The other night I invited the Royal Naval Tot club of Antigua and Barbuda to address the Salty Dawg Rally group and share a bit of history of this very unique club.   Following that introduction at one of our earlier events, last night we were invited to join them for an introductory “tot” of rum.

This group gets together every night of the year to pay tribute to a since abandoned practice of issuing a ration of rum to every sailor in the British Navy.
Here’s what they have to say about the club on their website…

To signal the nominal end of the working day at 1800 hours local time by a gathering of like-minded individuals who make up the membership.

To carry on the revered tradition, sadly ended in 1970, by consuming a half gill of the nearest equivalent to the rum which was issued to the Royal Navy (i.e. Pusser’s Blue Label).

To confirm daily allegiance to and/or respect for the Crown by proposing the Loyal Toast to Her Majesty, the Queen.

To provide Royal Navy warships with marine based leisure activities and organise entertainment for the crew in the Nelson’s Dockyard area.

To promote and foster friendship and goodwill in the English Harbour and Falmouth Harbour areas through entertainment and social services.”

I had first learned of the group last April when I attended one of their ceremonies and wrote about it in this post.

I was so intrigued by what I experienced, I thought it would be fun to share it with the rally fleet Dawgs.

So, last evening we assembled at 18:00 in Nelson’s Dockyard,  a perfect place to reflect on the history of Antigua, the British Navy and the Queen.

I introduced the Dawgs to the Tot Club.   That’s me in the white shirt and tan shorts. After the introductions were done, Tot Club leadership officiated and instructed us to “cleanse our palates” with a bit of water.
We raised our glasses, toasts were made and a final tribute to the Queen.  Then, everyone, well, nearly everyone, downed the “measure” of rum in a single gulp followed by a swallow of water to kill the burn. It was a very unique event and I think that the Dawgs really enjoyed themselves.  And, I can’t think of a spot where this custom would be more appropriate than in such a historic spot, in the midst of Nelson’s dockyard, the home of the British Navy here in the Caribbean in the age of sail.

I’d very much like to join the club myself and hope to do so in the coming months.  I won’t go into what’s involved in this except to say that it involves  drinking a lot of “tots” and a good deal of memorization, two activities that don’t seem to be compatible.

However, I do enjoy the history of the area and hey, they have an awesome burgee.  And all that is motivation enough for me to stay the course.  I hope my liver holds out.

Now, there’s a title that I never thought I’d be using in a post.  Let me explain.

As I prepared for the Salty Dawg Fleet to visit Antigua I reached out to many contacts here in Antigua about marina visits, special events and shopping.  Along the way I spoke with Ann-Marie Martin, the commissioner of parks.  She oversees, along with other areas here in Antigua, Nelson’s Dockyard, historic home to the British Navy,  now restored as a very popular spot for visiting yachts to tie up for a visit.

I had been trying to connect with her for several days since I arrived with Pandora but had not had any luck in setting up a time for us to meet.  Finally, after stopping at her office yesterday I received an e-mail from her apologizing for not being available as she was “really busy preparing for the Royal Visit”.  Royal visit, you say?   Indeed.

It seems that Prince Charles is arriving in Antigua today and will tour, among other sites, Barbuda and Dominica, two nearby islands that were devastated by last summer’s hurricanes.   I have been told by those in the know, that he will be touring the dockyard on Sunday afternoon.  We don’t know the exact time but it would be fun to catch a glimpse, that’s for sure.  I guess you’ll have to stay tuned to learn more.

The last few days since arriving have been really hectic for me, as well as those preparing for Charles.  However, things have come together nicely and we have already had a number of fun events and there’s something going on nearly every day through next Thursday, Thanksgiving, when Brenda and I fly back to the US for the holidays.

Our “official” venue has been the lawn at the Admiral’s Inn overlooking English Harbor and we have had wonderful evenings there already.  Here’s a group shot from last evening’s party.   It’s a pretty good group in spite of only half of the fleet having arrived.  Mike, from the Antigua and Barbuda Royal Navy Tot Club spoke to the group and has invited all of us to participate in one of their ceremonies, held tonight in the dockyard.  Stay tuned for more on that in a future post.   The Admiral’s Inn is in a lovely setting set among the ruins of an old sail loft.  Boats loaded with sails from warships were brought into this slip and the sails were raised up through a hole in the floor of the sail loft that once was on top of the columns.There are lovely views everywhere. 
I particularly enjoyed this small water garden. There is much to do in the Dockyard and that’s where Prince Charles will be visiting on Sunday afternoon.  Brenda and I are going to try and catch a glimpse.  Fortunately, we have some pretty well connected friends so perhaps we will get lucky.   “Charles, want to stop for a beer aboard Pandora?”

