Six Weeks of Sailing
July 1-4, Terre-de-Haut (Les Saintes), Guadeloupe
Our sail to Iles des Saintes (part of Guadeloupe) on July 1 was a picture-perfect day. But before we left Roseau, the capital of Dominica, Scott and I hopped in for a short swim to grab a bit of exercise (and check out hurricane-submerged docks and a rust-camouflaged car.) Kim and Lisa soon joined us. Kim was looking at the bottom, about 25 feet down, and mentioned that she saw a bandana. “See any skirts?” I asked with a laugh (a skirt of mine had disappeared a few days before, I assumed it was to the wind and currents when I was drying all of my belongings after The Great Saltwater Incident). I looked down myself, and the bandana Kim spotted was my blue paisley skirt! Scott threw his fins on and free-dived a brilliant skirt rescue with a gaff hook.
Jeff then got a lift to customs from Beanz, who arranged for a special Sunday check-out, and then we got underway.
It was a beautiful, 41-mile, seven-and-a-half hour sail. We had a few lulls and motored once for a bit, but for the most part we had a nice rolly, sunny cruise, heeled a bit to the port side. We got out of the lee (protected side) of Dominica after a few hours, and the seas got a little more energy, with the boat comfortably heeling a bit further.
We could see the two bumps of Guadeloupe (“Guad-a-loop”) for the last few hours, and as they came into focus, we watched water crash against the cliffs and tried to distinguish which were the eight isles of Les Saintes. (Does that cliffy bump of an island count?) As we approached our sheltered harbor in Bourg des Saintes, on the main island of Terre-de-Haut, we were mesmerized by mostly-white houses with rust-red roofs sprinkled in clusters. I rode in for the last 45 or so minutes on the bow, changing out our Dominican flag for the yellow quarantine flag, for our pre-customs-clearing entry, and then watching for a mooring ball.
Because we didn’t make it in in time to clear customs that day, we enjoyed sundowners from the cockpit (mostly rum-based as we were down to three beers), gulped down our third meal of pasta with red sauce, and contentedly talked and listened to music. Slowly people wandered from the cockpit to put on bikinis and grab a fresh-water rinse off the back of the boat, read, and mosey to bed.
Though a crowd of dolphins fighting playfully for a spot on our bow would have put the cherry on top, we had a remarkably lovely day. Jeff even spotted a shooting star as we sat in the cockpit in the dark.
Jeff checked us in Monday morning, we changed to the French flag representing Guadeloupe, and we dinghied in. Bourg des Saintes is a small, charming town, a fun place to explore and for me to practice my French. We all had priorities: Jeff and Scott wanted to catch some world cup soccer games, I wanted time with an outlet and wifi to write, most of us stopped at an ATM for Euros, we all shopped for staples, and Kim immediately found gelato.
Scott and Jeff lucked upon an open-air bar of men watching the Brazilian/Mexican game, and we arranged to dive in the afternoon. We watched crabs scatter around on the sand and ducking into their holes, pelicans plunging into the water after fish, and an old scraggly black island dog swimming circles in the shallows near all the dinghies. Bourg des Saintes is night-and-day in comparison to Dominica, which is among the poorer of the eastern Caribbean islands and desperately trying to recover from Hurricane Maria in September of 2017.
After a day in Bourg des Saintes, we were sad to say goodbye for the first time to one of our crew. Michelle had been with us from the start, for 10 days, and we had been just a three-person, solid team for the first week. We dinghied her over to catch a 6:30 a.m. ferry to fly out from the mainland.
Kim, Ann, and Lisa rented a golf cart to ride to a hilltop fort; it just took them a while to figure out which side of the road to drive on, and which paths were for cars and which for bikes and pedestrians. (They only got yelled at in French a few times.) We did a decent provision run at a store one evening, and I felt awful for the number of our crew monopolizing the line and for the growing number of locals behind us. (In this part of the world, the stores are sometimes quite small and often have only one line of people buying a few items for the day.)
We ate well in Bourg des Saintes, enjoying fantastic desserts (like a crazy chocolate fondant with a touch of ginger) at Au Bon Vivre. We had fabulous food at a few places for which I can’t recall their names, and for a small town, the cruising guide has a particularly long section on recommended restaurants. (It feels so uncomfortable to me when someone apologizes for not speaking English when I’m in their non-English-speaking country. This happened at a couple of Bourg des Saintes restaurants.)
We also went diving one afternoon, with Dive Pisquettes, and it was a unique diving experience. We left everything aside from dive gear at the shop (because our guide was also the captain, and no one would be on board the boat while we dived), we donned our dive gear, and we walked down to the beach, into the water, and for me, neck-deep to reach the dive boat’s ladder to climb aboard. It was a particularly wet ride out to the dive site (La Vierge), which was cool, but had odd currents through the canyons that had a few of us nervous. Our dive guide knew what he was doing, though, and we all ended up at the boat with no trouble (and Lisa and Ann had had a great snorkel while we dived). He offered us a good blast of “punch” (mostly stiff rum) from a bike water bottle on the return. My limited French had been our primary channel of communication, and he hadn’t worked much to communicate with anyone else (I’ve been the lone person before in a crowd who doesn’t speak the language, so I don’t blame him). But I was proud to earn two kisses on the cheeks from him to send us on our way.
Engine trouble the next morning shifted our schedule a bit while Jeff and Scott troubleshooted, but they sorted it out with great humor (and a little help from wifi and the Googles in town, since the boat manual is in German) and we headed around the corner in the afternoon to dive and snorkel at Pain de Sucre.
Guadeloupe is among the few islands we are allowed to dive without a local dive shop, so Kim and I used the tanks before handing them over to Scott and Jeff.
Sleeping on a boat isn’t always easy. I quickly get used to the rocking, but the noises are exacerbated—a LOT—particularly if it’s windy. (Even the captain says so.) If your bed is over the diesel tank or one of the two water tanks (unless it’s in the bunk room they all are), it sounds like you’re taking on water. But even once you know that that’s not really an issue, you have the mooring ball bobbing up against your cabin if you’re in the v-berth (the front cabin, where Jeff and I sleep), and you may have the dinghy bumping up against either of the back cabins. And then there are the many lines (don’t say “ropes” to a sailor) that might be banging within a mast, the flags whipping, the lines outside the mast, the creaks and twangs and drawers or cabinets that weren’t fastened. And then there’s the mugginess. It’s bad enough, but when you feel a spray of rain on your face while sleeping, you leap up to close the hatches in your cabin, and then you spring to the lounge and galley to close those. And then it gets hot again, so someone else might open things back up. And then there might be another squall.
BUT, it’s also a constant reminder for me that I’m living on a boat, which is pretty cool. And sometimes you can see things through the hatch. For me, I can always see the mast through the hatch from my bed, and once in a while I luck out to see the moon, and once in a while, I get to see the moon AND a bird fly overhead. I often wake up not fully rested, but I always wake up happy to be on a boat with another day ahead. Future nights—see our upcoming Saba blog—have gotten rough, but I haven’t regretted going through a one.
Learning the Language 