The Leeward Islands - March 2004

Antigua

Antigua was the first of the Leeward Islands we visited. One assumes the decision as to where to draw the line between which islands are windward and which leeward must have been somewhat arbitrary as the Lesser Antillean chain processes in a smooth North-North-Westerly curl from Grenada to the Virgin Islands.

Yet Antigua felt immediately different. Partly because it is lower than neighbouring Guadeloupe and the climate was noticeably drier and the vegetation less lush, with bare soil between cactus plants - something you would not see a little further South. Partly it is because Antigua is a former English colony and Nelson's Dockyard in English Harbour is a wonderfully well-preserved and restored example of a British naval dockyard going back to the mid 17th century. The customs officials were boorish and tedious too - again, as with many former British colonies, they have inherited the zest for paperwork but lost the punctiliousness and precision.

In Antigua we were joined by our friends Peter and Katherine Camp, who had met us when we were in Barbados, and were to join us for a couple of weeks. We soon had them a long way away from London life, mentally as well as physically, when after a long walk up to the heights over looking English Harbour (with wonderful views) we came back to the dinghy in the dark and promptly fouled the outboard's propeller on a long stern line put out by another boat. Usually it is a simple matter to unwrap such a rope and one just hopes that the propeller is not damaged. But this time try as we might we could not; as bad luck would have it the rope was fiendishly snarled. So there we were twenty yards from shore, safe but stuck, firmly 'anchored' to this line and too far out to swim back to our boat. Luckily Katherine came to our rescue, revealing she had a bikini on underneath her trousers and blouse, and swam ashore to ask the night watchman there to lend us a knife. The sight of her swimming back minutes later with the moonlight glinting off the knife in her teeth was unforgettable and the job was done in seconds. I can't imagine though what a shock the night watchman got when this strange woman came dripping out of the sea in the night asking to borrow a knife!

Leaving English Harbour we went round to Jolly Harbour on Antigua's West coast. This is a huge modern marina so we chose not to go in (except by dinghy) and anchored instead in the approaches which avoided all the concrete and was much more pleasant. From there we set off the next day for St. Kitts, which we reached after a fine 9 hour run during which we had dolphins round the boat and Peter and Katherine were lucky enough to sight our first whale.

Nevis and St. Kitts

Nevis, and it's sister island St. Kitts, which make up the nation of St. Kitts and Nevis is one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean and all the more charming for that, with a slower pace of life and easy-going people. We hired a car (with the baldest tyres I have ever seen) and toured the island, visiting abandoned sugar cane plantations, the exposed Atlantic shore and a wonderful botanic garden.

From Nevis it is but a short hop to St. Kitts - more properly St Christopher's and where the adjective is Kittitian, strangely enough, rather than the more obvious Kittian. We spent our first day here in Ballast Bay which gave us some lovely swimming but strong winds  were predicted the next day so we headed for the marina at Basseterre. Much as I hate marinas (and this was our first marina stop in the Caribbean) this proved a good call for the winds did indeed pipe up and though we could have anchored off it would have been bouncy and going to and fro in the dinghy would have been wet. At least in a marina you can hop on and off the boat at any time and we were just by the town centre.

Here we hired another car, and when I exclaimed to the Leonie "look, decent treads, not like the car we had in Nevis" the agent puffed his chest up and said "Man, you is in St. Kitts now!". I was amused to see when we hired another car a couple of days later that the treads were once again bald...

The Kittitians have been wonderfully clever and the island appears almost totally unspoiled. But it is shaped a bit like tadpole with a little tail of a peninsula going off to the South East and when you go down there you discover the Four Seasons/Marriot/Hilton mob have moved in in strength; the coastline is solid with hotels, the pavements solid with pasty American joggers and the roads teeming with taxis and staff buses. But a mile away, you'd never know.

Our plan had been to go with the Camps to Statia, Saba and then drop them at St. Martin. But the bad weather meant having to stay in St. Kitts for longer than planned and we lost that opportunity. Neither Statia nor Saba have good anchorages in strong swells and the marina was constantly swept by squalls and gusts. A neighbouring boat set out for St. Barts but came back some hours later reporting that they had been able to make no progress at all against 25 foot waves and 40 knot winds. So it was good we stayed where we were.

St. Kitts boasts one of the finest forts in the islands - the wonderfully named Brimstone fort, which is a large sprawling edifice on an impregnable hill. It has been beautifully restored and makes a fascinating visit as well as giving commanding views all around. Kitts also has some lovely rainforest and we pushed our way up in our hired off-roader as far as we could before scrambling along what is known as the 'military trail' for some way. Sadly the trails here are badly marked (probably to encourage you to take a guide) but the rainforest was as magic as ever.

Statia

We had pretty much run out of things to do on St. Kitts by the time Peter and Katherine had to catch their hopper flights out and the very morning they left the winds had slackened and so we cast off from the marina, leaving the island about the same time they flew out.

It was a short 20 mile run to Statia but once we were out in the open sea the winds picked up again and the swell got up - never to the point of it being really uncomfortable but enough to make us glad we had not gone before.

Statia, together with Saba and Sint Maarten is part of the Netherlands Antilles (which also includes the ABC islands off Venezuela) and again contrasted dramatically with the other islands we had visited. This is a colony and, though a tiny one, benefits from the support of the Dutch government, so the harbour is sound, the roads good and everything works... and the people are wonderfully friendly too.

