You may have noticed that there are several photos of flags dotted about the surroundings pages. Our boat is British registered so we fly a large red ensign on the stern. But, what those of you not part of the boaty world may not know, is that while visiting the waters of another country it is customary to fly a smaller version of their flag from your starboard shroud (bit of rigging). These are called ‘courtesy flags’ and, rather than simple good manners, in some places you will be fined if you don’t fly one.

Now, courtesy flags bought new cost in the region of £15 a pop. If you have been following our travels much you will be vaguely aware that we’ve been to a country or two since embarking on this trip. In fact, at time of writing we have been to 14 countries since leaving the UK. We were fortunate enough to inherit a bunch of flags when buying the boat which included Spanish, Portugese and French courtesy flags plus a whole surplus of out of date regatta and race flags.

So, rather than buy a new one for a country we only visit for a week or so, James and I, in true make do and mend fashion, have been making our own. The old regatta flags have come in handy and most countries have fairly straightforward designs which are easy to replicate (remember, we both have Fine Art degrees) but some, such as the parrot needed for Dominica, are a bit more involved.

Those that we have made so far are:

Morocco, Dominica, Antigua, St Kitts & Nevis and Sint Maarten (Gran Canaria and Ceuta are Spanish; we were bought a St Lucian flag by Lis and Paul; and Martinique, Guadeloupe and the Saintes are all French of course). The only noticeable country missing from the list is Statia (St Eustatius) where we were naughty and neither made nor flew a courtesy flag as we were only there for 16 hours!

These started out as quick bodge jobs, made underway with a few scraps and a pot of glue. As we travel on they have become carefully crafted works of art, with the two salty sea dogs trying to outdo one another with our beautiful creations (I am particularly proud of my Antigua and St Kitts & Nevis efforts…). Plus, with a saving of £15 each time, there’s a lot of satisfaction when you hoist one of these lovely things and know that there is money in your pocket to be spent elsewhere.

Anyway, all are pictured here for your viewing pleasure.

The first post I wrote about anchoring waxed lyrical about the sheer joy of the freedom to drop the hook whenever and wherever you can. Beautiful turquoise waters, stunning wildlife and a sky fit to burst with stars can be the rewards of a well-chosen anchorage. Plus, it’s free!

However, it should be noted that we don’t necessarily just invent the best places to anchor; we go in accordance with anchorages marked on charts and recommended in guides. This means you know that the holding will be good, that you’re not going to be in the way of other vessels, that the depths are workable and, most importantly, that the swell conditions are usually good.

Well, no, not always as it happens. I wrote once about Puerto de Conil, a roly poly anchorage near Cape Trafalgar in Spain that we had one night in before making passage to Gibraltar. Now, I feel compelled to write following a number of dreadful nights’ sleep in Bassterre and Frigate Bay St Kitts. There can be nothing worse (in the context of sailing your yacht round somewhere as beautiful as the Caribbean – poor me…) than a rolling anchorage as, by the time you realise just how bad it is, it’s usually already dark and you’re disinclined to move the boat.

A gentle, water-bed-like, side to side gentle sway is all well and good but when we’re talking about full rolls, big enough to knock all the washing up onto the floor or throw you out of bed or make doors slam then it’s awful. Side to side, plus back and forth with the additional corkscrew motion thrown in too. Particularly because you end up in a situation where you know you will never get to sleep and no amount of reading your book or drinking a herbal tea (tricks that work quite well in your house in London) will help you.

Best to put out an extra stern anchor so that you can take the swells on the stern and nowhere else… but wait, that’s a job still waiting for me to get round to it and splice a length of warp onto the 6 metres of chain we have for the second anchor. Damn! Maybe I should attempt it during my insomnia? Can one splice at 2:30am?

Right, rant over with, back to enjoying everything :)

...Sounds like a horrid combination doesn't it? Well, it was the brain child of Chris, James's older brother, who visited with his wife Jane in St Kitts over the last few days. It was so nice to have proper contact from home and our first proper daysails with visitors (which got us on our best sailing behaviour). They both managed really well despite St Kitts being unusually windy with force 5 and 6 the whole time they stayed.

