Vixen has been sailing around Antigua for about two months now. We just had a great visit from Daniel and Raya who flew down from Maine and slept on the cabin floor for a week.
As you can see in the photos Daniel made all the girls palm frond hats.
Antigua is not a big island but it has a good mix of reef anchorages, deep inlets and some of the nicest people in the Caribbean. We are looking forward to the upcoming Classic Boat racing out of English Harbour with our friends on Grayhound -- a 65-foot three masted lugger from England.
I have also included a short video of Vixen running down the coast of Mauritania last November. Timbuktu is only 800 miles east across the Sahara!

Last November Vixen spent a month in Senegal, West Africa -- one week in Dakar and three weeks on the Casamance River. I keep thinking of that time on the river even now a few months later. This map is the best available of the area -- just a handmade sketch from some French cruising notes. Our electronic charts showed nothing but an angular indentation of the African coast. Here is the delta where the river meets the Atlantic but it continues fifty miles up stream to the town of Ziguanchor. We spent a couple of weeks in that Octopus-shaped maze in the middle of the sketch. 
On the whole river -- probably hundreds of miles of backwaters -- there was only one other yacht. 
Once you wind yourself back up into the mangroves the river is always calm no matter how much wind blows. At about five in the morning as first light could be discerned in the east the sounds of animals would rise from the jungle. Mostly birds but also frogs, crickets and other strange howls.
Here is a recording that gives a faint idea of the beautiful cacophony that greeted us every morning on the river.