weaving – Page 3

Two Weavers of Montserrat

January 23, 2018 | 3 Comments

It was a banner day when we got ourselves back to Montserrat and managed to visit the Sea Island Cotton studio. First, it was my birthday. Second, Montserrat is not an easy place to visit, even by ferry as we’d done the week before. It was a miserable sail there, and I suffered a bad case of mal de mer. Predictably, the anchorage had some waves rolling through, and getting on the small dock with our dinghy was less than ideal. But once I stepped ashore the possibility of getting to meet the mother/daughter team of Sea Island Cotton buoyed my enthusiasm!

Look what a charming place it is!

Hey, Baltimoreans and bird lovers! Take a look at the local oriole.

Anne Davis, the mother of the weaving duo, started this business in the early 90s, when her studio and home were in Portsmouth, the capital of Montserrat that was destroyed in the eruption. After that eruption, she lost everything and had to relocate and start again. About two-thirds of the inhabitants who lost their homes decided to take advantage of government funding to move to the UK. The island population still has not recovered from this large exodus. Anne never considered leaving the island. Her studio and house are now located in the small village of Salem, which is not particularly close to where tourists arrive by ferry or by their own boats. You’d have to know about her from guidebooks and get a cab to visit.

Back to the start—Anne learned to weave from a local weaver resident who was originally from Canada. The government provided funding for this Canadian weaver to teach local women to weave. I didn’t get many of those details about that project, but Anne said she is the only student who continued to weave after the course finished. Anne and her daughter Lovena now have two looms: a LeClerc counter balance loom with a weaving width of about 36”, and what looks like an ancient 4-shaft Baby Wolf by Schacht. The identifying herd of sheep that is branded into the castle on the loom is mostly gone. Perhaps it’s just the tropical climate that makes the loom appear older than it may be! Both looms were empty when I visited. Anne was planning to put a warp on the LeClerc in the next day or so. Lovena weaves on the Baby Wolf.

Only Lovena was in the shop when we arrived. I called ahead, using the phone that the cab driver offered when I told him where I wanted to go.

The hanging rods had many beach cover-ups, scarves and shawls, all woven in what looks like a gauze structure to me.

Then there are shelves and shelves of table linens in many different structures. It was hard to choose, but I was not going to leave empty handed. All the table linens are finished with fringe, which is a bit of pet peeve for me. But they were all so beautifully woven, with great selvedges and in beautiful weave structures and colors, I had to overlook the fringe. I’ll deal with hems when the fringes begin to wear out.

Unfortunately, there is no longer any sea island cotton to be had. The cotton industry died along with many other things after the eruption. Anne and Lovena order cotton yarns from Camilla Valley Yarns in Canada. Wow!—same company I’ve used on numerous occasions! Small world. Lovena didn’t seem to think shipping from Canada took long, but I imagine she has a more easy going outlook than I do! We have exchanged email addresses so I think I will give her links to a few of the larger US weaving suppliers– and maybe some of the not so large vendors that I enjoying using.

Bob surprised us all by inviting Lovena to come out to Pandora for a glass of wine when she closed the shop. She accepted the offer and decided to close early and get her mother to join her. I wasn’t sure what they’d think when they arrived at the harbor in Little Bay and saw how large the waves were coming through the bay. Anne showed some concern and wanted assurances from Bob that the dinghy would hold all of them! I’m impressed that both women braved the unknown to visit us.

The most interesting part of our conversation was when we told both women that we’d been on Montserrat about a week earlier and mentioned our disappointment that our tour guide would not stop for a visit. Lovena remembered seeing both our faces in a passing van! She remembered mine from the middle of the van–a woman who looked bugged eyed at her as we passed. And she remembered Bob in the very back of the van, looking back at her as we passed. She told her mother she was certain that they were about to get van full of customers….and then they didn’t….

