New Year in Guadaloupe.... again

That’s right, we have only had half a holiday season in an English speaking country since we left home, (Year 1 – Baiona – Spain/ Cascais - Portugal, Year 2 – Canary Islands – Spain, Year 3 – Puerto Rico, Year 4 – Dominica (English with a twist) / Guadaloupe, Year 5 – French West Indies), but everyone still enjoys it much the same way with fireworks on New Year’s Eve and lots of partying. 

One downside to cruising is cruiser’s midnight which falls at 2100hours when most cruisers fall asleep. This does tend to preclude at least some from truly celebrating NYE properly, and again I was alone on deck to watch the fireworks in the Saintes harbour. We had planned to be well north of here for NYE but we decided to hide from a largish NNE swell here on the new mooring bouys (€60 a week for us) but did not dodge the swells at all! This resulted in a rather bumpy week where a lot of reading and not much else was achieved.

The Saintes is a pretty little group of islands south of Guadaloupe with a character all of its own. Definitely French, with baguettes and accras de morue for lunch and the harbour neighbourhood starts to get dotted with small cruise ships many of them sail powered and some square rigged.




Staadt Amsterdam
They did make me appreciate just how easy it was to sail our boat – certainly couldn’t do what this lady did!





So we had a restful week, dining out, and relaxing and as a challenge I baked a banana loaf using Dinah’s (Evergreen) recipe and boy was it good!



On the sixth day we could take the rolly anchorage no longer and dropped the mooring lines and headed for Deshaies. As usual the winds were fluky coming up the lee of Guadaloupe, motoring, motor-sailing and sailing at various time. But of course the wind shot up to 30knots as we rounded up into the bay and after a quick and nervous once round the anchorage we anchored out the back in about 10m of water. Our new Rocna grabbing quickly, thank god!

We decided to wait for a nice weather window to go straight to Sint Maarten as it looked like the swell and predominant winds was going to rule out the planned visit to Monserrat again – so we sat back and relaxed, taking advantage of our familiarity with Deshaies to do very little. The most adventurous we got was to dress up in our new Christmas presents and head to Grand Anse for lunch and a day on the beach. The swells were large and breaking on the beach, so a swim was crossed off the agenda and a longer lunch was the order of the day! And we deserved it as the walk to the beach took about an hour each way (and there were hills in both directions!)



On the way to the beach we did stop in the local supermarket for a bottle of water (yes I do drink water as well) and were surprised to find a familiar advert – kinda makes you homesick doesn’t it...



 Anyway, it looks like tonight is the night we bid farewell to the Guadaloupe for the last time (probably, maybe, who knows...) and head off to St Maarten.

COMMENT: 

AUTHOR: Silke 

URL: http://www.la-palma-sailing.com 

DATE: 2/7/2012 5:01:10 PM 

great post - great to hear from you! all the best and please keep posting! huge hugs from La Palma xx ----- 

COMMENT: 

AUTHOR: Mum 

DATE: 2/9/2012 1:18:57 AM 

Great to get your BLOG Matt. Great photos as usual

COMMENT: 

AUTHOR: Alison 

DATE: 2/10/2012 6:37:51 AM 

Love the Christmas outfit Karen, it looks almost like winter gear for cruisers. Al x

Ah Guadeloupe – You’ve done it again!

Previously in Matt & Karen’s Soggy Adventure... (bugger it, read them yourself). So we checked in at Le Pelican and everything in Deshaies was as we remembered it (except Harold no longer was delivering bread, which is why we came back – fresh baguettes and croissants in the morning without leaving the boat – how civilised!) Anyway, there was not much we needed to see since we had been here before, so it was a relax station, with a dive thrown in.



So that was how it was. When we got back to the boat, Mike and Cheryl from Happy Times, whom we had met checking in, dropped by and asked us over for sundowners.... so the relaxing started. We arrived and met Mikayla, their daughter, and were introduced to Bob (a high school headmaster), who he ditched his sick wife Janice for the night and Johanna and Martin from Swedish Sailing Vessel Snowbird (you really need Cheryl’s Swedish accent to understand why it is Swedish Sailing Vessel Snowbird, not just Snowbird). We had a fun night, particularly when Bob described a real life High School Musical. I am sure that is why he left his job!

