Sunday, March 09, 2008

Sailing in Antigua on a traditional Caribbean sloop

As you know if you have been reading the past few blogs starting with the Sailing Part 1, we are getting a yacht built and will be operating a sailing side of Adventure Antigua's tours, charters and excursions under Sailing Antigua. The site is http://www.sailing-antigua.com/. Please read the sailing blogs if you haven’t as they have great pics and loads of interesting info about how the wonderful sailing yachts are built here traditionally in the Caribbean. More photos and info about our new yacht to come next week. For now though I will show a little vid taken on our cheap little sony camera yesterday. Mykl and I were invited out sailing by Alexis Andrews on his Carriacou sloop “Genisis”. Our boat coming this April will be almost exactly the same so it was good to finally get our on Genesis. The winds were fairly strong in the morning as we sailed out of Nelson’s Dockyard into the Atlantic, and even though there were some good sized swells, Genesis sailed very comfortably over them with grace and pride.
No prouder than Alexis who had this yacht built traditionally in Carriacou by the same guys building our yacht. It was Alexis who introduced me to the yacht builders during the Antigua Classic Yacht regatta a few years ago when Genesis took top honors overall. He has two books coming out at the start of this year’s regatta. The first, Vanishing Ways, is about how the ancient tradition of wooden boat building in the Caribbean is slowly fading away with the exception of a few small builders trying to keep it alive. The second volume contained within the coffee table book is simply called Genesis and is a photographic journey though the amazing cultural process undertaken to build the very boat we were sailing on yesterday. I can’t wait to get my copy! I hope to interview Alexis soon about the book and about the boats that we are getting soon. For now enjoy this little video I put together of our sailing session yesterday. Thanks Alexis!