I’ll post a photo of my treasures if I can get them loaded. Everything about this post has taken ages (speaking of

We’ve definitely started an acquaintance, and I’m looking forward to a budding friendship with both women. What a birthday treat! It doesn’t get any better!

St Kitts, Thomas Jefferson, Batik

January 11, 2018 | 1 Comment

That’s an odd assortment of names in the title, yet that is the diversity of what we have seen on this island!

The weather has us pinned down off the southeast coast of St. Kitts. There are no harbors here for protection, which is the case for many of the West Indies islands in the Caribbean, and boy do I miss the protected harbors on Antigua. After sailing from Antigua last Saturday, we attempted to anchor off Nevis, but the best anchorage area was too rough! It was only 2pm in the afternoon, so we sailed about seven miles further to White House Bay on St. Kitts, and then had to move again for more protection. We were finally settled, although not comfortably, just before sunset. The winds have been quite strong, which is typical for this time of year. They are called the Christmas winds and usually last until the end of January.

The capital of St. Kitts is Basse Terre, and in the center of the city is a roundabout with a clock in the center called Piccadilly Square.

Cruise ships arrive almost daily in Basse Terre, and we can see them come and go from our anchorage, a few miles to the east. There is a hospital ship in the same area that has to leave every time a new cruise ship arrives. We learned that this ship is a medical school and that since the destruction of the medical school on Dominica this ship has taken on the faculty and students from that university. We watch it come and go every day to make room for the large cruise ships. I wonder what the faculty and students think of that. I’m trying to wrap my head around the students practicing surgical procedures on a vessel that has to be rolling around even slightly, in spite of having stabilizers. I contemplate over each evening as we watch the sunset from Pandora.

Yesterday we hired a tour guide to drive us around the island. Normally Bob and I detest this kind of touring, but this island has many windy roads and switchbacks that lead through the mountainous terrain, and driving is on the left. It was a smart decision not to tackle it ourselves!

Alexander Hamilton was born on nearby Nevis, and Thomas Jefferson’s great-great grandfather had a large plantation here on St. Kitts. The plantation has become a historic site here, no surprise, as well as the site of a botanical gardens and a local business of women who make batik fabrics. I’m quite fascinated to learn—so late in life!—that some of our founding fathers had such exotic origins! Years ago I visited the home of George Washington’s family, Sulgrave Manor, that seemed to be ‘right down the street’ from Princess Diana’s ancestral home Althorp. Both these family manses are in Northamptonshire, in the UK, so not so exotic. Still, I was well into adulthood before I ever gave a thought to exactly where our founding fathers originated. I just vaguely thought of them all as English. History is far more interesting in the details, isn’t it?

Romney Manor was first the site of gardens for a man named Tegereman who was chief of the indigenous tribe of Caribs. By 1625 this site had become a beautiful Euorpean style home for Sam Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s forebear.

The gardens are good mix of natural landscape and cultivated gardens.

It would hard to ever leave a spot like this…..more lemonade, please!

Along with the gardens, which are well cultivated and include beautifully landscaped areas of quite a variety of tropical plants, a group of women also run a textile business on the property of the plantation. The women make wonderful batik fabrics and their business, which started in 1976, is called Caribelle Batik. After 40 years, they must be on their 2^nd or even 3^rd generation of women keeping this technique alive and well. I’d say I was watching the 2^nd generation of master batik makers demonstrating for the tourists, since all of them were about my age.

The shop was full of about anything you can dream up to make with batik fabric. There were wall hangings, clothing, all kinds of little containers, pillow covers. I bought a nice selection of things to bring home for friends and family.

The designs are drawn with a stylus filled with melted beeswax.

They do intricate designs, and the best thrill of all was walking through the gardens, surrounded by exotic plants, views of the ocean, and lines and lines of batik fabrics drying in the breeze. I think this will be the highlight of my winter!

