The latest gossip on the terrace was that Roman Abramovich was building a place here on the island. Somewhere overlooking Nonsuch Bay, someone said, near Harmony Hall, the plantation house turned upscale Italian restaurant with rooms and a gallery. Berlusconi's building here, too, another added. And we'd already spotted Giorgio Armani's villa at Galley Bay, as we'd sailed up to Falmouth Harbour from Hermitage Bay, the newest hotel on Antigua and our base.
We were lunching on lobster salad - it was that or the snapper - on the waterfront veranda of the Admiral's Inn in Nelson's Dockyard, one of a settlement of exquisite Georgian buildings constructed of stone and brick (brought as ballast) at the behest of the British navy in the late 18th century. And the conversation had turned to the rich and famous after the revelation from its elderly proprietor, Ethelyn Philip, that Madonna and Sean Penn had spent their honeymoon in 1985 staying at the inn. It seemed improbable not because the building, which dates back to 1788, isn't beautiful, nor that the view through the masts of the massed yachts bobbing on the turquoise Caribbean isn't stunning, but because as celebrity-endorsed hotels in this part of the world go, the Admiral's Inn is, well, modest. You can stay in room one, where the queen of pop put up, this month for $125 (around £62) a night, a pleasant airy whitewashed space with a four-poster bed covered in a toile de Jouy counterpane, a couple of canvas director's chairs and a compact and gloomy shower room that an estate agent might describe as in need of refurbishment.
Abramovich chose not to stay ashore when he spent New Year here last winter; instead he slept aboard Ecstasea, a mega-yacht from his burgeoning flotilla. I was staying somewhere between the two, at least in terms of luxury and expense, at Hermitage Bay, a new upscale hotel on the west coast of Antigua.
It's an alluring place for all sorts of reasons: 25 handsome wooden cottages, set on a verdant hillside above a long sweep of pale sand, with silvery wallaba-shingle hip roofs just like the ones on the stores, workshops and officers' quarters in the dockyard, from where it's an hour or so by boat or by road, down a long unmetalled track, on the west coast.
What makes Hermitage Bay unusual as a hotel of this quality is that it is an all-inclusive. (Curtain Bluff and Jumby Bay may have pioneered the upscale all-inclusive model on Antigua, but neither has the same sense of boutique scale, nor the impressive design credentials.) In October, for instance, a beach cottage starts at $570 (£280) a night, a rate that includes up to four meals a day (always à la carte), drinks, minibar, a 30-minute massage, transfers and watersports tuition.
Which is why the chance to learn to sail a Hobie Cat - to try something entirely new with nothing to lose if I proved hopeless or didn't enjoy it - seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. For a start, there is no better way to appreciate Antigua's landscape: the 365 beaches that trim its ragged coastline of coves, inlets, isthmuses and great curved bays. (By contrast the interior terrain, though hilly and green with patches of rainforest, is unremarkable.)
The water is also a terrific vantage point from which to survey the wildlife: a school of silver flying fish skimming over the surface and a flock of young pelicans basking along with some egrets on a rocky outcrop. By now I was leaving the sailing to my instructor, Devon, as he talked animatedly about the hawksbill turtles found here and explained why frigate birds can't land on water and that the jellyfish we'd spotted don't sting but secrete a toxic slime with a poison that can be neutralised with sand.
