Exploring English Harbour

Here we are still in Antigua awaiting the arrival of parts to fix the staysail furling system. We decided to do some land exploring while we are in Antigua this time.

We wrote about our trips to St. Johns and Deep Bay with Holly and Joe and now we will fill you in about our time in the English Harbour area.

This area consists of two harbours, English and Falmouth, which are separated by a narrow peninsula of land. The village of English Harbour is situated at the land end of the peninsula and stretches from one harbour to the other. The Falmouth side of the village is where most of the businesses, like grocery store, laundry, restaurants, gas station etc., are situated. Along the road to English Harbour are a few restaurants and then on the English Harbour side is Nelson’s Dockyard.

We were anchored in English Harbour for the first few days – a harrowing experience at times. The inner harbour is quite calm. It was actually used as a ‘hurricane hole’ in the past. That is a place where it was relatively safe to anchor during a hurricane. However, the currents were variable and the boats turned every which way. Add to that the fact that some of the boats had the stern tied to shore, meaning they didn’t swing, and the anchorage was quite full, there were times when boats came very close to each other. We finally decided to leave when another boat anchored closer to us than we were comfortable with and Griff had to push it off a couple of times during the evening. We then moved to Falmouth Harbour and have been here a week now. The anchorage here is a little rolly, but there are not as many boats anchored here and the water is clear so we can swim off the boat.

The marinas in both harbours seem to cater to the larger yachts and there are some beautiful boats here – both sailing and motor, but they are humongous compared to our 49 footer.

Some of them are in excess of 200 feet.

One we were particularly interested to see was the Maltese Falcon. We had read about it in one of the sailing magazines. It is 289 ft. long with 25,791 sq. ft. of sail. The sails are trimmed to the wind by rotating the masts – no ropes or stays on the boat. If you would like to charter her here is the website http://www.charterworld.com/index.html?sub=yacht-charter&charter=sailing-yacht-maltese-falcon-1096 or you could just book a flight down and join us - maybe not as luxurious, but definitely cheaper. The Nelson Dockyard Marina was interesting. They have Mediterranean type docking. That is the boats dropped an anchor or picked up a mooring ball and then went stern to into the dock. What was interesting was for the longer boats they would drop their anchor at least a boat length away from their bow which meant the anchor was on the other side of the harbour from the marina and therefore the anchor chain stretched across the channel. We watched a couple of boats leave the marina and because other boats had docked after they had they we picking up anchor chains as they weighed their anchor. We saw one that had three chains laid across his chain. In addition to that hazard there are also still chains across the harbour from 200 years ago when they were used to moor boats.

Nelson’s Dockyard is exactly that. It is the dockyard built in 1725 and used by the English Navy as its main naval station. Admiral Horatio Nelson used this as his base for his excursions to the other Caribbean islands to claim them for England. After they emancipated their slaves, the English would attack slave ships from other countries, buy the slaves off the ships and then bring them to Antigua where they were apprenticed to craftsmen (for a wage) and later became master craftsmen themselves. Since 1951 most of the buildings in the dockyard have been restored and house various tourist related businesses. Here is a website if you would like more information on the dockyard http://www.paradise-islands.org/antigua-nelsons-dockyard.htm

Beside the dockyard there were also a number of fortifications built around the two harbours. There are numerous hiking trails in the area as part of the Nelson’s Dockyard National Park system. Because of these fortifications Antigua is one of the few islands in the Caribbean which remained in English hands for most of its history.

We did one walk from Fort Berkeley at the mouth of English Harbour across the sea end of the peninsula to Pigeon Beach in Falmouth Harbour – a distance of 1 mile, up and down a hill that is 300 feet in elevation. On the way we passed a Keane’s Battery, Middle Ground Barracks and Fort Cuyler. All had excellent views of the sea to the south and west of Antigua. You could see why they were situated where they were.

This is how we have been spending some of the time waiting for parts. The rest of the time has been spent with the usual boat maintenance stuff - polishing the stainless steel, swabbing the decks, etc. etc. We are looking forward to the arrival of the Perrys and sailing again.