In addition to a rainforest full of exotic native and not so native plants that have found there way here, St. Kitts also has a large colony of green monkeys. They are everywhere! Our guide told us that they were brought to the island by the French, who brought them on their ships from Africa, along with their human cargo destined to be slaves. Some islanders have taken young monkeys for pets. I got accosted by a heckler, who came up from behind and just put this monkey into my arms. I didn’t mind, but I would have preferred to be asked. I guess he knows well that if he asks, most people will say no. It’s better to just throw a monkey into your arms and grab your phone before you have a chance to think. It’s the way of life in this part of the world, so it’s best just to go with it. Cute monkey, isn’t it?….wearing a diaper, thank heaven!

We had stopped for this view when the ‘monkey man’ approached me.

How about a monkey in its natural setting. They are pretty shy so we haven’t gotten close to the wild ones.

In the middle of our day our tour guide took us to a local restaurant–just a couple of picnic tables under an awning, with a ‘kitchen’ in an attached shed. No refrigeration. Our guide said all the food was prepared daily so no need to refrigerate anything. Well, hmmm. The choices were pretty varied, so it’s hard for me to imagine that they used everything up everyday.

Yeah, I know! It looks pretty rough, and I’ll admit that I was nervous about the food. It was all delicious–barbecued pork ribs, rice and pigeon peas, green salad, and Caribbean mac n cheese. Others had baked chicken, or baked mackerel with same side dishes. No one got sick.

I am staying onboard today. The wind has abated, although our weather guru says it’s best not to change locations until the weather is more settled at the beginning of next week. Sheesh! It’s only Wednesday! I plan to spend some time working on a small tapestry that is getting embarrassingly old, and then I will spend some time on my little Norwegian woven band. Later we will meet our cruising friends for sundowners at the beach bar, SaltPlage, where the view of the sunset will extraordinary! Well, as you can, we already had our sundowners…I could not get this post online yesterday.

So, that’s my report. St. Kitts is an interesting and unusual mix of history, lush flora and fauna, and beautiful local textile work. All good for me.

Memory…and Text (or lack of it)….and Textile

January 5, 2018 | 1 Comment

These first few days of the new year have been a bit of a roller coaster. As the east coast of the US was plunged into a weather condition called a ‘cyclone bomb,’ Bob and I were enjoying mild tropical weather in Antigua, where we celebrated the new year with fireworks that we watched from the deck of Pandora at midnight, shortly after the rise of the first super moon of the new year. All week the moon rose each night, well after dark, for such a display of lunar magnificence—exactly what the doctor ordered on these long nights—although noticeably shorter than January nights in New England. We’ll have a second full moon at the end of the month. A month with both a super moon and a blue moon—what might that conjure up for me?

Two days later I saw the moon rise over Bob’s shoulder as we had dinner at a local restaurant in English Harbor.

And one last photo–the moon rising over the courtyard of Copper and Lumber, in English Harbour.

I have not made a new year’s resolution since young adulthood, after doing so throughout childhood and early adulthood never gave me the desired results. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about resolutions at the start of every year, as well as at the beginning of September each year. Those shortened days in late summer/early fall, along with the start of a new academic year, are always a time for me to reevaluate and take stock. So here I am again, at the start of another year, thinking about another set of priorities and ideas that I will refuse to call resolutions.

Being away from home is also a time when I take stock of my situation and think about re-prioritizing. Years ago, I read The Artist’s Way, and writing the morning pages has always worked a strange magic on how I think about work and get things done. For some reason, perhaps that heady mix of being away from home mixed with the exercise itself, morning pages have a stronger effect on my thinking while we are away each winter. It’s working its magic again this winter. In addition to that exercise, I have started reading Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit. A dear friend gave it to me for Christmas, and it rekindled something I’ve missed. I started that book many years ago and never got very far, in spite of thinking it was a great tool. I lost track of the book and haven’t seen it since. What a pleasant shock to receive it again. I am enjoying it and have added its exercises to my morning routine. Of course I hope this will lead to good things and good work!

