Barbuda!

After picking up Father and Brother Martin – Papa Keith and Will, we decided to go on a short jolly up to Barbuda, Antiguas little sister-population 1500.

We had heard it was nice but didn’t quite prepare us for it. I mean we are talking uninterrupted white sandy beaches 10k long – its picture postcard shit, the stuff in the adverts and probably what you envisage the Caribb to be like.

We anchored up on this beach on the west coast of the island and went ashore in awe. We got approached by what was probably 50% of the islands water taxi’s – this one bloke who called himself ‘king goldy locks’ which I thought was a bit odd. A ‘king’ for starter – bit pretentious and goldy locks!? Did he realise she was a small girl!? Considering the body hair and the stature of the man ‘king papa bear’ would have been more apt, anyway –tangent! After shaking him off we pumped up the 12’s just as the wind was dropping off- typically.

Notably as we were in our new found Shangri la, old papa Keith was more interested in plugging himself into the World Wide Web and we had to re-anchor closer to the only hotel for miles to get the free wi-fi – we did tell him his FB status could wait another couple of days!!
This provoked two feelings, one; (dads voice) whats the world coming to when one cannot abstain from emails and that Jazz for a week? I ask thee! Secondly; It was quite funny sitting in what some would possibly describe as paradise and still being able to get on the net!

The following day we hop-scotched the mine field of reefs around to Spanish point on the south west tip of the island and anchored up. Unfortunately not enough wind to KSurf, as we said though your not so bothered when considering where we were.
We had a mooch about on shore, and I nipped into a bush to take a wee (bare with me) looked up and about 2 foot from my grid was a little humming bird! this thing could not have been larger than my thumb. Later on I donned the old David Bailey hat, armed with the telephoto.

Later on we donned our Ray Mears / hunter gatherer chapeaux (I know- a lot of hypothetical donning!) in the pursuit of some lobsters on the reef, something the Island is famous for. Now these things are wily little coruscations and fast as hell. Jimmy located one hidden under a reef and I lay in sub aqua ambush, fishing hook in hand. Eventually I admitted defeat, however, just before I gave up, I looked over the reef to see not a few meters away from me the biggest ass Baracuda, it must have been a metre long- and these things have teeth like veloceraptors (honest!) needless to say I kept a beady eye on that one. By this time I felt like-if not a little soggy I had my David Attenborough hat on as well.
Meanwhile, further up the reef in a stinking current Jimmy had located a myriad (I love that word- frankly the number we found doesn’t warrent it but anyway) of these Lobbers and after some fight we managed to bag three of them!

I also found a few conch shells that day and after working out how to get the contents out of the shell and prepare them, we had ourselves quite a catch. So that evening we sat down to our most experimental meal of the trip of yet, consisting of; conch curry and lobster tails(prob more hats there as well… Stein, Floyd?). Was it worth it you cry? Probably not my humble opinion, and we definitely expended more energy in pursuit of our supper than we gained consuming it! However, memorable couple of days !!

We finished off our jolly by stopping back off at our fav little spot Green Island. We dropped the lobster net that night with some fish heads (just in case we hadn’t caught enough recently). The following day we awoke to discover that the ugliest mother ucker of a Eel in our little trap. I mean we had caught everything but lobster in this thing, it had swallowed both heads whole! It reminded me of those eels in the Disney classic the Little Mermaid, these things ooze evilness!

We did however have the best nine metre day of the trip so far and we all came off the water in shattered and looked like we had done shots of tequila through our eyes! Wind and sun battered; physically drained we limped back to English harbour.

Apologies for my ramblings this is pretty unedited due to time restraints and anyway its my F’ing!

Currently we are sitting in a beach bar in St Martin next to the end of the run way where evreyone stands at the end of the strip and gets blasted by the jets – its pretty funny ! (youtube it!)

Going to be here for a week or so, going round to Oreint bay this aft to go kiteing!