Antigua, West Indies March 2014                     Vessel: Dufor 400 Provider: Dream Yacht Charter Journey:: 60nm, 7 days What was meant to last for 4 weeks came to an end just after 1 week. Jan got called home after a shortfall in the office. So the big journey was dumped. Antigua is just beautiful. English Harbour’s “Paparazi”-Restaurant is great in both, general site and food. Likewise, just on the other side, Cathrines Café - which moved to Falmoth Harbour and is called “Cathrines Plage”. The food is excellent, the service good and the owners lovely. They are much nicer than their crew actually is. The latter one is as posh as the place is and as such a bit too much self focused. But as said the owners are quite hearty and give one a very warm welcome. Little Bay (which we visited for the first time) is located slightly north of Jolly Harbour and offers a nice first splash. Quite busy during the day time as the “party-cats” come and go… but the beach is just nice (not as nice as the one in Barbuda though). If falls quite after 4pm. So how is sailing with a little grinder who is not even 12month old? The boat itself is cool for him as there are a lot of things to get explored and “tasted”. Mum and dad are close so that is all good to him. Playing at the beach and swimming in the nice water is of “plasir” aswell. Sailing: we figured that trips around 3hrs are the best to him. So jumping from bay to bay is easy for him – crossing the open sea like we have done in the past might have turned our as a bit of legwork. So our next trip will be rather in the med-sea where there the distances are shorter and the sea less rough. Non the less, if the flight is not too much of stress (we planned for a stop-over in NY to give Carl a little time to stretch his legs and we paid up for business class) the Caribbean is within reach easily. “Our” yacht, the Dufor: • Inside it was great. Arrangement very well thought through. Interior gives a light but still cozy atmosphere. The boat seems to be bigger than it actually was given the layout. • Outside: the standard winches were way to small to lift a dinghy. And likewise the main sail was not easy to lift. However biggest hassle was to do this exercise single handed. The winches for the main sheet are next to the companion. From here there is no view towards the sail and as such the battened mainsheet is not to if its messed up with the lazy-jack lines or not. Likewise the same hassle applies if one is trying to set a reef. One is fully depended on a second person – this makes life complicated – unnecessarily. • Incident: as almost always something goes wrong while at sea. We anchored at Falmouth Harbour, switched out the engine and it didn’t go quite. There was this “brrrrrrrr” noice. Quickly we noticed water in the bildge. After shutting down the breaker for the fresh water pump it turned out that one fresh water tank emptied itself out somehow into the boat. The noise came from the compresor for the hot water which wasn’t able to keep up the preasure since there was no water left. After calling the base, the manager came around and found out that one hose did slip off from the hotwater tank and as such everything rinsed into the bildge. Medium cool... and quite surprising since the boat looked very well kept elsewise! As one might have figured, this page is usually less of a self expression but rather meant to give the curious “to be” sailor a good clue about the area we have viseted and in parts explored. Now, with our little on the level of experiences changed a bit and thus we give you a bit of a glimps inside our little family in order to display how sailing with such a fragile grinder is... One more thing: photo quality might be so-so. Reason for that is that we used our iPhones for capturing the moment and then: we were simply more busy and didin’t spend that much time for the extra mile to take a nice shoot.