Yesterday several cruisers joined us in taking a day trip by ferry from Antigua to Montserrat. Most of us have been hoping to visit Montserrat for a number of years. It is a difficult place to visit by boat since it has no protected harbors. You need calm winds and no northern swells in order to safely anchor there and get ashore in a dinghy. Even if you get one perfect day, like yesterday, it’s not enough, since you need to spend at least one night there in order to have time to also get ashore to see the sights.

The biggest sight is the volcano, which of course you can see as you sail anywhere in the area. It’s a huge mountain whose summit is always lost in the clouds. Those clouds are usually emissions from the volcano itself—sulphur dioxide which you can smell if you are downwind.

Our friends and we decided that the weather was not going to be perfectly favorable at any time in the next week or so, and that we should take the ferry across from Antigua for a day trip. In order to get the most out of our day we decided to hire a tour guide. There were eight of us. The cost of this outing was rather steep—just shy of $400 for each couple. We left Pandora at 6:30am and did not return until 8pm. The downside was that out of that 13 ½ hour day, we spent 8 ½ hours either waiting on various immigration and customs lines, or sitting on the ferry. Our tour was only 5 hours out of that long day! Still, we can now say we’ve been there, and the sights were as amazing as we’d always imagined!

Here is the track of the washout that occurred when the heavy rains began — the rains that came down once the fiery ash rose into the colder atmosphere above and caused massive electrical storms. 20 years later, look at that dry bed. It’s hazy from the gases being emitted.

The volcano overshadows every vista on the island. It is present, always. The smell of sulphur is always present too; it just depends which direction is downwind. We drove around the outskirts of the devastated capitol city, Plymouth, that was buried under ash from the last several eruptions during the mid-1990s. The islanders have not yet declared where they will rebuild a new capitol city, so it still feels like they live in the midst of this destruction, over 20 years later. This ruined city held most of the population where many people worked in government offices, schools, and the university that were also part of the city. Although very few people died in the eruption, the population has dwindled by 2/3’s of what it had been beforehand. The loss of homes and jobs forced many people to move elsewhere, and the English government subsidized moving people to England if they chose to leave. It was stunning evidence that what humans have achieved over the millennia is so fragile compared to the force of nature.

Last year when we attempted a plan to visit Montserrat, I read about a small weaving business on the island called Sea Island Cotton. Before the eruption Montserrat was known for having the best quality sea island cotton, which is cotton grown in soil high in volcanic ash. The fibers of this kind of cotton are finer and softer than cotton grown elsewhere. A woman named Anna Davis started a handweaving company, using this special cotton to weave table linens and personal items. She lost her looms and shop when the volcano erupted, but she has started over in the small village of Salem, and her daughter Lovena has joined her in the operation. Last year I wrote about how much I hoped to meet her.

Yesterday, I finally made it to the island, but our tour did not allow for a stop for one person–me!—to indulge in such a wish! At the end of our tour we stopped at the botanical garden and our route took us right by the shop! I was excited to see it and also miserable that I could not get there! There was a set of Sea Island placemats for sale in the gift shop of the botanical gardens. They were summery yellow and white, in a weave structure called Ms and Os. I loved them, but they were finished with a fringe, which is a pet peeve of mine. I looked at the fabric and did not think the edge pattern could suffer being cut off and hemmed. I didn’t want to buy them just because it was the only thing I could find of the mother/daughter weaving duo! But now I certainly regret it…. We passed the shop again on our way back to the ferry terminal, and it was closed. What a missed opportunity!

Yesterday’s trip was a good way to take my mind off the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I don’t think I will mark this day in the future, but the first anniversary of a death is always a day when you cannot ignore the significance of what happened one year earlier. I could not help thinking about how people live on in our memories, and it is how we keep them with us. Ancient cultures had no other way of keeping the memory of someone alive since they did not have written language to record these things. Memories tended to die when the last person who knew the deceased personally passed on. To extend memory the Greeks began to sing about their memories, and these songs might outlive the last person who actually knew the subject of the song. It certainly worked with the stories and characters in the Illiad and the Odyssey. When I think about these ancient sotries, which I so much enjoyed reading and studying in my youth, I think about the phrase “Sing you home.” It was the only way humans once had of keeping someone alive, and perhaps a way to send them to the Elysian fields.

