Location: English Harbor
We started off today at 12 am, hoisting our sails and aiming our bow towards Antigua. We broke into our watch teams, and I had my favorite watch, starting at 6 am, right in time to watch the sunrise and have a warm cup of coffee in hand. We merrily jumped right into a “mega BA (boat appreciation)” to clean Ocean Star to her full beauty. She is a breathtaking ship, but it always amuses me as we pull into new harbors and marinas the attention that Ocean Star receives. We always have onlookers pointing and waving, or even whole catamarans of tourists snapping photos of the ship as we glide by.
As the BA wound down, I took two lucky shipmates to go provisioning with me in the town of St. John. Surprisingly, the supermarket there was very similar to the mega grocery stores in the US, and for the first time this trip, we headed home with bags packed full of every single item on our shopping list! Normally, we run into shortages (the French islands seemed to be out of lettuce the whole time we were there), lack of selection (when the only meat available is pig snout), or just don’t carry the items we may be used to (sorry shipmates, marshmallow fluff just isn’t going to happen down here!). Provisioning in the Caribbean means being flexible and being able to change menus on a daily basis, but that doesn’t mean we go hungry or eat poorly. In fact, I think some of us eat better than we do at home with three well-rounded, fresh meals, hot and ready at the same time every day!
After lunch, we moved the ship to English Harbor in Antigua, once again to much fanfare and picture taking upon arrival. Shipmates spent the afternoon relaxing and exploring English Harbor, a cute area built upon the old English fort and dockyard of the 1800s. Tomorrow we plan to explore the historical sight more!