On our trip from St. Barths to Antigua, we decided to stop and stay the night in Barbuda just so we could shorten the daily sailing time. 

Barbuda is a flat island, with not a lot of inhabitants, and a lot of nice sand beaches.  We anchored here when we had chartered previously so we knew a little about the island.

We weren’t going ashore, so we didn’t need to check in with immigration.  I had purposely not registered with Barbuda, nor told anyone that we were going to be there.  If we wanted to check in, we would have had to had a PCR test and quarantine for 14 days, because Barbuda is officially part of Antigua, with the same rules.  So we just anchored, had some dinner, and got ready for bed.

About an hour after we anchored, I heard my cell phone ringing.  I looked at the number and recognized the area code as that of Antigua/Barbuda.  I thought this was very weird because, while I had pre-registered to enter Antigua, I hadn’t said anything to Barbuda and didn’t understand who would be calling from Antigua.

When I answered the phone, the voice on the other end identified themselves as being from the Port Authority of Barbuda.  The guy said they saw our boat on AIS (like GPS), found our phone number on the Antigua registration, and wanted to know what our intentions were.  Seemed nice enough, just doing his job, so I said that we were on our way to Antigua and were just spending the night.  He double-checked that we weren’t planning on going ashore – I confirmed that we weren’t – he said to have a good night and hung up.  I just thought this was interesting that we were being watched and they were trying to do the best they could to enforce their COVID rules.