We sailed over to Oualie beach in Nevis, a really lovely spot. The name comes from its original Spanish name, 'nuestra señora de las nieves', which means 'our lady of the snows', referring to the mountain which dominates the island's landscape. Chris and Jane were craving some white sand (most of St Kitts is volcanic) so we had a day trip here before popping back over to the mainland and the bar 'Shipwrecked', which promptly became their new local :)

The few days they were with us flew by in a sunny, happy, windy and rum-fuelled time and was over far too quickly.

So who should we bump into in Antigua (not literally - see below!) but Andy Grant! The sailing guru who we crossed Biscay with. He crossed the Atlantic in his boat, Olympus, with our friend Oli and arrived into Falmouth harbour on Christmas eve. It was great to see him and swap crossing stories.

Antigua is the land of the superyachts and, therefore, land of the flip-flops which is what the scores of crew and staff that work the superyachts are called. It's the first place we've been to in the Caribbean that seems to be full of travellers and yound people on a budget, which makes a nice change from the cruise ship crowd. In no time at all we were whisked off to a dock party with a jungle theme (Andy and two of his crewmates came as Rambo) and danced the night away.

I have vague hazy, late-night memories of James and Andy resuming the monkey dances that they came up with first in the Scilly Isles (Zoe and Elena will remember these in the gardens of Tresco). After Antigua we headed for St Kitts and saw real live wild monkeys on the road. Funny week really.

We had a series of misadventures within about a week of each other.

First off, in the Îles des Saintes, we dropped our keys overboard. The keys were for the boat itself, the outboard and for the dinghy padlock. Stupid us for not putting a float on the keychain you may think. Well, actually no, we did have a float on the keychain but said keys were lost while still attached to the padlock for the outboard and the weight of the padlock made them sink. Ooops, but, thankfully we have spares of all these so not too much trouble there.

Next, in Guadeloupe, we managed to lose one of the dinghy oars in the middle of the night. We still can’t decide whether we didn’t secure it properly and it somehow blew off or, much more horrible to think of, if someone crept up to the stern and unattached it while we were sleeping. Either way the upshot is very annoying as we now have to use the outboard with our dinghy rather than rowing. We’ve been looking for a replacement but, as it’s an English make, we probably won’t find one till St Martin.

Then, lastly and most dramatically, upon arrival into English Harbour, Antigua, we managed to crash into another boat. Not too badly, I hasten to add. We were manoeuvring through a tight anchorage, looking for a spot for the night and the wind was pretty strong. While weaving between two boats, we caught the skeg* on someone’s wire mooring buoy line which caused the bowsprit* of that boat to come veering towards us. Fortunately the only damage is a broken stanchion* (of which we have spares) and our guard rails need a little tlc which we’ll take care of in St Martin. The other boat was fine and the owner, a lovely Scottish chap, was far more concerned about us being alright, so a good choice if you have to hit into something.

Oh dear – let’s hope we have a less eventful time of it in St Martin…

* Too many boaty terms thrown in there, sorry. Here is a glossary to clarify!

Skeg - A tapering or projecting stern section of a vessel's keel, which protects the propellor and supports the rudder.

Bowsprit - A spar extending forward from a ship's bow, to which the forestays are fastened.

Stanchion - An upright bar, post, or frame forming a support or barrier with the boat’s guardrails (see photo).

I thought that it was important to write something about our passage-making these days. Moving up the islands in the East Caribbean has been quite a varied experience. First of all because each island itself is a distinct, individual country of it’s own (referring to “going to the Caribbean” is the same as an American talking about visiting Europe) and second of all that it’s easy to forget that there still is a big old amount of Atlantic ocean that separates one from another!

Unlike our country to country voyages prior to the Atlantic crossing, all these hops are relatively short: St Lucia to Martinique was only 25 miles, Martinique to Dominica was 38. On a clear day you can see the next island you’re heading to before you start which helps with judging your heading, leeway and weather conditions. We also have to always leave from and enter into a ‘Port of Entry’, as we need to clear customs in all these different countries.

You may have noticed that we’ve been progressing always northwards and always kept to the western side of each island. This is because it’s the leeward side, the side protected from those same strong, regular trade winds that helped blow us across the ocean. This means that in our travels up and down the west coast of each island we are relatively sheltered but can encounter fairly strong winds, swell and current when travelling from one to another. It’s quite easy to forget sometimes that your homely, comfortable boat which nestles nicely at anchor in a pretty bay will once again lurch around violently on Atlantic rollers as you get out into the open water once more.