So, back in Falmouth harbor, Pandora’s on the dock for one more night before we move out to anchor with the rest of the fleet.  It will be nice to out in the breeze and surely way less expensive than slip and electric.    Here’s Pandora, front and center.Also, sharing space at the dock is a school of Tarpon, each over 4′ long.  I can only imagine what it costs to keep a boat like this 220′ sloop Anatta, launched in Holland in 2011, on the dock.  The scale of these yachts is amazing.   How big can a boom get?  Or the electric bill for this.   I was told by the marina manager that some boats use over $1,000 of electric every day.  Imagine?  I can hardly wait to get my bill.   I got fuel and learned that the largest order recently was for 100,00o liters.  It took several days to pump it all aboard. Up on the top deck are two… Elevators?  Popcorn makers?  Can’t figure it out. We saw this very unusual yacht, Adastra in St Martin last winter.  Looks like a Starship to me.  We met the captain and he’s agreed to let me come aboard later in the week to take some photos.  She’s a remarkable yacht built to very high standards. It seems that she will soon be available for charter so they are here for the charter show and he said that the owner is open to some publicity.  Will be interesting, that’s for sure.  So, here we are in Antigua and so is Prince Charles.  I guess I’d better wrap this up so I can get ready for a “royal sighting”.

Yes, that would surely be a bit different, wouldn’t it?

 

It’s Wednesday morning here in Falmouth Antigua and more boats from the Salty Dawg Rally are arriving each day.  We have lots of special events planned including some happy hour gatherings and our “famous” arrival dinner scheduled for Monday.   It will be held at Boom, part of the Admiral’s Inn right in the historic Nelson’s Dockyard.    It’s a remarkable venue and co-owners Astrid and her brother Paul have gone out of their way to make us feel right at home. You can’t beat this spot, with a front row seat to the history of the British Navy in Lord Nelson’s time.  And, a view of historic ruins of the dockyard’s sail loft.  I challenge you to find a more iconic vista anywhere else in the Caribbean.  English harbor and the Dockyard from nearby Shirley Heights. Yes, it’s been a lot of work pulling all of this together on such short notice but things have come together very nicely.  We won’t have the entire fleet with us on Monday when we have our arrival dinner but I feel pretty good that the bulk of the boats will be able to make it.

A number of the Dawgs have opted to tie up at the Antigua Yacht Club Marina in Falmouth, along with Pandora. Here’s the view that greeted me today while I sat in the cockpit with my morning coffee. Speaking of coffee, I’m out of decaf so watch out.  Caffeine and me?  Not a great combination.    However with all that’s going on, perhaps I’ll need a bit of a boost to keep up.

All I can say is it’s great to be here  with all the other Dawgs.  Let the fun begin!

It’s been a busy few days since arriving here in Antigua first thing Sunday morning, after a 1,500+ mile run that took 9 days and 23 hours, not to put too fine a point on it.    It’s actually pretty amazing that we made it in ten days, my original prediction, considering that there was very , very light winds and plenty of weather “obstacles” conspiring to keep us from following the rum line.

My able crew, Chris and Jim. hard at work along the way.  I won’t bore you with the  “we motored this many hours, burned # gallons of fuel and sailed X % of they way except to say that navigating the fickle winds, currents and squalls, perhaps 20 or more of them actually.   However, I think it’s  sufficient to say that we had just about every weather option you can think of from flat calm with no wind to sporty sailing on a really close reach and had to go way east to get around a persistent ridge that plagued the fleet for days on end.

“No Bob, we really want to know.  Just how many hours did you motor?”  Ok, if you insist and because you asked so nicely…   We motored 129 hours and were underway for a total of 239 hours.  I guess that  means that we sailed just over half of the way.

In miles of sailing, it was more than that as we spent plenty of hours moving along at 8-9 kts, and sometime with top speeds in the low double digits.  Perhaps that explains how we were only the second boat to arrive here in Falmouth.  And, on that subject, that the boat that got here a few hours earlier may have left the day before we did.  Pandora’s a pretty fast boat.

As we left Hampton, along with many others in the 76 boat fleet, there was a full moon.  It was beautiful.As the entire fleet was headed to a specific way point south of the Gulf Stream,  to try and get on the right side of a large eddy, we were in sight of a number of boats for several days.  It was pretty impressive to see magnificent clouds over the boats in the distance.   As there were A LOT of squalls and plenty of rainbows.  And some terrific sunrises.  I always took the 04:00 to 08:00 watch, my favorite.  Well, my favorite after I get over the shock of being awakened with “Bob, it’s 04:00.  You’re on…”At the halfway point we found ourselves 500 miles from anything in every direction and days went by without us seeing any other boat.  However, this 60’+ Swan came up out of the distance and passed us doing 10+kts, but not all that fast as Pandora herself was moving along in the 9kt range.
Pretty good turn of speed for Pandora as she is a lot smaller than that Swan.  And with a crew of 6 and a bunch of hotshot sailors, they passed by less than a boat length, just to say HI and, I expect to say “mine is bigger than yours”.  And on they went..As the sun rose on Sunday morning, spirits were high as we watched the lush green mountains of Antigua  rise before us. So, here we are, on the dock for the first night all by ourselves.  Did I mention that we had just about the fastest time to Falmouth?  Thought so…  Not a lot of boats were here in the marina when we arrived, but this 220′ sailboat was nearby.  Huge.  I heard that they had a party catered at one of the local spots and spent plenty including a cool $1,000 on a special cheese platter.  The owner of the dining establishment told me that they also drank lots of expensive wine and the bill?  Well, let’s just say “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”  Nope, not Pandora’s crew.  Less than half of the rally fleet has arrived and many more should arrive over the next few days as for many it’s been a very slow passage.   Nearly 20 of the 55 boats that are headed to Antigua had to divert to Bermuda to get more fuel so that they could make it all the way in the light winds and not run out of fuel. 

