Being here in Falmouth Harbour in Antigua for a few days has allowed us to look around at some of the other boats at anchor, and one thing has really hit home - all the really BIG yachts (both sailing and motor) are British registered!! I thought that we were in a recession! Not a shred of evidence of that being the case out here. One hundred feet, two hundred feet long palaces (Gin and otherwise) gleaming like new pins grace the quays with their uniformed crews bustling about making the boats even shinier for their owners' arrival. No speck of grime to be seen anywhere. Very much like Pandora. We had a cleaning and maintenance day today, and now the stainless steel shines, the decks are spotless and the topsides are washed down so that the salt crystals have been banished.
We are planning to stay here for a couple more days, and then if the swell shifts from a Northerly to an Easterly we will check out and head off to either Montserrat or Nevis, we haven't quite decided which. Yesterday we had about three hours of walking around the area, culminating with a climb up to Shirley Heights, recommended in all the tourist guides as 'the place to be on a Sunday evening' where we drank some beers listening to the steel band play as the sun went down below the brilliant red horizon. We decided to take a taxi back down which was just as well. The water taxi had stopped running and the distance by road was much longer than we had anticipated. We would have been very late back otherwise.