So the death of my mother has rejuvenated my erratic attempts to design a tapestry to sing my father home, after his death more than six years ago. This is something that has emerged and reemerged during my ‘morning pages.’ Text and textile and memory. Like song, textiles often served as a story telling method before there was written language, as you’ll remember from more recent times when large tapestries were woven that told stories for the many non-readers to view and understand. Text and textile and memory intertwined.

Earlier this week I warped my little band loom from handyWOman on Etsy. I made a warp based on examples from the book Norwegian Pick Up by Heather Torgenrud.

I am enjoying weaving onboard! I’m just practicing a bit of plain weave before I attempt some of the pickup patterns that are given in the book. It’s nice to be weaving something relaxing and a bit mindless. At this point I do have to pay attention to the rhythm and movement of using the shuttle and opening the shed since it is so very different from loom controlled weaving, and consistency is vitally important to the look of the band and the selvedges!

When we are more settled (whenever that might be!) I will turn my attention to the two small tapestries I have onboard. One is getting so old it is embarrassing me! The other is fairly new. I thought about doing a photo record of all the projects I have with me, but I haven’t gotten to drag everything out of their storage places and take the photos yet. And I’m sure it will just annoy me at the end of this winter to have a record of all the things I didn’t accomplish! But since it’s also the beginning of a new year, when I am writing my morning pages and reading Twyla Tharp’s book, maybe there will be good work flowing off my looms this year. Fingers crossed.

Nostalgic Holiday

December 16, 2017 | 1 Comment

By the end of this brief month we’ve been home we will have visited our older son and his family, which includes our delightful granddaughter Tori, three times. That is a LOT of driving, and it always includes a trek through New York City… and that brings back memories from the decades we lived in New Jersey.

On our last trip home, after Tori’s 1st birthday party, we drove into the city for an appointment that should have taken place over the summer. It was a sparkling mid-December day, where the snow that had blanketed most of the northeast had already melted on the city streets. It was the morning the suicide bomber had set off his pipe bomb in the subway near Times Square. Hearing this news, we decided to avoid the West Side, so we took the Holland Tunnel. What a view with the sun directly behind Freedom Tower!

We drove down to Battery Park to get on the East Side FDR.

What memories! Foremost in my mind was a very different day–a late summer day in September, five years ago, when our son Christopher met us at Battery Park. We were onboard our last Pandora, and Chris was on his bike! We said our goodbyes across the water, and I was crying. It was our farewell moment at the beginning of a 9-month trip down the east coast of the US and across to the Bahamas, where we spent 4 months sailing about 1,000 miles among the islands from the Abacos, the Berries and the Exumas, before retracing our tracks back up the eastern seaboard. I’d never been away from home that long before–actually haven’t been away that long since either.

Chris first met us near Gracie Mansion, where Hells Gate flows into the East River. He took this wonderful panorama of us. We were alone on the river that morning.

Then we raced him down to Battery Park, Pandora against Chris on a bicycle. We won, by only 10 minutes, and he had to navigate far more traffic than we did that morning!

While we lived in New Jersey, I almost never had an occasion to drive on the East Side, so driving up the FDR brought this single memory back in full force. I can still feel the breeze and smell the river and the city from that September day. What a difference a few years make. Chris was at the beginning of his doctoral studies; Bob and I were neophytes at long distance sailing. Now Chris has been working in quantum physics for a couple years, and Bob has put 10,000 miles under the keels of two Pandoras since then.

