A report on the voyage from crewmember (signed up from our forum), Mike Coad.

Deep bay is just round the corner from the island capital of St. John, and felt very clean after St. John's dirty harbour. The harbour seemed to be the last stage of the town's sewage system. It rained the night we were there, and the things floating about made us all reluctant to do the anchor handling. However, the people were friendly and we bought good fresh fruit from street traders. Didn't manage to find a large supermarket in St. John, though there are a couple of decent smaller ones within 5 minutes' walk of the harbour.

There was a bar on the beach where we drank Pain-Killer cocktails. The recipe for Pain-Killers is worth repeating here as it seems to work just as well at home in England: it's equal parts of rum, orange juice, pineapple juice and coconut milk over ice. The recipe also worked pretty well on St. Martin, a couple of weeks later, where we explained it to the waiter on our last night, and ended up with hang-overs on the morning we started the crossing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though.

Approaching Basseterre on St Kitts.
Basseterre (not sure about the spelling) is the main town on St Kitts. There seem to be Basseterres (various spellings) all over the Leeward Islands. The town is pleasant enough, but like so many of the islands, there isn't as lot of work for people, outside of servicing the cruise ships when they call in. There are smart shops selling designer-label stuff, and people living in shacks only a few yards away. Having said that, it didn't seem so noticeable on St Kitts as it did on Antigua.

The anchorage seems to be rather exposed. We stayed right next to the commercial port (watch out for large free standing rocks just below the surface as you get close inshore). This is where you check in. It also seemed to be the only place to land. We got fairly wet in the tender looking for somewhere closer to the town, and in the end we came back to the commercial port and accepted the fact that we had to use a taxi.

Nevis looks good from the boat, lots of well preserved colonial architecture, though again it's rather set up for attracting people off cruise ships. It's worth knowing that despite what the pilot books say, if you want to check in at Charlestown you need to be there before midday. Otherwise it's an expensive taxi ride to the commercial port.

We never checked-in on Montserrat. We arrived at the port of entry (Little Bay) after the officials had left for the night and the guy in charge said we needn't bother to check in if we stayed in the port area and left the following day. If we wanted a shower we could use theirs. The people from the bar outside the entrance sold us beers over the port gate, so, clean and refreshed, we (well, me anyway) had a better opinion of Montserrat than some of the other islands. My prejudice says "no cruise ships, that's why". Who knows

Des Haies, Guadeloupe.

Another pretty place. Much set up for visiting yachts, and there were a lot of them (but still few compared with England). There's a pretty good supermarket one road back toward the left end of the town. This is a French island, so you get standard French produce at French prices.

Right: In the hills behind Des Haies.

The picture shows Skipjack in his customary clothes-horse mode. Days at anchor, or calm sunny days at sea brought all manner of stuff out for drying.

Beginning provisioning (Basse Terre, Guadeloupe).

We stayed at the Marina Riviere de La Sens, just south of Basse Terre. This is the capital of the island, though not the largest town. We walked into the town (took about an hour) the first night, and found it dark and pretty much closed down, with nowhere to eat open apart from a Macdonald's. Apparently the town does close down at about 1930!

The French supermarkets sell long-life (we're talking weeks!) bread, meant for making croq monsieur. It's pretty dire stuff, but is better toasted. We were so desperate that I made a toaster (see below).

My toaster. In use, you have  to be pretty quick at turning the bread over. You'll need to use a knife for this as the toaster gets pretty hot.

The toaster doesn't stay looking nice and shiny for very long. We ended up keeping ours in a plastic bag, to avoid spreading rust and burnt toast about.

Quite easy to make. Take a large tin of Strasbourg sausages. Throw away the contents, unless you really want to eat them. Cut both ends off with a tin opener. Using pliers, hammer, block of wood etc. flatten the tin so it's got a rectangular cross section. Choose one of the larger sides to be the top. Cut out the other (bottom) side. The hole needs to be big enough for the flames of your cooker to come through. Make it a little smaller than you want, so you can turn the edges in to avoid cut fingers. We used a large old pair of scissors to cut the tin. Support the top face of the tin on a block of wood and make lots of holes with a hammer and nail (try to avoid using a very short woodscrew, which was all I could find as it's not good for your fingers).

No report of an ocean crossing would be complete without a trophy-photo of a flying fish. Unfortunately, as you can see, ours weren't very big.

Sao Jorge, Azores.

This one's a bit dark. You wouldn't want to suffer from vertigo if you lived on this island. The cliffs are very high, with very few places at sea level. Much of the land near the edge is terraced, and the rainwater just runs off the sides in waterfalls.

Right: The volcano on Pico, partly covered by cloud.

By the time we were round to the north side of Pico we were in brilliant sunshine. That big mountain sure plays havoc with the wind, though. We had to go pretty much clear over to Sao Jorge to get clear wind.