The best part of Statia, for us, is The Quill. This is a volcanic crater, the peak of which - Mazinga, is about 1,950 feet above sea level. The locals have made wonderful and well-marked trails which let you climb right up to the rim - which is 1,000 feet across. You can then traverse around it to Mazinga or descend 500 feet through rainforest to the crater bottom. We set out early, at 7am, to avoid the heat of the day and reached the rim around 10am. It was a great hike with the vegetation changing dramatically from sea level to the ridge. As we walked up we noticed small stones kept tumbling down the slope in front of us and soon realised these were soldier crabs. They are a kind of hermit crab and as you approach they tuck themselves up in their shells for safety. This means they lose their grip and then often go bouncing down the slopes. We saw hundreds of them right from the bottom of the Quill to the ridge itself. Whether they are normally so abundant or whether it was their breeding season (they have to get to the shore to for that) I don't know. I was also lucky to see several red bellied racers, a snake (harmless), which is unique to Statia and Saba, and grows to about a metre long - though never much thicker than your thumb.

Saba

Saba lies some 30 miles from Statia and is little visited by yachts. Partly because it is slightly off the beaten track and partly because there are no good anchorages. Until the 1950s goods were unloaded from boats and manhandled ashore by men waist deep in water and then carried up hundreds of precipitous steps. Saba is a truly volcanic island - a classic cone rising from the sea with steep sides and very little shelter.

I had been inspired to visit Saba after reading Patrick Leigh-Fermor's wonderful book 'The Traveller's Tree', which Katherine had given me, and which tells of his travels through the Caribbean in the 1950s. Saba is quite unlike the other islands as there were never any plantations there, so the population is a real mix of Scots, Dutch, slave descendants and others - they are a dogged and resolute people. Told by 'experts' that it would be impossible to build roads, a Saba man took a correspondence course in road building and now there are fine (and scary) roads carved out of the hillsides linking the two villages of Bottom (which lies in a fertile valley inside the former crater) and Windwardside, where the houses used to be held by chains to the ground lest they blew away in strong winds.

This would also be a great place to hike and they have some excellent trails but Leonie had hurt her ankle climbing Statia's Quill so Billy, a local taxi driver, gave us a lovely tour pointing out the local sights from an iguana basking by the roadside to cashew nut, breadfruit trees and the beautifully kept villages.

Today there is a tiny harbour (with a very steep approach road). Yachts can't put in there but very strong moorings have been laid on the lee shore so, although it was a bit bouncy and a long bumpy ride round to the dock, the boat was safe and secure. Saba is noted for its sea life and we found a reef shark soon took up station in the shade under our boat. In the heads (bathrooms) on our boat we have big hatches which open up on the inside of the hulls and it was a strange sitting on the loo watching this 6' shark hovering just a couple of feet away.

Sint Maarten/Saint Martin

From Saba we headed for Sint Maarten, which lies slightly East of North but we were just able to fetch under sail after a five hour run.

This curious island has for many years been shared amicably between the Dutch and the French. The Dutch have the South part and the French the North. There is no physical boundary between but, if you clear in on the Dutch side, you can't take your boat to the French side without clearing out and clearing in there, though you can dinghy across.

The Dutch side has always been a freeport, like most of the Dutch islands, and this is where most of the yachts go to take advantage of the huge inland lagoon and the vast array of services for yachts. For we are now in the land of the rich, where vast mega-yachts well over 100 feet in length line up in their dozens, each needing armies of mechanics, electronics experts, riggers, plumbers, fitters and provisioning to keep them going - and you can get it all here.

We took advantage of this to feed our boat's endless craving for spare parts and replacement gizmos and spent a week in the lagoon intermittently relaxing and working on the boat. The contrast between the Dutch and French sides was fascinating. The Dutch side is cheap, scrappy and often dirty but bustling, frenzied and busy. The French side is quieter, cleaner, more elegant and of course has far superior food, both in the supermarkets and restaurants. So being anchored in the lagoon between the two was pretty handy!

Anguilla

It is a mere 20 miles across the Anguilla channel but once again you are in a different world. Anguilla is one of the few remaining British colonies. The story is that we casually lumped them with St. Kitts and Nevis at the time of independence and they didn't like it at all. After much protesting, the eviction by Anguillans of a Kittitian police force and a hilariously botched 'invasion' by British troops, Anguilla finally got its 'dependence' back and has been thinking about what to do with it ever since.

For Anguilla is a bit like Saba in that it never had the climate to do much in the way of growing sugar. It is low lying, so it is dry, but is now building a market for itself with tourism and the offshore financial industry.

We were keen to visit Anguilla because it is unspoiled and has beautiful beaches. Also we had been told to look up Gordon Andrews who has lived there for some years - which makes him a 'belonger'. Both Anguilla and Gordon were as lovely as we had been told and he showed us a bit of the island and made us feel very welcome. The only downside of Anguilla for us was the fiendishly complicated and expensive clearing-in system, where you have to pay not just to clear in but also to visit any other bays than Road Bay, the main arrival anchorage. They have cunningly priced their cruising permits to expire at midnight, so to spend a night in lovely Crocus Bay would mean us buying two permits plus a mooring fee, totalling nearly $100US per night - more than you'd pay to go to a marina. This is actually quite smart of the Anguillans as many of the large yachts and people on charter holidays don't mind shelling out. I watched several people being relieved of $100 dollars or so while I was waiting in line with the predictable forms. It's also a way of stopping the anchorages becoming too crowded but, for people living permanently on a boat, it is not really viable. Never mind, Road Bay is a lovely anchorage in its own right with a beautiful beach and the most amazing powdery sand, so we lay there at anchor very happily for our short stay.