Ille de Saints and Guadeloupe

We left Dominica and sailed the 4 hour or so crossing to the Saints which is a little group of islands which are part of Guadeloupe, all belonging to France. We sailed across the area the battle of the Saints took place in 1782 (the British beat the French) to the lovely little quaint holiday place, only problem is it is full of French tourists and obviously priced accordingly. We had a day walking to Fort Napoleon (which was just closing when we got there at 12.30), then left for Guadeloupe the next day.







View from Fort Napoleon at The Saints

The Saints main street of its only town

Rapau at anchor in the Saints (centre of picture)

The area were the Battle of the Saints took Place

Bass Terre (Guadelouple)

We caught a fish during the 3 hour sail to Bass Terre, but sadly it got away just as we got it to the boat (and it was at least 6ft long, honest!) We went into the marina as we were desperate to fill up with water.

Wrecked vessels still lie in the marina from the Hurricane

The marina is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Lenny in 1999. The port entrance light has still not been replaced and the entrance is tricky if you get it wrong as the boulders of the sea wall which collapsed during the Hurricane are still beneath the surface reducing the depth. However, after negotiating the hazards and seeing the evidence of several wrecked boats still lying were they were wrecked, we were offered a good deal wich included water so we enjoyed the luxury of staying the night in the marina (showers and electricity, yahoooo!)

Bass Terre's sophisticated front (unsual for the Caribbean)

Dashaies (Guadeloupe)

Next day it was off to the little village at the north end of Guadeloupe, Deshaies. Another expensive French village but with a beautiful river walk, or rather a river boulder scramble along the River Dashaies. It took us two and a half hours to scramble along the boulders to the top of the river, but it was lovely and peaceful, and cool and shady under the overhanging trees.
Then we took the road back which was only half an hour walk.

Rapau in Dashaies

Dashaies sea front

Boulder Scramble

The top of the River Deshaies

We rewarded ourselves with a sundowner at a little bar where Keith continued his obsession with peeling the labels off the bottles of beer to stick onto the front of his daily long!

Keith peeling off the beer label

Awoke the next day for our 8 hr passage to Antigua. It was unusually rainy and seemed set in but we went for it anyway and had a fairly miserable sail up to Antigua in the rain most of the way (it was warm though............yet we are thoroughly spoilt!

A short video of our hike to the Boiling Lake in Dominica in March.

DOMINICA

nb. the captions wont stay in the right place everytime I publish this page so you will have to decide which captions go with which!!!

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!