So after we got home and got some rest we decided we wanted to dive Jacques Cousteau’s marine park so we went and tried to book in at Blue Pearl www.bluepearl.gp run by Relio and Stephanie, but they were doing what they do – diving. But through the miracle of the internet we made contact and organized the dive. We couldn’t do Jacques’ place but on Saturday we dived the reef just off Anse Paul Thomas. The price was reasonable and all inclusive and Stephanie spoke English! When we arrived there were 2 other couples diving with us, but they went with Relio doing a Baptism of Diving and we got Stephanie to ourselves. The dive was fantastic ranged from 2-18m, although Karen didn’t have enough weights, so she hogged Stephanie and I had to try and keep up to see what she was being shown.  We swam with a hawksbill turtle, saw fish fighting, unique sea shells, heaps of vase coral of so many shades and colours. It was great. I managed to last 45 minutes before I blew my tank. We then hauled ourselves onto the boat, ate ananas (pinapple) and bananas (bananas) and drank planteurs punch (rum punch) before heading back to the shop and having more planteurs and finding out what we had seen. It was a great day. Highly recommend doing a dive with them!

After the dive we relaxed and then motored to Le Saintes at the southern end of Guadaloupe. We tried to check in here on our way north... you would have known that if you had read the blog... but it was too crowded. This time we headed straight for Pain du Sucre (sugar loaf) under motor. All was good until 10 minutes from the anchorage when the oil pressure alarm from the starboard engine came on... what the..!!!!

We motor in on the port engine and literally dropped the hook like a charterer! 30m and probably all in a heap. I had a feeling I knew what it was and when I opened the engine compartment, I was right. My oil filter wrench had scrapped the paint on the oil filter and it rusted, pin-holed and sprayed all our engine oil around the engine room! It was the quickest oil change I have ever done – no need to pump the sump – it was empty! I changed the oil filter, filled the engine with oil (or up to the full mark anyway for all the girls out there) and tested my work – all good! So I did the Heinrick Manoeuvre (Boofa – you know what I am talking about) on the anchor and found it resting on its side on the sand below. Time to re-anchor! We test the motor and reset the hook and relaxed for the night.

Next morning, we decided to move into Grand Bourg so up came the pick and we headed on in and decided to drop the anchor near the fishing harbour where Merengue told us to. As we were setting the anchor we look over and all the other boats in the harbour were on moorings. So the hook came up again and we moved over to mooring number 47, nice and shiney new and free until 1 July (apparently). They are everywhere in the harbour which is notorious for deep anchorages and poor holding to the north, so we were happy to be on the mooring! I have heard they will be €25 a night soon.

Anyway, after deciding to never do a fort again in the Caribbean, we set off the next morning to Fort Napoleon on an overcast but humid day. It was a reasonably easy walk and the views over the harbour were great.



I hate to say it, but the fort was in excellent condition and was well worth the walk.



It was then back to the boat with baguette in hand and back at the boat we met Terry and Julie on Melvin and talked about having drinks the following night and maybe staying for the fish festival on the weekend. Now I am sad to say, we have met a couple of pretenders along our travels (Boats flying the Aussie flag, but the owners having funny South African accents – obviously they have seen the light even tho’ one who will remain nameless still barracks for the Boks), the situation on Melvin is worse... Terry is an Aussie and Melvin is flagged with a red southern cross and no Fed star (Kiwi). I will work on him on the way south and see if I can straighten him out!

Next day we catch up with Happy Times and invite them for drinks, only to find Melvin has done a runner for Pointe a Pitre – they must of heard of my rum punch, so we delay drinks for the a day and I get to work on Debbie’s old donk. To fix the gears, the whole motor head needs to be removed, and after inspecting it, this does not seem hard. I remove all the visible bolts, spill engine oil over Karen’s nice white deck, but still I can’t get the motor off. Before I resort to a hammer, I do a web search on the problem which I find is very common. The solution was to hit it with a soft hammer, which I did and it worked. The engine is apart and next step is to fix the gear shift – but we don’t want to rush things so that can wait a while.

Melvin arrived back a couple of days later, and I told them that we had had drinks without them, but the fish festival was on. So Saturday it was off to Plage de Pompierre for the concourse de culinaire (or something like that). The bay, an easy walk from town, is beautiful so we found some coconut palms (which Terry checked out for dangerous appendages) for shade and sat down to listen to the music.



As they were still setting up the stalls, this situation didn’t last long, we hopped up and headed to a restaurant close by to have a cool drink, taking in the wildlife on the way.



The restaurant was packed with locals and the food looked quite nice, but we restrained and headed back to the fish festival – there had to be food there. And there was – fish no less! So we grabbed some fish skewers (and Karen went outside to the sandwich vendor for her cheese sandwich) and settled back under the coconuts and gorged ourselves – there is no such thing as a small helping in the Caribbean!



