This chapter is dedicated to all the people who have dreams, whatever they are, and to those who try to pursue them, no matter the result at least it worth to try!
At the moment I’m living with people who made of their dreams their real life..
The arrival in Antigua has been celebrated with a proper lunch flooded with rum punch and followed by a long night out partying and meeting new folks, most of them crew of the yatching world.. The first night out becomes the rule and soon English Harbour and Nelson bay become like a little village where every night we meet the same faces and spot the new entries.
Indeed, despite Antigua being a pretty big island, all the few evening bars and the discotheque Abracadabra are all concentrated in our area.
10 days run fast with a daily swim in the beautiful Galeon beach and few works on board that reward Nina with a new shining teak deck.
I celebrate Christmas together with Nina’s team and the new friends, but it’s time to move on.
Together with Roberta, an old friend from Italy who also left his life back home to follow a dream and travel around for a bit, we post various messages on boards in marinas and online to look for a new boat to host us in exchange of good company, sharing expenses and additional help on board. It’s thanks to crewbay.com that we meet Luis: 60 years old from Argentina he’s sailing the Caribbean since two years with his wife and now looking for new company on board while his wife is back home. After a talk on the other side of the island we’re all convinced to sail together and on the 26th we’re already sleeping in the amazing Deep bay on board our new house Wind Whispers. She’s an Oceanic Cyclades 50 with 5 cabins, three bathrooms and a couple of fishing guns that hopefully will provide us with some extra food.
As soon as on board we realise the pace of Luis is something different from what we’re used to. Despite the over a month sailing on Nina I’ve been always aiming to a target called Antigua and progressing as fast as possible. On board Wind Whispers everything is different and a day more in Deep bay to enjoy a lunch with some friends of Luis and to wait for a couple of knots more of wind makes perfect sense.
We’re impatient to discover and explore as much as possible of the Caribbean and we want to push Luis to go fastest and further…but each time we meet one of his friends I realise it worth it and that maybe it’s us we need to slow down and learn from this lifestyle.
Toby and Juliet (http://sjsunflower.blogspot.com) who 7 years ago started sailing from Malesia and are now living on the beautiful “Sunflower” and targeting to sail further West across the Panama Channel and then across the Pacific Ocean to explore within the rest the islands of French Polinesia.
It’s in Guadaloupe where we met instead the family of Laurant and Anne-Laurent who started living on board 15 years ago when they began to sail first the Mediterranean sea when they were only 23! Their two children only know houses that float and move around with the wind.. All the teaching is given on board by their mother and the experience of travelling is adding experience on top of it.
18-20 knots of ENE (East North East) wind push us South of Antigua to Guadaloupe the biggest island of Caribbean.
We anchor in the bay out of Desahies, a tiny village where we can do customs in a tourist shop with a computer in a corner. A boulangerie light up our day with fresh baguette an a decent pan au Chocolate when we wake up on the last day of the year. We celebrate exploring the island by car and climbing the active volcano that makes a barrier to the trade winds Alisei blowing from Africa till here. As soon as we get to the top we realise it when we can barely stand in front of the gusts while all the air is saturated in humidity and sulphur fumes.
New year’s eve is very different this year and celebrated on board with Luis and Roberta.
But we don’t get intimidated by 40 
minutes drive to reach the best and probably only pub of the island where we end up dancing at the sound of Mojito before driving back both by car and then dinghy to the boat.
We are spending some days to sail all around Guadaloupe: two days ago we stopped in the marine reserve of Cousteau in front of Pigeon and swam with turtles while yesterday I woke up swimming a couple of km in the paradise beach of Pain de Sucre in Iles des Saintes.
And this is one of the encounters we do in this Paradise:
After more than two months not going into a dock we’ll have to sail Wind Whispers in the main port of the Island Point a Pietre in order to repair one of the two fridges to then head more north and hopefully in time to meet again in few days Nina and its friends in Barbuda an amazing island north of Antigua.
But nothing is certain in this lifestyle and no hurry is foreseen, any “plan” if so can be called is always depending on weather forecast and last minute decisions.
For the moment I keep on thinking about these dreamers I’m carry on meeting and the Life they’re living…
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