The crossings from one to another are generally a lovely sail, you feel as though you’re blowing off the cobwebs and getting back out to sea. Having said that, although we all enjoyed the St Lucia to Martinique passage, both Lis and I had an awful time on the Martinique to Dominica crossing with the motion and strong winds that day making us feel really ropey and leaving all the sailing work to the lads, who actually had a lovely day of it. But, Dominica to the Saintes was a glorious trip.

Now, the thing about those trade winds is that it’s hard to make progress on any passage going east as that is where the wind is coming from. The one time that we needed to do this was when James and I sailed from the Saintes to Pointe à Pitre, Guadeloupe. So, to tackle this, we chose a perfect day for it, made the best course to windward that we could (which means sailing as close to the wind as possible) and, when this no longer got us far enough away from the lee shore of Basse Terre, we motored into wind for about an hour so that we could sail again. This is the first time we’ve needed to motor for propulsion since leaving Europe (can you sense the pride with which I typed that?).

But, by far our highlight island-to-island jump so far has been Port Louis, Guadeloupe to English Harbour, Antigua. It was a perfect 7 hour sail, beam reaching, 6 to 6 and a half knots all the way with one reef in and a full genoa. Just the two of us again, clear skies and plain sailing.

So, for those of you who have not brushed up on your Caribbean island topography, Guadeloupe looks like a lopsided butterfly. Its western wing is called Basse Terre and is covered in mountains and volcanoes with clouds hovering at their summits; its eastern side is Grande Terre and is flatter, drier and older. In the middle is a narrow river, actually it’s more of a saltwater channel, bordered by mangroves which bisects the two. It is very shallow, only 6 and a half feet deep at points, has a huge reef at its northern end and is straddled by two bridges. These bridges open at 5 in the morning to any vessel that is ready and willing and just plain crazy enough to sail up the channel. Can you guess who that might include…?

We moved the boat from outside Point à Pitre to the southern end of the Rivière Salée, by the Pont de la Gabarre, and dropped our anchor in the afternoon, just as the sun was starting to dip. It’s a lovely spot, still and quiet save for my initial squawks about just how shallow it is. You see, I should point out at this point that James and I have not confirmed, as yet, what our exact draught is. This is the key measurement that you need from the water line to the bottom of your keel and enables you to know that you have enough water when you anchor. Now, since the famous running aground incident at Alvor in Portugal, we have always over estimated and offset our depth gauge so as to avoid any hairy situations. Our documentation on the boat states that it’s 1.72m but, so many of these statistics have proved to be inaccurate, so we were still somewhat unsure – hence the squawking.

But there is safety to be found in numbers and, to our great relief, two other boats joined us to anchor and lie in wait for the 5am bridge opening: one catamaran – well known for having hardly any keel whatsoever, and one monohull like us – a ketch which probably had a similar draught. When the time came and our little caravan of three started nudging towards the clanking bridge in the early hours, we positioned ourselves in the middle and slowly started joining the dots between the alternating port and starboard markers. The second bridge, the Bridge l’Alliance, opens half an hour later and you can anchor just after this one too. This allows you to take a little rest and have breakfast before continuing along the second half of the channel in good light as you travel between bridges in pitch black.

The shallowest points of the river are just before the southern bridge and at the northern end, where the channel pours out into the Grande cul-de-sac Marin, a 4 mile system of reefs. However, at both these points the bottom is made of soft mud so a quick manoeuvre rescues you from any grounding situation. The journey itself was beautiful and atmospheric: from the start in total darkness, using the buoys as our only guide; to the mangrove-lined morning with herons and butterflies as our company; spilling out into the eerie reef-world at the northern end, where miles of mill-pond still turquoise water borders the navigable route through. Spooky, calm and all without a soul around as our caravan companions had moved on after the northern bridge. So, although we planned on this route to shorten our sail to Antigua, the adventure that we got from the short cut was memorable to say the least.

We sailed from Portsmouth, Dominica, to Terre d’en Haut on the Îles des Saintes on February 6th. This is where we parted ways with Lisanna and Paul, our crewmates since December 1st, who are flying onto Cuba before heading back to real life.

