Watersports Bonanza

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I have been far from communication this week, enjoying the best that Antigua and Barbuda has to offer on the water sports front. We left Nelson’s dockyard and motored through heavy swell to Green Island, a haven for wind and kite surfing on the west coast of Antigua. The next four days revolved around time in and on the water.

Every morning I took a group of 2 or 3 divers out to the exposed side of the island, where the waves crash over the reef and send white water spray up into the air. We were attempting to track down Elkhorn coral, a particular species of hard coral that is endangered and therefore populations are in need of careful study to monitor their disappearance or recovery in certain regions throughout the western Caribbean.

I also spent time out on the wind surfer attempting to progress from a 4m sail to a 6m sail and learning the hard way that using a harness when wind surfing is a lesson in balance and how best to slam into the water when you get it wrong…which I did a lot! When using the harness, you hook yourself onto the boom encircling the sail so when the sail falls forward or backwards, if you lose your footing, then you go with it. The tendency is to end up legs in the air and your waist being pulled hard downwards towards the water and the board.

We sailed from Antigua to Barbuda, a small island to the North West which is part of the same country as Antigua, but looks very different from the mountainous and volcanic islands that we have visited so far on the trip. Barbuda is what is called an accretionary prism - it is formed from sediment pushed up into a low pile as a result of the North American plate being pulled down underneath the Caribbean plate. The product is a low lying sandy strip of land populated by a few people and a lot of sea birds which wheel and dive over a spectacular 11mile beach on the western side of the island.

After a very short stop in Barbuda, we sailed for St. Barths last night and arrived early this morning having followed a spectacular full moon throughout the night, which lit our path through the water and provided fantastic lightshows in Ocean Star’s wake.

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