We never expected to go to Antigua, but here we are. The wind blew us here instead of Guadeloupe. We lefft Nevis on Thursday, April 24, and sailed to Montserrat, where we anchored for the night and left at dawn. When we rounded the northern tip of the island and set a southerly course for Guadeloupe, we found a south wind against us on the nose, with a southerly chop washing over the bow. We were looking at 30 miles of motoring against that wind and chop, or - look! There's another island over to our east! That would be a close reach, so let's do it! So we had a nice sail over to Antigua.
We just happened to be here during Race Week, with all the hustle and bustle of a major international regatta in town. We'll stay for a week, see the sights, and then escape to quieter anchorages in Guadeloupe.
We found this shop in St. John, the capitol of Antigua - imagine a shop named after our boat!

Our new instrument display is pictured here. That's probably the best thing we did for the boat in St. Martin, replacing our instru- ments. The old Datamarine instruments worked for 25 years, so we feel they gave good service. The depth sounder went out in Luperon, almost a year ago, and we've been using a Humminbird transom mount unit, lowered on an old boat hook into the water and hose- clamped to the monitor. It worked very well and now we know we have a good backup unit for the depth. Speed and distance would work sometimes, but not often.
We chose a Navman unit, which so far we've been pleased with. Our requirements are simple - we don't have a chart plotter, radar, or console GPS, so we didn't need to interface with other instruments and displays. We have been living without speed and distance now for a while, but now that we have it we really like to see. Our unit displays a log (like a trip meter), a total log distance, speed, average speed, battery voltage (!), depth, and .... it slices, dices and makes our life easier !
Our instrument display unit, with two thru-hull transducers, was about $440 at Island Water World. The comparable unit at Budget Marine was Raymarine, and just over $700. So we feel like we got a good deal and are having fun learning all the features of the display.

We stayed in St. Kitts a few extra days at the marina to fix our head. That's the toilet for land-lubbers out there. It had been increasingly difficult to pump, requiring extra pumps, and on the way over to St. Kitts it overflowed with sea water - not a good situation. We closed the thru-hulls and knew we'd be facing another go at the toilet. It's a Lavac, supposedly one of the more maintenance - free varieties of marine toilets. But ours has been a problem off and on, requiring taking apart every few months. Now we wish we had bought a whole extra pump in St. Martin, that will be on the list for purchase in Grenada!
Boy what a mess when we took it apart - calcified crud with sea salt, thankfully not too smelly, as it was all petrified. Lots of buckets of vinegar later, the crud came off and all parts looked much better. A new valve at one end - and put it back together.

Woops! Larry threw the bucket of old vinegar water with crud overboard - and the black plastic nut required to hold it all together. Here's the nut pictured with the scuba gear he needed to go diving after the part. Not a chance we'd find one of these nuts on the island.

We finally left St. Martin and started our way south. After 1,000 miles of upwind motorsailing from Miami in the last year, we turned the corner and are able to sail. We are still beating into the wind, but conditions are improving.
We sailed from St. Martin south to St. Eustatia, where we dropped our hook for the night and then kept going to St. Kitts. If you stop at Stasia and don't intend to go ashore, leave at first light or the park patrol will charge you for anchoring.
In St. Kitts we stayed in the Port Zante Marina, a real treasure at fifty cents a foot per night. We have not been to a marina in over a year and it felt good to treat ourselves to a dock and fresh water showers.
The people of St. Kitts are friendly and helpful. We explored the town of Basseterre, and took a bus up the coast to the restored fort of Brimstone Hill. That is well worth the excursion, we got an audio tour guide and learned all about the history of the extensive fort. The public bus leaves you a short 30 minute walk to the fort, but it's all uphill and a good hike.

We tackled some climbing here in St. Martin. For weeks now, we've been anchored in front of Mount Fortune, so we decided to try climbing it. Mountain goats scamper up and down the face of this rock every afternoon. We put on our hiking boots and jeans and made it to the top, for spectacular views of the Simpson Bay Lagoon, Marigot on the French side of St. Martin, and Simpson Bay on the Dutch side. At the top the wind really blows like a banshee.
We've been waiting out strong trade winds and high seas (25 + knots, with squalls coming through regularly, and 10 to 12 foot seas). We went into the boatyard to chat with our friend Lindsey and others.
Our instruments are now in and working (at least the depth; we'll have to wait until we're underway to test the speed and distance). We chose Navman instruments to replace our original Datamarine setup, which lasted over 20 years of good service. Of course we had to do some carpentry to make the display fit, and the wire stringing around the boat took days to finish, mostly grunt work of taking everything out of all of our lockers to access the hidden panels and painstakingly shove wire through small holes. But we are delighted to have a working depth sounder and a crisp display with large, easy to read numbers.