… drop the hook and rest awhile. That’s cruising easy style. But find a pretty anchorage with excellent supermarket nearby, clean water, a picture perfect view, plenty of space and free wifi on the boat, and it’s tempting to rest a long while. Or it would be, if the yen to go sailing purely for sailing’s sake didn’t come a-knocking.
Lovely and convenient though the anchorage outside Jolly Harbour is, after Paul and Kathryn left, it wasn’t long before we raised the hook and set out for pastures newer, if not bluer (Jolly Harbour waters are hard to beat, colour-wise). Unsettled weather led to a late start however, waiting for a series of squally deluges to pass though. The last leaving a complete and glorious rainbow as it passed.
The intention was to head north up the west coast of Antigua and go explore the north end of the island. A good enough excuse to simply get sailing again.
With cruising, however, intentions, are one thing; reality frequently something else. No sooner had we got into open water, set main and jib, settled on our course, Butterfly winging over a flat and shimmering sea, then a pretty little bay to starboard caught our attention, and after a quick consultation with Chris Doyle’s Guide to the Leewards, that used words like “charming” and spoke of sunken three-masted ships, we cut our sail short and turned in to Deep Bay. Ten minutes later we had dropped the hook between aforementioned wreck and shore, in a shoal and nicely sandy seabed.
Deep Bay isn’t as ethereally beautiful as the Jolly Harbour anchorage, but Doyle is right – it is perfectly charming. The wreck, a three-masted iron barque named the Andes, sunk in 1905, is still there for snorkelers to ogle; what looks like a carbuncled mast tip protruding above the sea marking its position in the centre of the bay. Though why the bay is named “Deep” is something of a mystery. We dropped anchor well back from the shore and with only 2 metres below the keel.
Deep Bay’s proximity to St John’s Harbour, the island capital, ensures daily visits from day excursion boats based in St John’s. Their pale, camera-toting cargo of tourists on a jolly jaunt to see the wreck. In they rock and after an hour or so, out they roll. Michael Jackson’s Thriller warbling tinnily over the waves and into the distance. Traditional Caribbean calypso is rarely heard these days.
If you fancy stretching boat-lardy legs, at the northern end of the bay, there’s a scrabbly climb to a fort embedded in the hillside. From the sea, it looks rather odd – like a model fashioned from the mud of the hill from which it emerges. From the sea is where I preferred to view it – forts being eye-fodder for blokes, I think, more than blokesses. (Well, this blokess, that is. I’m all forted out, not sharing Dick’s enthusiasm for such things.) Besides, I was pootling in the kayak, exploring the bay, when I spotted it, and wasn’t about to ruin a good pootle by climbing scrub and vertical scree dragging a paddle and kayak with me or otherwise.
The north and south shores of Deep bay are good pootling country. They boast some very pretty natural rock gardens, boulders tumbled one on top of the other, each formed from many thin layers of this and that. Like a haggle of stout wafer pastries after an enthusiastic bun fight.
From our anchored spot on the northern side of the bay, we had a ringside view of ships passing on the other side of a break in the rocky hillside. Rather like a landscaped TV screen. Here, you can see giant glittery cruise liners silently gliding out from St John’s on the other side of the hill,before disappearing behind the resumption of rocky outcrop once more.
A few hours after our settling in the bay, a very dapper monohull sailed in skilfully, but very slowly, very cautiously. Rather to our surprise, given how much room there was elsewhere, it came to a halt just aft of Butterfly’s port sugar scoop. We weren’t exactly thrilled by the proximity, but the rather forlorn expression of its skipper as he made to drop anchor indicated all was not well.
“No engine,” he said gloomily. “Over-heated.” The droop of his shoulders spoke bucketfuls about the situation’s PO quotient.
“Need help?” offered Dick. Though it was clear the wife on the helm and the guy himself were more than capable of anchoring without engine assistance.
For the rest of the day, and for much of the following morning, we saw very, very little of our unhappy neighbour. Both of us guessing exactly where he would be found – head buried deep in the engine compartment. It was much later, in the run up to lunch on the second day, when we saw our friend finally emerge in the cockpit; below him, just above the waterline, the throb and splutter of the boat’s engine exhaust heralding success at last.
It’s a rare and callous cruiser who couldn’t empathise with such a drama and happy triumph.
We were so pleased for him, we almost cheered.
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