Out beyond your hotel there's an island full of wicked-good exploring, loaded with seductive beaches, hidden coves, atmospheric eateries -- and the best post-office happy hour in the Caribbean.
Photos by Zach Stovall
Sometime in life, everybody should have a Saturday afternoon just like this. We're anchored on a power catamaran in Carlisle Bay, right off Antigua's curving southern shore. The air is balmy, the breeze is light, the rum punch comes out swinging. Turquoise wavelets gurgle against the hulls. Layers of green hills rise up in the island's interior. To the south, Montserrat silently smolders, its perpetual volcanic plume bent west by trade winds. I'm drip-drying after snorkeling a few nearby coral heads, spying on parrotfish. I must have problems of some kind, but at this moment I can't imagine what they might be.
"What good is it having a boat if you're only going to use it to make money?" proclaims Eli Fuller, holding court on his day off. The boat in question, the Arawak Odyssey, belongs to him, and it is often at the disposal of Adventure Antigua, the eco-tour company the outspoken third-generation islander started eight years ago, ferrying visitors on six-hour jaunts around tranquil coastal islands and reefs. But not today. It's hard to imagine that anyone on the planet does a better job than Eli of overlapping the need to pay the bills with a knack for wringing every glorious drop out of island life. The 35-year-old -- tall and wiry, his hair shorn nearly to the bone -- oversees his thriving enterprise largely via cell phone from some boat or some beach. He seems to squeeze his "work" between episodes of deep-sea fishing around Antigua, boat-camping excursions to its sparsely inhabited sister island of Barbuda, and carefree hours of windsurfing and beachcombing. Those who want to taste the good life on Antigua could hardly hope to find a better role model to follow.
| Like many a swashbuckling Caribbean yarn, this saga began in Toledo, Ohio. Early in World War II, a tough, streetwise West Point graduate from there named Nick Fuller arrived in Antigua, then a British-colonial backwater, to serve as U.S. vice consul, a diplomatic post. "He loved the water, loved boats," Eli says of his grandfather, in a slightly singsong, Creole-inflected cadence. "He told me when he set foot on Bird Island [an uninhabited outcrop off Antigua's northeast shore] he knew that's where he was supposed to be -- nowhere else on the planet." After the war the senior Fuller opened the Lord Nelson Beach Hotel, Antigua's first waterfront lodging. "He and his wife raised seven kids in that hotel," Eli says. |  |
The next generation of Fullers raised their own young in similar seaside fashion, which made for an enviably amphibious childhood. Eli grew up like a West Indies Tom Sawyer, lighting out on rafts made out of century plants, diving for conch, roaming every inch of Antigua's 22 North Sound islets, fishing for dinner. "There's no doubt we spent more time on the water than on land," he says. At 12 he took up windsurfing; at 16 he raced in the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. After graduating from college in Florida and bouncing between far-flung windsurfing regattas and short-lived jobs, he launched Adventure Antigua, gradually building it into one of the island's premier tour companies. Its flagship Eco Tour, which blends snorkeling and island-hopping with a crash course in coastal ecology, is "modeled after our childhood adventures in the North Sound," he says. "We aim to pull it off like you're visiting old friends."
Most of us are still trying to figure out how to mimic Eli's life on a permanent basis. But in the meantime, visitors with an adventurous mindset can take a few cues from him and other Antigua lifers who have the run of the 108-square-mile island. Just follow these steps.
>>> Continued: Step 1 -- Get out on the water
