We’re up fairly early and head into the harbour to make the walk up to Shirley’s Heights. It’s a pretty famous lookout, several hundred years old.

It’s a nice walk around the north-east side of English Harbour, you walk up a big hill, then back down again. About two-thirds of the way down to Galleon Beach we see the sign that marks the entrance to the foot path that leads through some ruins and an old gravesite and eventually to the top of Shirley Heights. It’s quite descriptive and says it’s about 1 3/4 miles. Again, if this was a French Island, there would be no sign.

We walk up the gulley, it’s a pleasant slope and come to what apparently was an old dam. No other explanation for it here. Further up we come to some gravestones, pretty much in the middle of the bush, some of them still legible and 230 years old. A little further up we come to the major cemetery. Probably 30 or 40 gravestones around, very few of them have any discernible writing. Pretty interesting.

Near the top is the old cistern, and then you come out on the road just below Shirley Heights. The path continues across the road to the bluffs where there are fabulous views of the south of Antigua and the many sailboats engaged in some kind of race. There seems to be continuous races here.

We walk around a bit and eventually make our way up to Shirley Heights. Spectacular setting we take a bit of a break, a bunch of photos and admire the views. I email one to Bill Danis. A young woman offers to take our picture and tells us her husband is on one of the very large sailboats out in the ocean in the race – currently winning so she’s happy. She’s there with her two young daughters and they are a professional racing family. He travels the world racing on this large yacht. She asks us a few questions as they are interested in doing what we do.

We buy a couple of soda waters and take shelter from yet another short downpour. There is a party here every Sunday afternoon/evening but we doubt we’ll make it.

We find the track leading down, a bit steeper but not too bad, shortly we are on Galleon Beach. It’s very nice and we cool off in the ocean a bit.

We walk along the beach, procrastinating for the long walk back up the hill and around the bottom of English Harbour to our dinghy. Christy spies a water taxi and flags him down. He takes us across the 100 yards to the other side of the bay. Could almost throw a rock across this gap but the walk around would have been long and hot. The taxi saves us at least an hour. He asks for EC$20 but we don’t have many small bills so he is happy with the 10 or 12 we give him. He’s being paid by the resort so this is gravy for him.

We walk back to the dinghy and head back to Milu. After a brief respite, we dinghy over to Pigeon Beach, tie up to the swimming marker lines like everyone else and wade ashore. We walk up and down a bit and lounge on the beach. Pretty soon it’s looking like more rain and getting late anyway. Most people are leaving so we do too.

We chill back on Milu for the evening.