I'm Here !!

Hi,

Very very quick update - I'll do a proper one with lots of pics and video in the New Year. We arrived in Antigua on Christmas morning. I happened to be on watch when the sun came up at about 6:00am and as the sky became slowly, slowly lighter we could just start to see the outline of land. We celebrated with cheese on toast, mince pies and tea. There were only 2 of us on watch when we sighted land so we gave the lads another hour in bed before getting them up with the news of landfall. Every one of them, to a man, lept out of their bunks rushed up on deck, saw the land and couldn't stop smiling for the next 2 hours. We got alongside in what is a very quaint harbour at around 10:00am, spent an hour "putting the boat to bed", and then walked all of 15 yards to a beach style bar. There was a champagne party on the dock organised by the locals at around midday and the atmosphere was incredible. I've got lots of pictures of a very happy crew, sitting together in the sun, on terra firma repeatedly talking about how good it felt to have arrived.

That was four days ago and since then we've been doing alot of chillin and partying. We're flying back to the UK tonight and we're all ready to go home now. In some ways it seems like a long time ago that we set off from Gibraltar but in other ways it seems like yesterday that I boarded the train at Victoria bound for Gatwick.

The passage from the Canaries took 17 days in all and I've loads to tell you but it will have to wait. We nearly decided to find a yacht that had been abandoned by a crew on the ARC race, we were going to claim salvage rights and sail it back to Antigua but in the end decided it would add too much time to our passage and there were too many unknowns about the yacht's sea worthiness, it's exact location and the whole business of salvage rights. We caught some Baracuda, we stopped the boat and swam in the middle of the Atlantic, we saw dolphins and whales and flying fish, we had some beautiful weather and some bad, we lost all communictions to the outside world for about 5 days because our satellite system stopped working (our other long range communications didn't work from the offset) and lots lots more.

Got to dash now. I've got my Yachtmaster exam the first week in January with three days at sea beforehand doing prep so I won't be able to do a proper update until the second week.

Happy New Year, hope you a good Christmas see you soon.