The downsides of sailing. You make friends. They leave. You leave. Life sucks sometimes. As Gwen shouted across the decks, ‘It was vomit flavour!’ Have a great time, MickBeth in Deep Bay. We can’t wait to see you again.. 

But hold on… we’re almost out of here too. We’ve been in Antigua for almost a month and tomorrow a large enough window apparently opens for us to scoot up to the British Virgin Islands.. Islands in the Caribbean that are British? This is a concept we can’t wait to try out! I feel like rocking up at the dentist and joining their NHS waiting list. Does one exist? Do you think they’ll have a queue of drunkards and bored-looking police in A&E on a Saturday night? If they do, I’m telling my family right now: I'm never leaving. Rule Britannia. Period. 

It will be the first ‘new’ place for us too since we sailed into Grenada in February. Ha! For us this a strange fact within all the other strangeness of being based in ‘Ocean City’. Everywhere feels new until you really go somewhere new. We hear going up North is a different kind of Caribbean. More pirates than plantations.. Well, Treasure Island is hurling itself straight out of Quest’s cupboard. Legend has it that Stevenson based his island on Norman Island, one of the many scrubby pieces of paradise in the BVI. And the main channel running through is called Sir Francis Drake Channel…. remember that cheeky fellow and his Golden Hind? The one who came back with more gold than Queen Elizabeth I's share of the whole yearly crown. Just in time for that little skirmish with the Spanish Armada.. It would have been like JK Rowling turning up unexpectedly and completely sorting out Nigel Farage. With cannons. Hold on, did I say that? Oh well.  

So leaving Antigua means that we have to get off our Xmas hinds. At the moment, this feels like no easy feat. Yesterday we fell in love with Pictionary. We never thought we’d enjoy drawing so terribly.. And Grab the Pig? The Ormerod family were quick to dismiss it with their very high brows. Too quick it turned out. What a fun if not intellectually-packed half-an-hour.. And so in the well-intentioned Christmas Spirit, we’ve left pretty much everything to do on the last day. Provisioning, Customs, going to town to see if Superman could fix our unfixable phone (Go, Superman!)…. Wish us luck. 

Oh, but before we go, a drama in Jolly Harbour yesterday! The Cap and Delph came back from their evening walk with Madame Pissy Pants (Love you, Fin) and stopped at our new friends, the Kiel-based boat, That’s Life. Yes, Big Bully, your friends! Thomas still had the binoculars in his hands. ‘Did you see?’ he said and pointed to the nearby beach, the same beach we’d intended to visit all day but were too sprawled out to get there. ‘Mariah Carey came here with her family. They put a tent up and stayed all day.’ Lulu’s face when the news was imparted back on Quest. Priceless.

Love from Quest and her celebrity-missed-by-a-whisker crew xx