Dispatches

It was the end

f a long and fairly painful couple of months in the Caribbean. My girlfriend and I had crossed the Atlantic in search of the dream, a Swan 45, headed down for a weekend in Barbuda. We did an overnighter and sped across silvery moonlit seas as we made our escape. By dawn, we could see land; a long, white beach that seemed to run onto infinity. In front of it, iridescent blue water. The approach was tortuous, the reward great. We dropped the hook right off this endless beach and rowed ashore. We had to walk almost two miles along the beach to find any sign of civilisation. Eventually we met some locals who were very excited to see us. They took us in a speedboat across a sort of salt lake behind the dunes to the only village on the island and we cleared customs in a shed surrounded by chickens. We cracked open a cold beer proferred to us by one of the villagers and chilled. Simpson Bay seemed a long way away. .