Dominica (Pro: Dom-in-ee-ka
We left Martinique with 2 reefs in the main for our 35 mile journey to Dominica but as there was next to no wind we shook them out. As we left the lee of the island we had to put them back in again and had a very lively sail with 25-30k wind on the beam between the 2 islands.
Hoisting the usual home made Dominica flag
(above the yellow quarantine flag)
Roseau Bay (Dominica)
Roseau Bay
Ahhhh Dominica!! My memories of how wonderful this island was from a sailing trip I did here 12 years ago were not to disappoint! A very beautiful (though poor), lush tropical island with no less than 7 potentially active volcanoes. It is the only island which still has original Carib people living on it (they have all been overrun from all the other islands many years ago). We picked up a buoy in Roseau Bay and met up with a couple we had met previously, Frank (Germany) and Lilliet (Brazil) who are cruising on a Moody 36 the same as Rapau. This was interesting for Keith as he could compare the technical detils etc with Frank. After inviting them aboard to try our several of our Ti-punch's one evening, we did a couple of fairly small hikes with them using the local bus to the Sulpher springs at Soufriere and the magnificent waterfalls at Trafalgar Falls.
Soaking in the hot sulpher springs
Waiting for local bus with a nice Carib lady
Trafalgar Falls
We then somehow agreed to go on a hike to the boiling lake with them. This involved 3 hours to walk there and over 3 hours to walk back! We got up at silly o'clock in the morning to get the local bus, (in the process of taking the dinghy ashore the key on a lanyard around Keith's neck hit hm in the eye, we joked that this was a ploy to avoid the walk). We started the walk at 6.50, reaching the boiling lake at 9.45. We finally reached the end of the walk at 13.45 (taking more time coming back as we stopped for our picnic which lightened our ruck sacs thankfully!) The terrain was a gruelling mixture of very steep wooden steps, rock climbs and stream crossings. But the rewards were wonderful. We passed warm sulphur streams, hot boiling geysers, steaming fumeroles in the Valley of Desolation, and finally reached the boiling lake which is the largest in the world being 62m across and a bubbling inferno of water heated from somewhere deep inside the earth.
Frank and Lilliet on the hike to Boiling Lake
Keith climbing
River crossings on way to Boiling Lake
The Boiling Lake
Teddy at the Boiling Lake
All of us at the Boiling Lake at lake!
Hot fumeroles and bubbling pools
The Boiling Lake in the distance
Liliet climbing and crossing
Teddy bear picnic during our return from the boiling lake
We even boiled an egg in one of the small boiling puddles then ate it, and had our picnic (with teddy bear) beside a cooling frresh water stream. Needless to say we sailed the next day to avoid testing if our legs were still working! (The white of Keith's left eye on one side turned into a nasty red blood blister type of thing, so he wasn't joking after all!)
Frank boiling the egg in a net in a boiling pool
Portsmouth, Prince Ruper Bay (Dominica)
We sailed up to Portsmouth in the north of Dominca and anchored in Prince Rupert Bay. From here we visited the Cabrits National Park and went to visit Fort Shirley which was built by the British to defend Dominica. There was a really nice dispaly of the famous 'Battle of the Saints' in 1782 in which the British beat the French in a sea battle in between Dominica and Ille de Saints (the next island to the north, which is French).
The view out to the Saints where the battle of the Saints took place
The outboard motor had stopped working so Keith had to mend that and we also did some hard work scrubbing the bottom of the boat using scuba gear while here. We could not believe how much weed and marine growth had taken hold beneath the water line in the last couple of months. Afterwards Keith was having a wash and found a little crab behind his ear! (He says it was from the bottom scrubbing, but who knows how long it had been living there!)
Keith mending the outboard motor
We finally left Prince Rupert Bay for Ille de Saints feeling a bit worse for wear as there was a beach BBQ the night before which included free rum punch! There were many people from the anchorage there and we met a couple from New Zealand who wanted help to sail their boat across the Pacific to New Zealand...........a few more rum punches and we would have been on our way to the Panama Canal by now!!
A video of St Vincent some time ago!
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