to airlift them off the island. Today, Redonda is a nature reserve and bird sanctuary, attracting bird watchers, and nature enthusiasts from around the world. You can read more in this national geographic article.

It was nice to see an island that wasn’t populated with humans, from afar it looked incredibly deserted but as we got closer we saw all the birds circling above, a flock of brown boobies came to say hello and started flying around the boat and fishing very nearby, we think they like fishing around boats because flying fish jump out of the water and fly away to get out of the way of boats, the birds then easily swoop down and grab themselves dinner as we sail by.

We arrived on Nevis in Charles Town in time to get to the clearance building before they closed so after grabbing a mooring buoy we started to get ready to go to land, which included putting the engine on the dinghy. This daily task was made a little more interesting because we found there was a crab in there!

We think it must have been attached to the mooring buoy rope so when we took the dinghy forward to untangle the mess of rope on the mooring we’d chosen the little thing had fallen in. We returned him to the sea and set off for the town dock

Clearing into new counties can be quite funny, there are usually 3 or 4 rooms which you have to go to, this is normally the order

  1. Port health
  2. Immigration
  3. Custom
  4. Port Authority

Port health just make sure you’re not bringing in disease or animals etc. Then at Immigration, you give them all your boat details and they hand you back no less than 5 double-sided sheets of paper which the captain has to sign and date the front and back of, immigration keep some of this paperwork whilst you take other sheets to customs who stamp it and then tell you to take it back to immigration, then immigration say you can take yourself to port authority and pay the huge fees for all their paper usage 😉

With the exception of the French islands who have it down to a tee with their self-service computer stations and low physical paperwork needs, all the other islands really need to drag themselves into the present era and make the clearing in and out process a bit more user friendly.

A lot of islands have a system called SailClear which is supposed to make everything easier on arrival, you fill in the online forms and present your SailClear code on arrival, this does make it slightly quickly to input your details into their system but you still need to answer all the usual questions, like where have you come from and where are you going to and how long are you staying even though they are already written down!

Anyway back to St Kitts and Nevis!

After all that paperwork we went to find a snack and we came across a bakery that smelled delicious, they sold the biggest fresh iced cinnamon buns you’ve ever seen and although I’m not one to choose cinnamon usually, we bought one to share, it really was amazing, soft, moist, sweet and tasty! So good in fact we got another one the next day!

We went back to the boat after a stroll along the seafront and came up with a little plan for the next day, we had heard that Nevis had some hot springs, open 24/7 and free so definitely had to try that, we got to land as early as we could to go before the day got too hot.. no one wants a hot spring when your already sweating buckets!

It took about 15mins to walk there and we found a small covered pool with one local guy in already, normally many more hot pools would be open, in a little chain of pools with a stream connecting them but that day they were being pumped out and power washed so we got in the open one.

It was incredibly hot and took us a few minutes to actually get all the way in, as we were halfway down the steps, someone who clearly came here regularly, strode down the steps into the pool without hesitation, and at that point we didn’t want to look like numpties so got in quicker!

We got chatting to this guy, his name was Tee. He told us how to correctly say Nevis and we chatted about the two islands some history and also about traveling in general.

Back to the dock, and back to the boat!

Our next stop was a beach just slightly further north along the island where we would pick up a mooring bouy and enjoy some interesting weather, but let’s save that for next time!

Montserrat

Montserrat

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Antigua and Barbuda are joined so you can clear in on one and clear out on the other if you wish, which is what we were going to do but after finding out it would have been a 45min dinghy ride from the closest anchorage in Barbuda we decided that passing by Antigua on our 60mile crossing to Montserrat would be a better option!

So we headed the 30 miles downwind back to Antigua to check out and spend one more night in Antigua’s most popular anchorage, Jolly Harbour.

And the following day we set off for Montserrat.

We could see the island before we’d even left the bay so knew it wasn’t going to be rushed sail, it was fairly leisurely albeit a bit rolly, but on our way we actually overtook a sailing catamaran that was headed in the same direction. It’s not often that we are the ones catching up on and overtaking boats, particularly catamarans which should be faster than us downwind!

It’s a Saturday and clearing in on weekends can be very expensive, Montserrat has a few out-of-hours charges which we didn’t want to pay, so instead we stayed on/around the boat at anchor in Little bay anchorage (which is totally allowed as long as you don’t go to shore and keep your yellow Q flag up)
We swam and tried to relax in the most rolly anchorage of all time.

We were glad when Monday came around so we could go to shore, check in and explore.

We hiked in the morning to a lookout over the bay we were anchored in and sat for a while under the shade of a tree admiring the view and the few birds that graced our presence.

The day was getting to be unbearably hot so we decided not to take the trail any further and go back down to the town

On the sea front we saw a fun-looking dive shop/bar and found ourselves a nice cold drink whilst eating our packed lunch of ham, cheese, and everything wraps.

In Montserrat half the island is restricted due to volcanic activity which has destroyed a large city called Plymouth (yup spelt exactly the same as Plymouth back home!)

You’re not even allowed to sail around the south end of the island because of it too so travel was a bit restricted, instead after lunch we took a walk through the town, the local school was having a sports day on a playing field and we laughed whilst watching the egg and spoon race!

We wondered some more and got back to the sea a little way up the coast. The waves were smashing up against the rocks and sending spray high up in the air. I enjoyed the stillness of the land whilst watching the sea as this place has got to be the most uncomfortable anchorage we have ever spent more than one night in, even the barman at the dive shop asked how rolly the anchorage was!

Walking through the restaurants and bars we found one with an outdoor pool table so naturally we had to play, we spent as long as possible on land before going back to the rolly anchorage.

We played best of 3 games to start with and after winning two Adam said we’d better up it to 5! We were fairly evenly matched, even if the table, cues, and balls were a bit rubbishy, the red was our black 8 ball because we were missing two balls but had 2 8 balls instead so anyone looking on probably wondered what on earth we were doing!

So that we didn’t need to cook on the super rolly anchorage we bought a whole bunch of wings and cheesy fries from the bar to take away, quickly walked back to the dinghy and headed back to the boat for sunset.

Unfortunately for us our outboard engine decided to have some issues this evening and didn’t want to start to deliver us back to Hannah quickly, so we ende dup slowly rowing half of the way until the engine eventually decided to start.

The anchorage doesn’t look rolly from the shore, but you can see the breaking waves on the beach.

Montserrat was lovely, but we will be glad to put this anchroage behind us.