This December day, we parked our car near the East River and walked west into the throngs of midtown… past Lex and Park and Madison, and on to 5th Ave. It was fitting to me that Saks has chosen Snow White as the theme for this year’s windows. Our little Tori seems like Snow White to us with her ivory skin and dark hair. I wish she could have been with us to see this!

As it happens, Tori’s Mom loves Mini Mouse, and now so does Tori. I made Tori a Mini Mouse dress to wear for her birthday, and her parents decided to have photos taken to commemorate this milestone. We don’t have any of the final photos yet, but here are a couple of proofs. I love the middle one (kind of wish I’d made her a Snow White dress, though!).

During our visit for Tori’s 1st birthday party, the first snow of the season fell on the day of her party! Grampy gave her the first taste of snow.

The rest of us made party preparations. Kandice had seen this Mini Mouse fruit bowl on Pinterest, and Rob and I enjoyed creating it!

Rob and Bob finished decorating the huge tree. We always say that Rob likes to “Clark Griswold the heck out of Christmas”–and he does.

But….back to our drive through New York….our appointment was only half a block from THE TREE so we had to take a moment for that. Due to the earlier incident with the bomber, the streets were heavily patrolled by policemen in groups, all carrying automatic weapons. I haven’t seen that kind of police presence since the 70s in Rome, but I will refrain from saying more.

The promenade and the shops along it were still as festive as ever. My favorite shop is Penahaligons!

Earlier this week Bob gave a slide presentation locally about our travels through the Windward Islands during the past winter season. As usual, he was entertaining and humorous and his slides were stunning.

One of the highlights of the evening for me was that a woman approached me to tell me that she’d missed hearing me add to the presentation with whatever handwork I’d discovered on our travels. I had no idea that any of the sailors in the audience would want to hear about textiles and handwork!

And on that note, it seems I’ve gotten quite far off track on writing about textiles lately. Perhaps my final thoughts will center on that. A couple of my gifts this year focused on Idrija lace from Slovenia, which I quite love. I ordered these little lace hearts from Slovenia. I should have ordered many more!

My favorite purchase this year came from the Hartford Artisans’ holiday sale back in late November. It is a short piece of Deflected Double Weave sewn into a cowl. What a terrific idea to weave cowls in this structure! For one thing, when sewn together with a flat fell seam they are reversible! Another bonus is that from a warp that would normally be used to make only two scarves, I can probably get six cowls! Oh! And a 3rd bonus–no fringes to twist. I’ve already made my warp, in a much different colorway than this cowl which I bought at the sale. I’ll be ready to dress my small Baby Wolf to weave some gifts when I return next spring.

Today marks the halfway point of Hanukah, and it is only 10 days until Christmas. We’ve had three snowfalls already and some record breaking cold temperatures. As I write this today I am steeping a large quantity of gin in a mixture of dried hisbiscus flowers, cardamon and peppercorns. It is my ‘plan B’ from years of searching for damson plums with no luck. I hope hibiscus gin will make a delicious gin and tonic this evening to warm me as I make a batch of cookie and get started on tomorrow’s beef wellington. I hope you are doing similar things to make your holiday festive and to keep warm. Best wishes….

Antigua, Ho!

November 19, 2017 | Leave a Comment

My trip to Antigua went smoothly. Once I arrived at the airport in Baltimore, I connected with another sailing friend, Judie. We made our connection in Miami, and even enjoyed a couple of leisurely hours in the American Airlines member lounge! There is a saying among sailors that “nothing goes to weather like a 747.” It’s certainly true! While Bob had his easiest passage this year, there was still one long day when he and his crew had to schlog through 20 squalls. My passage was much shorter and much smoother than Bob’s! His journey took 9 days, 23 hours. He had estimated 10 days, so how’s that for accuracy on something as hard to predict as sailing conditions and boat speed?

It is shockingly hot here, but lush from all the rain during hurricane season. Antigua has had little damage compared to its close neighbor Barbuda whose entire population has now been evacuated. We spoke with a waitress who is from Dominica who said that the rainforest, the best in the Caribbean, has been flattened. No one here has gone untouched by this year’s violent weather.