Sunday came around quickly so it was sails up and off to Dominica, with winds on the nose and seas on the side, but we made good progress with the  winds shifting to the north as we came into the lee of the island and we sailed on into Prince Rupert Bay with plenty of sun and Karen at the helm (for some of it at least)

Like I said, We’re off to The Saints

So we got up early right, headed north right, had a beautiful sail right, noticed a cruise ship off our port stern right, started to head into the channel to The Saints right, still under sail right, noticed that the cruise ship was gaining on us fast right, and heading into the channel right – so much for sailing vessels stand on rights – we turned to starboard and dropped the sails looped round and followed it into port. Welcome to the Saints!

That was just the start of it – there were 2 more cruise ships at anchor in the harbour and about a thousand other boats taking up the two small anchorages near Grande Bourg so after one aborted anchoring attempt we gave up and decided to head on to Guadaloupe – say Pointe-a-Pitre. That wasn’t to be either as the wind had turned more to the North making a sail to Pointe-a-Pitre on the nose and with only 4 hours of light and a tricky channel entry we turned to the west to head to the anchorage at Basse Terre – the capital. Well I think Doyle got it wrong when he said there was an anchorage there – the shelf looked about 12ft wide and the wind was blowing from the west so we had a lee shore full of rocks! Bugger that we agreed as the starboard engine failed, got a rope caught. We powered up on port and headed north to Pigeon Island. Along the way the rope seemed to clear itself and we were able to start starboard as well to make better time. We made it by sundown in time to see a beautiful sunset over the island.

We woke up in the morning and the north east swell had arrived in anger. We watched as the waves crashed onto the dinghy docks that suggested that we may not get ashore here easily…. which was an understatement. We dropped Debbie and thought we would see if we could find a way in as we had to check in to the country. We tried to find a river that was a bit to the south but with no luck so we tried the floating dinghy dock which looked interesting to say the least but the waves weren’t breaking over it anymore. As we neared we met a local dive instructor swimming to his boat and he suggested out best bet was to leave Pigeon Island and head north to Deshaies and check in there. It was an easier harbour to get ashore in this swell. So we upped anchor and headed north.

We arrived in Deshaies and anchored out the back as we always did and sat on the boat making sure we were dug in watching the waves crash against the walls of the beachfront restaurants. “How the hell are we ever going to get ashore in that – hopefully we can get in at the fishing harbour” I was thinking when we heard “Where II” being called from a rowing dinghy fighting the wind and swell. It was a guy named Indie from the yacht Pegasus anchored ahead of us. He gave us the low down on the dinghy dock and Customs so we could clear in. Customs were helpful but made it clear that really they didn’t want to waste time with yachts – better for us to clear at the local cyber café (Pelicans). We wandered around the village checking out where everything was and getting a baguette before heading back for the night.

The weather was crap for the next couple of days windy and raining and we stayed on the boat and even though there was bugger all sun so solar power was low, Wally the Wind Generator certainly made up for it and we were living off free energy for most of the time.

 There is a variation on the boat boy in this harbour, in true French style…. Harold the bread boy! Each afternoon he comes round and takes orders and the following morning we get fresh, hot baguettes and croissants and pain au chocolate! With the bad weather we were even having hot coffee for breakfast (infused with local vanilla beans – very continental!)

Indie came and visited (I get the impression he was kicked off the boat as his partner Natalie was studying for some exams) and we decided to have New Years Day lunch on our boat (well really Indie did and we went along with it) So Indie and Natalie were bringing a French Ham, and wine and we did the quiche, salad and Champagne.

So New Years Eve was spent on the boat, we put champagne in the fridge and hit the sack early with the alarm set for 2350 so we could see in the New Year. Good in theory, but when someone is so tired that they can’t get up – the practice was not quite there. Anyway there were fireworks from shore and the boat next door was letting off flares so it was a bright welcome to the NY – I won’t say which one of us saw it in….

New Year’s lunch was delicious – the ham and potatoes baked to perfection and the company great. Although we hadn’t met them before, we had realised that Indie and Natalie were anchored not far from us in Brewer’s Bay St Thomas last year ( there were only 4 boats there) and knew our Bocce tormentors - Jim & Wendy on Merengue.

Once the rain stopped we decided it was time to see some of the island and headed to the bus stop to get a bus to Pointe-a-Pitre. Waiting, waiting, waiting… but no bus showed so we headed to the car hire and got ourselves a little ford and headed into town. We stopped at Grande Anse which was pretty and within walking distance of Deshaies, and went onto St Rose where we stopped for morning tea (pastries off course, we are in France) and headed onto Pointe-a-Pitre (missing the Rum Museum - can you believe it!?)

