The beachfront at Dickenson Bay

Matthew's "Rope"
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After a good night's sleep we are raring to go.  We explore the beachfront, it's pretty nice.  We are located on Dickenson Bay, staying in the Halycon Rex Hotel.  The hotel was very cheap - 50 quid per night for room only.  It shows though as it's all a bit tatty.  But it is a 3-star hotel, so what did we expect?

Dickenson Bay is smaller than I expected.  It mainly consists of the Sandals Resort, a couple of bars and then a couple of smaller resorts like ours.  All the beaches in Antigua are public, so you are free to walk anywhere around the Sandals "beach", but when we try to get inside Sandals resort we are quickly thrown out.  They security guard isn't particularly helpful either in showing us the way to the local shop.  It took us a further week to find it!!

Did we feel safe there? Absolutely.

Dickenson Bay
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There are about 3 or 4 places to eat outside the hotels.  We didn't actually eat at any of them in the end so I can't comment much.  But I would say the Coconut Grove looked nice at the end of the beach, and "The Beach" also seemed to have a good menu.

Dickenson Bay had quite a lot of watersports on offer.  Depending on your hotel deal some facilities were free.  There are also "shops" with Jet Ski's and the like.  We ended up using the Jet Skis from Sneaky Pete's.  The most common watersport activity, apart from swimming, seemed to be sailing on the hobby-cats.  There weren't many kayakers about, and we only saw one person Water-ski whilst we were there.

Dickenson Bay again
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It's fair to say the resort and Dickenson Bay was extremely quiet.  I suspect this was a combination of the recent murders of the UK honeymooners, the time of year, and the collapse of XL.com.  Did we feel safe there?  Absolutely.  There were a few peddlars on the beach but they were very pleasant, and I felt no threat.  There was a high security presence on the resorts, sometimes local's could get in though.  From talking to other people that had holidayed elsewhere in the Carribean it seemed this was a safer island to be on!

Sunset
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We spoke to the taxi drivers about the lack of people.  Their comments were that it was the quietest it had been in 25 years in September, but that Sept was always a slow month.  In October the cruise ships start coming in, and the weather improves which brings over more people.  They also said that Americans' had stopped coming over so much, most of the custom was now from the UK/Europe.  We were surprised, with the US being so close.

Personally, it didn't bother me the resort was quiet, I prefer it like this anyhow. I think there were enough people for it not to be awkward.

Spot the boat!
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The one thing that was missing from Dickenson Bay which we had seen in Fiji was that there was no reef close to shore, and very few fishes (if any) visible in the water during the day.  At night you could see the fishes from the Warri Pier, but it just didn't have the same feel as Fiji - it felt like the reef had fallen away somewhat - which was obviously a real shame.