Location: English Harbour, Antigua
This morning started off rather differently than normal waking up. I half expected to walk up the companionway and look out onto the ocean from our anchoring, but then I recalled that we had docked the day before. It was truly the most liberating feeling being able to just hop off the boat straight onto the dock; some people decided to kick their morning off with a run, and others walked around Nelson’s Dockyard in English Harbour. After breakfast, we walked with Tor on the Middle Ground Trail to Fort Berkeley, with Student Leadership books in hand, and had class looking from the fort over the ocean. Returning to the boat shortly thereafter, Captain Ben let us know that due to the drought in Antigua, we needed to switch docks in order to get water and electricity. So, we quickly took the dock lines off, started the engine, and moved a few boat lengths away to another dock. For the rest of the morning, we had boat appreciation, where we scrubbed Ocean Star’s cap rails and gave her a soapy deck wash, and we completed the task with the enticement of shore time as soon as we finished. Racing to find a hammock store (closed, unfortunately), we explored Nelson’s Dockyard and Falmouth Harbour and, more importantly, had our first “real” shower of the trip (don’t worry, we’ve been taking showers in the ocean, plus a freshwater rinse; the locals, however, claimed with disgusted faces, (that doesn’t count). As there were many defeated faces in regards to the lack of hammock purchases returning to the boat, when the man who owns the hammock store personally showed up at Ocean Star with hammocks in tow, the mood quickly turned around. After a delicious pasta bolognese, we left Ocean Star to go to the Galley Cafe to watch An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on climate change, for Oceanography class. Now, off to bed in our new hammocks! Goodnight & much love from Ocean Star!