St. Johns, Antigua

In Antigua we booked a tour to go to the south side of the island to take a short kayak ride through the mangroves out to the sea and then go snorkeling out on the reef followed by lunch a beach resort.

The directions to find the meeting point were complicated, but our ship ended up docking on the pier right by the meeting point, so we didn’t need go out through the port complex and walk around. The directions would have been needed if we had docked on the other pier.

The tour was nearly full, with two small buses of people. It took almost an hour to drive to Cades Bay.

The kayak to the sea through the mangrove was fairly short, maybe 500 meters.

We pulled the kayaks up on the beach and stored them. Then we hopped in the speedboats to go out to the reef to snorkel.

We spotted several sea turtles on the way out to the reef. They were a distance from the boat and dove when they saw us.

The sea was rather rough with 12-16 inch waves. Everyone got in the water slowly, but a few didn’t last long and swam back to the boat without telling the guide, which caused him a bit of distress while he looked for them. We had to wear waist floats while in the water, which caught the waves and made swimming against them more difficult. The visibility wasn’t great with some sand stirred up. There were some fish and some corals.

After snorkeling we went back to the beach with the kayaks and kayaked back to the dock. After finishing, we went to Ffryes Tiki Beach Bar for lunch. There was a steel drum band playing while we ate. We had the option to stay a bit at the beach and get in the water, but folks wanted to get back the ship.

Back at the port we saw one of the Star Clippers sailing ships in port.