I have made things as cozy and homelike as I can for the moment. I’ve put out the little woven table mat that I bought from Chris Hammel during the Greater Boston Open Studios a few weeks back. It is just right for our dining table aboard Pandora. I hope she knows how much I love it! Bob got fresh bougainvillea for the table to greet me when I arrived, as well as a vaseful of pale pink oleander. He knows I love flowers!

The day before I left home I visited the Hartford Artisans’ annual weaving sale with my friend Jody. We both bought some great treasures, and I bought this kitchen towel to put onboard to help me remember fall at home….there are no naturally occurring autumn colors in the Caribbean, so this feels a little like New England in November. It’s the towel on the left.

Our mascot, the little sailing mouse, French Louie (who came from a shop in St. Martin, but is originally from Denmark!), has a new hammock. My friend Mary made it for me when she was trying out her skills at net making. She did a fine job, and Louie and we love his new spot for relaxing! Thank you, Mary! Sadly, we will not be visiting St. Martin this year due to the hurricane damage suffered there.

Before he left on the long passage, Bob made a lot of entertainment plans for the boats arriving here. There has been cocktail party one night, and a ceremony by the Antigua and Barbuda Royal Navy Tot Club last night. We were guests at their daily meeting, where in historic fashion one of the members reads from the logbook various events that took place on this day over the past 700 years or so, then toasts enemies and lost friends (Thursday’s toast-there’s a different one for each day of the week) and the health of the Queen, and THEN we each take a tot of rum, all in ‘one go.’ For men, a tot is an 1/8 of a pint. That is 1/4 cup of rum, straight, all in one go! For women guests the tot is half that. Well, let me tell you I failed at getting it down all in one go, and I decided not to attempt the rest of it. I gave it to Bob, who was successful at his own full tot. Sheesh!

Here is Bob in the white shirt at center, thanking the Royal Tot members for their hospitality in hosting us for their daily ceremony. It’s a beautiful setting in the Copper and Lumber historic site that is now an inn and restaurant.

Tonight, Saturday, Bob has arranged another dinner, the first of three. Tonight we will be having fresh sushi, Caribbean style. There is a traditional Caribbean dinner coming up on Monday to welcome the rest of the arrivals–boats who had various equipment problems and boats that are simply slower or had weather issues getting here. One of the restaurants here in Falmouth Harbor is hosting a Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday for all of us who will not be home for that holiday. There are plenty of English and Canadians in our sailing group who will join us for this holiday dinner. Other boats in the harbor are flying home port flags from Sweden, Holland, and France. As the weeks go by there will be more and arrivals from many other places.

For the moment Pandora is in Falmouth Harbor, where we spent a few days on the dock, enjoying the ease of stepping ashore for me, in addition to being plugged into electricity so that I had some air conditioning to help acclimate to this tropical climate! Now we are off the dock and anchored out in the harbor. There is plenty of breeze, but it still takes some getting used to!

This lovely water garden is near the entrance to English Harbor, just a short walk from Falmouth. I would love to add something similar to my own garden next summer. I know I’ll have to settle for something far less interesting than this giant iron pot that might have been in use when Lord Nelson was stationed here.

My last post had a photo of Pillars Restaurant where we had dinner after my arrival. Pillars is equally beautiful before the sun goes down.

Before I left I had three wonderful days with our son and his wife, and our adorable granddaughter Tori. She is getting cuter and cuter as well as bigger and bigger! I’m so glad we will see her again over Thanksgiving weekend.

In fact she will be our Princess Tori when she has her christening day on Sunday after Thanksgiving. And speaking of royalty, we have been hearing for days that Prince Charles will be visiting Antigua today as part of a tour to see the hurricane damage among islands that were once British subjects. I am keen to see him! Wish me luck!