On the way in to town we passed a huge mall with a hardware (Mr Bricolage) and sports store (Decathlon) so we made a point of planning a return visit here on our way home so Karen could shop. The way in was busy and it reminded me of traffic jams back home which I don’t miss and didn’t expect to see on an island this small but there you go.

 Pointe-a-Pitre is a pretty town with some distinct architecture – starting with the grand Tourist bureau.

We strolled along the streets and through the market stalls, buying the local vanilla beans very cheaply compared with other islands before heading to the Schoelcher Museum.

Victor Schoelcher was one of the first advocates of the abolishment of slavery in these islands and the museum has a collection of slave exhibits including slave neck collars, models of slave ships and even what appeared to be a slave sales registry or cargo list (I am not quite sure as all the explanations were in French). We finished off the visit here looking for handbags (as you always do in a tropical island).

Next we checked out the marina complex and then headed home via the mall (where we got drawer rails for Karen’s new shelf in the galley – my next job) and face cream from Carrefour. We then did the shopping run to Leader Price to refill my Brie, ham, beer and wine stock as my vegetarian partner has been quite taken by ham baguettes since we have been in the French Islands.

Next morning we were up early as we had the car until noon and took off for the hills. Our first stop was a lookout at Morne Louis which was up a tight little road littered with the results of mud slides. We made it to the top to be greeted by comms towers and absolutely no where we could get a view through the foliage! Not much of a look out! Another car was arriving as we left but I did not have enough French to say “Don’t bother!”
We then made it to Maison du Foret – an early picnic ground next to a fast flowing stream. This is a beautiful little area with heaps of picnic pavilions and further along the road, an interpretation centre (known as this obviously because we non-French speaking people need an interpreter to understand any of the signs), a suspension bridge across the stream and a 20 min walk which we decided to do (hiking again!).

The rain forest was wet and slimy and full of big trees and stag horns (some of them with name tags in French) – it was pretty whatever it was we were looking at. We made the hike in 24mins (an extra 4 for a detour around a fallen tree) and if you know Karen, crossing the suspension bridge was a great achievement too!

We headed back to Deshaies and dropped off the car, deciding that if tourist information was open we would head up to the Botanical Gardens. It was (first time in two weeks) and we did. They call the gardens and a bus will come down to town and pick you up which, although it is only 1.5 km it is all up hill so it is worth it.
Entrance fee was €14.50 each, which standing at the gate seemed as steep as the ride up, but we swallowed it and paid (we had just got a free ride up the hill) and were greeted by a thousand odd 35 lb koi carp. You could buy food and feed them but they looked fat enough and we needed some money over to buy our own lunch. The gardens are beautifully laid out and include not only the carp, but lorikeets (from Australia), flamingos, blue parrots as well as thousands of trees, flowering plants (half not flowering at this time of year but they had photos of what they would look like if they were flowering), orchids, waterfalls and even a Norfolk pine from Australia!

And of course we finished off the day taking the obligatory photo of me and my headless friends.

Big day, but we decided that we should forego the free bus ride back down the hill and then headed back to the boat.

After all that excitement, the next morning we decided that we would take a good weather window and head north to Antigua. If we missed it we would be stuck in Deshaies for another week at least, so the diving will have to wait for our return trip this season. So we checked out, and spent the afternoon doing maintenance on the boat (Engine checks, re-stitching the trampoline and finally clearing the rope from the Starboard prop).

Tomorrow we head for Antigua!

COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Mum
DATE: 1/30/2011 10:57:23 PM
Really enjoyed this blog this morning, Matt. Fantastic photos.

COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Anne Foster
DATE: 2/3/2011 12:29:32 PM
G'day WhereII and Happy New Year, I found you again after a long absence-good to hear how things are going Matt, you are obviously far too relaxed and at ease with the world. The blog is great-it all sounds magical and I love that Karen is eating ham, those French foodie influences are hard to resist! All is well here. We are leaving Melbourne town soon, alas not for Caribbean waters but for the sunny climes and brilliant beaches of Perth. Dave is working on an alliance over West (at my restless insistence of "c'mon let's do something new now that we've conquered the child rearing thing") and we will be there for 1-2 years at this stage. Sol and Elsa are 2 and 1 and full of fun and I should probably consider working again but I'm hoping to become a beachcomber and get a tan to rival Karen's... watch out for Pirates and I'll check in on you again soon. Cheers, Anne xx