The passage offered a wide variety of wind and sailing/motoring options and I have covered a lot of this in prior posts.   We did a bit of fishing along the way and landed one Mahi Mahi and I won’t talk about other various “ones that got away” including one that somehow broke the heavy line clean off of winch we had it tied to and took the entire rig “hook, line and sinker”, as the say.  That put an end to our fishing    Well, here we are in Antigua and since arriving I have been swamped with details for all the events as we have something planned just about every other day between now an Thanksgiving, including our first “official Happy Hour” tonight.

I’ll be reporting breathlessly, of course, on all the goings on over the next week or so before Brenda and I fly out to visit our kids and the christening of our granddaughter Tori the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

For now, all I can say is thank goodness that the local folks here in Antigua have been so supportive to help pull all of this together.   In particular, the Antigua Yacht Club has “lent” us Nesie, the office manager, to help with all the details including assembling some lovely pink “skipper bags” with all sorts of nifty stuff, even a sample of Antigua rum, to help the Dawgs enjoy their visit to Antigua just a little bit better. Oh yeah, Brenda arrives tomorrow. I CAN NOT WAIT!!!!

Well, there you have it.  We made it.  Back to Antigua for the second season this year.  I love Antigua.

Well that’s it, with nearly 1,500 miles under Pandora’s keel, we are nearly to Antigua with less than 150 miles to go until we enter Falmouth Harbor, probably around dawn on Sunday.

It’s surely been a challenging trip a good deal of “variety” including just about everything from flat calms to days with a squall every few hours to make me wonder if it will ever end.

Over the last ten days I have to admit that I found myself wondering if it’s worth it, being away from Brenda for so long and the day after day of playing “cat and mouse” with ridges and winds that seem to be doing everything possible to keep us from making our way south.

Back when I was first thinking of a direct run to Antigua, I estimated that it would take perhaps ten days to make the 1,500 mile trip.  Of course, it’s never a straight line but one way or the other, I made the assumption that we’d be able to cover about 150 miles in the “right direction”, on average, each day.  That we now expect to complete the trip in almost exactly ten days, is fairly remarkable.

I know that there were days when we made way less than 150 miles toward our goal and some when we did better than that, but overall, my ten day assumption turned out to be about right.   Of course, we “aren’t there until we are there”, however I now  expect that we will arrive in Falmouth tomorrow, Sunday, shortly before dawn which will make out total run a few hours less than ten days from Hampton.

So, will I do this trip again?  Probably, but I am  not sure if I’ll take Pandora home to CT this summer and may instead opt to leave her in Grenada or Trinidad, below the hurricane belt.  I have been hesitant to leave her for an extended period because there was always so much to do to bring her into proper trim for extended ocean sailing but most of those projects are now done so perhaps it’s time to just do the short run south from Antigua to her “summer home” after the northbound rally leaves in May.

Brenda and I had planned to do an extended trip to Europe every other year or so after I retired but with so much work on Pandora as well as the time it takes to get her from here to there, our travel plans have been delayed.  Yes, there were other reasons beyond “the boat” but all of this “schlepping” has clearly gotten in the way.  We really want to do a trip this fall so perhaps this year it does make sense to not do the long run north.

One thing for sure though, if we do decide to bring Pandora north this spring and back down next fall, I won’t be stopping in Hampton as it just adds too much time to the trip.  And to add insult to injury, it just takes forever and a day to get enough easting from Hampton to reach the trade winds.  It just seems to me that it would be easier to leave from CT and head south, passing near Bermuda on our way south and just skip all the “in and out” of going to Hampton which in itself makes the total run to Antigua about 200 miles longer than a direct run.

Besides, not stopping in Hampton would cut my time away from Brenda by about half as I wouldn’t be hanging out in Hampton for a week or two prior to heading south.

However, as Chris Parker would say, “that’s a long way out and things could change” but that’s what I am thinking now.  Well, for at least today.
All that aside, what I’m really thinking of is that I can’t wait to see Brenda and go out for a nice dinner so we can catch up as I haven’t seen her since I slipped the lines in CT, some three weeks ago.

Did I mention that she’s flying in on Wednesday afternoon?

Thought so.  And I’m really, really excited.

For sure, Pandora will be all cleaned up, in cruising trim and ready for Brenda.