Pleasant flight courtesy of our commercial partner’s at Virgin Atlantic directly from Gatwick into VC Bird Airport Antigua. 31c when we arrived yesterday afternoon with glorious sunshine and a little breeze to gently sway the palm trees to let you know that you have arrived in paradise!
Picked up the hire truck and headed of to Antigua Yacht Club Marina, home of Ondeck Antigua to be greeted by the lovely Amanda busy preparing all our official merchandise for the coming week You can get your gear by clicking here.
Just time for a quick sandwich before we take a few minutes to look around the marina where the world’s classic yachts are moored up looking utterly amazing in the Caribbean sun for Antigua Classics Week. It’s great to see the constant polishing and love being bestowed on these artifacts of our maritime history to preserve them for future generations. From the magnificent J class Velsheda, the new Ranger, Eleonora and so many of my favourites from the board William Fife (hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention!).
Met up with the sailing crew along with Liz and Ryan who run the Ondeck base here in Antigua. First sight of Liz’s ‘bump’ seeing as she is now 7½ months pregnant. Liz immediately demands to be fed in true pregnant lady style..so it’s off to the Mad Mongoose! The first Rum and Ting goes down very well (have been looking forward to it for weeks!) and helps fade any thoughts of jet lag! An early night for me tonight as I have a mountain of preparations and work to get through tomorrow.
Dave Harrison, our photographer for the next two weeks is salivating at the thought of shooting these beauties with there clouds of sail on the water tomorrow. All the images will be uploaded to our websites - you can view and buy images from lightwaveimages.net. With the first photos from Dave’s shoot before breakfast of some of the local wildlife up very shortly. We also picked up a new mini video camera at the airport and will try and upload daily short videos to show what we are getting up to and we will be Tweeting on Twitter. If you are a Twitterer you can follow us at twitter.com/ondeckantigua
Sunday night at Shirley Heights is legendary in these here parts and in the interest of this blog, Dave and I will have to attend to make sure we miss nothing for our readership. it’s a tough old job, but we’ll take one for the team on many occasions throughout the next couple of weeks.
Signing off for now