This left James and I to our own devices to potter about the islands. The Saintes are a part of Guadeloupe and are made up of small islands with some pretty beaches, a few bits of reef and some interesting cliff walks. The islands are quite rocky and steep to with small sheltered bays in which to anchor. They make a logical stop off en route to the mainland as they are about 21 miles from Dominica and 22 from Guadeloupe. At first glance there seems to be not a lot here aside from those things clearly aimed at tourists (souvenir stores, overpriced clothes shops, restaurants etc). But we were happily able to find a good little chandlery / hardware store, a great butcher, we poked our noses in at the local church and went on some fantastic walks. My favourite of the latter took us out to a beach covered with a forest of palm trees where we met two adorable kittens that nearly became our new boatmates. While walking back from the beach we passed a fenced-off field where goats and chickens were being fed their dinner and, amongst them, vying for some scraps were lots of wild iguanas. More and more of the big lizards kept joining the crowd, clambering down from the trees. We counted over 30 of them! A couple of days later we pushed on to Pointe à Pitre, Guadeloupe’s capital.

Note to all readers, this means our spare double cabin is now vacant and fully ready for visitors! All are welcome to stay, just get in touch and we can detour to meet you wherever possible :)

Approaching Domenica we understood instantly why we were given a warning about tricky anchoring there. It looks like something prehistoric. The island is so mountainous and steep-to that the coastal waters are mostly too deep to drop the hook anywhere. This is not a land of beaches but is a place to explore the natural wonders both inland and underwater.

We moored up at the capital, Roseau, on the day that kicks off carnival season. Carnival proper happens on February 20th this year but there is a whole series of parties that lead up to this. The carnival opening that happened when we arrived consisted of a parade of stilt-walkers, traditional carib dancers, little girl flag throwers, beauty queens and all kinds of other costume-wearing, booty-shaking revellers dancing through the streets or on floats. James and I liked the dancing stilt-walkers best particularly one very expert girl of about 10 years old. Other highlights were the shaggy looking monsters with Viking horns or the float for the pharmacy-sponsored “Miss plus size and elegant”.

We people-watched and drank Kabuli, the local beer, and wandered the grid of streets. The people of Roseau are nothing if not entrepreneurial as every house is also a bar and a bakery and offers a lawyer’s services. My personal favourite is a shop called ‘Robin’s nest’ which sells electrical items (old keyboards, walkie-talkies, fans and mobile phones) as well as ladies’ lingerie.

Roseau’s normal street activity is dominated by whether or not there is a cruise ship present, which there is 6 days of the week. Because of this, a veritable swarm of taxi drivers and tour guides descend upon anyone white offering their services. We wondered if we should make t-shirts stating “no we are not American and no we are not on a cruise ship”. As they are on holiday, Lis and Paul found themselves a nice tour guide and spent several days with him exploring some of Domenica’s natural wonders.

James and I are not so tour guide minded, nor can we afford tour prices, so we hopped onto the local bus (the same big vans as the taxis but full of people and making several stops). Venturing inland was a bit of a novelty for us. Domenica has 7 active volcanoes so there’s a lot of geological interest across the island: the boiling lake, lots of waterfalls, the Titou gorge etc. We decided to go to Trafalgar falls as we’d heard that the bridge on the road to it was currently being mended so a lot of the cruise lot were going elsewhere. Plus we left early in the morning, to avoid the worst crowds. Our bus dropped us just by the broken bridge, still useable if on foot, and we walked up the steep road through the village of Trafalgar to get to the falls.

Alas, there is another road to get here, and some of the tourist crowds were already getting out of their air-conditioned taxis. The trail to the falls consists of a little walk to a viewing platform. After this the trail gets much wilder and a sign warns that from this point you explore at your own risk as the area is prone to flash floods. Much to our joy the current cruise ship was full of the blue-rinse brigade and a lot of rather overweight, unfit looking people, none of whom had the ability, let alone the desire to go any further than the platform.

James and I rejoiced in getting one of Domenica’s prime sights entirely to ourselves and, as the crowds disappeared back into their vehicles and the trail fell silent, we happily scrambled into the rainforest to play. Trafalgar falls is made up of ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ waterfalls dropping down from a great height down to a series of fresh pools, these are also joined by hot pools from sulphurous springs. The hot pools are the first things you come to after parting from the trail and felt like the most luxurious spa treatment for us two salty sea-dogs. We sat and poached for a bit and then climbed over the rocks towards the freshwater pools at the bottom of the falls. Hot pool, cold pool, hot pool, cold pool, all while relaxing within the heart of the rainforest with just the jumping lizards, fleeting hummingbirds, scurrying crabs and the music of the jungle to keep us company.