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!

Martinique

In case you are wondering why the blog entries are so sporadic and e-mailing the same.

Well getting a connection is often very difficult. Sometimes we can get on line in the anchorage but only on deck, and we have to resort to trying to see the screen in whatever way we can! And it's hot in there!

Keith trying to get on-line!

Martinique

Weighed anchor from Rodney Bay, St Lucia and headed for Martinique arounds 25 miles away.

Had a brilliant sail, we sailed close hauled all the way under full main and genoa for the first time since we can remember. We were trailing a fishing lure that had been suggested to us by some freinds from a catamaran called Tallula, it was a really gay pink and feathery thing (the lure not the catamaran). Our fishing skills seem to have deserted us recently.....then, a couple of hours out we caught a nice sized Spanish Mackerel! Inspired by this, Keith decides to change to the really big pink squid with the enormous fish hooks........when we brought this in on nearing our destination the line had been bitten right though; glad we didn't actually catch that monster!

The Spanish Mackerel

The 'girly gay pink' lure

You might wonder what we generally eat. Well if we can catch fish I will bake or fry it and beiing fresh it iis wonderfull.....but we would starve to death if we relied on that. The only things that are cheap here are bananas and rum! So there is our diet of course! We eat loads of bananas and plantains (a type of banana that needs cooking), straight, baked, baked soaked in rum, fried, fried soaked in rum, all very tasty and nutritious.

Martinique is a French overseas deparment, and as such is a part of France. This status results in it having a higher standard of living than neighbouring Caribbean Islands. We were able to enjoy French baguetts, pate, cheeses and also, in the supermarkets, cheap wine and beer compared to the other islands. That was where it ended though. Everything esle is much more expensive than everywhere else, and everyone speaks French and very little English.

Diamond Rock

The island has had the usual change of hands between French and English in the battle to rule the waves etc. One of the southern off-lying rocks (Diamond Rock) was commissioned as a ship in 1804 by the English and called HMS Diamond Rock. 20 sailors and 4 cannon were situated there to defend the sea approaches to the island. The legend goes that the French finally caused several boats filled with casks of rum to be wrecked on the islet. The English gave up without a fight being dead drunk when the enemy attacked! My book source (written by a Frenchman) says that this tale may not be found in the English history books.......funny that!

Le Marin (Martinique)

First port of call was in the south of the island at Le Marin, a town which has only developed because of the huge marina and protected anchorage. Again, our reason for this stop is to get the alternator mended and try to sort ou the SSB rado problem. the place felt a bit like a huge car park for boat.

Rapau in Le Marin 'car park'

Le Marin town

Unfortunately it took over 2 weeks to get the wiring from the batteries re-done and get the spare alternator fixed so we were thoroughly glad to leave the 'car park' when we finally did.

Fort De France (Martinique)

A quick overnight stop at the capital Fort de France which was a vibrant busy town, then on further up the coast to St Pierre.

St Pierre (Martinique)

This lovely little town was once known as the Paris of the Caribbean and was the capital of Martinique. It was the social centre of Martinique and the richness of the plantations meant ships would take on rum, sugar, coffee and cocoa making the plantation owners multi millionaires. Apparently plenty of cheap bars, brothels and dancing girls were available to keep

the sailors happy.

Rapau in St Pierre

St Pierre

Then on May 8th 1902 the Mount Pelee volcano overlooking the town, erupted. Despite earlier warnings most people didn't leave, believing it impossible there could be destruction of this rich imprtant capital. A giant fireball of superheated gas flowed over the city leaving only 2 survivors out of nearly 30,000 inhabitants. One was a cobbler in his cellar and the other man imprisoned in a stone cell for murder. Twenty ships in the bay were also destroyed.

Mount Pelee

The prison ruins

The prison cell (no that's not the prisoner, don't be cruel. Keith was not in Martinique in 1902).

It was a nice little town and we visited the ruins of the prison and the theatre amongst others, and the vibrant Saturday morning market.

We then hiked 40 mins up the hill to the Depaz rum factory which has been rebuilt as it lies at the foot of Mount Pelee. The grounds were lovely and the tour even better as it was free! So we had to celebrate by buying some very unusual gimballed glasses and a four and half litre box of Depaz rum for almost a song so we could make tradional Ti Punch!

The Depaz mansion (re-built), in the shadow of the volcano

St Lucia

Vieux Fort (St Lucia)







First stop after St Vncent was at the south end of St Lucia at Vieux Fort which is a very busy local town town 'without a tourest bone in its body' according to the guide book, and it seemed to be right. We enjoyed our few days there with cheap food and drink and not a boat boy in sight which was a refreshing change. Not so sure about the shoes though, I spotted a sign saying 'Ladies shoes only $29 buy one get one free', first time I've seen that option, must be a one legged person's dream shoe shop.



On a disappointing note, the day we got up to leave, the painter (line, for those of a land lover persuasion) from our spare inflatable dingly ( we had been using the spare while we were repairing the main one) was all that was hanging on the back of the boat..............no boat attached! We had towed it some considerable way some days before so the knot would have been really tight on the boat end so we can only assume someone has stolen it during the night.





Soufriere (St Lucia)







A two hour sail to Soufriere Bay which is in the Pitons, A breathtaking anchorage in the Bay and some great snorkelling around the point. Met up with Andy and Sue again on Spruce and decided to share a car hire and drive around the Island.







Rapau anchored in the beautifull Pitons

















snorkelling at the Pitons






It was an open top jeep type of car and we drove clockwise around the island stopping at a little village called Anse Le Raye and chatting to a nice lady called Greeta who was selling bread on the street and very excited that we would put her on the blog. She told us her life story, 8 kids, dead husband and still baking bread for a living at 68. She even tried to give us some bread for free which put back our faith in people here.






Greeta the bread maker












Coffee stop





Stopped for lunch in a one horse town called Micoud (no horses only chicken and sad dogs) and got very cheap lunch at a rum shack (bit early for the rum though even though we could see the panadol on the shelf with the alcolhol!)









The handy Panadol!







We drove on down the east side of the island to Lattille Falls were we chatted to a Rasta man who was living off the land and all the lovely fruit and veg by putting a homemade ram pump (Andy assures me people will be impressed with this!) onto the falls and generating electricity to pump water around to the crops etc. We then went for a secret walk in the rainforest (we should have had a guide but hey had all gone home when we got there so we snuck in). We named Sue the Banana Bandid the way she sloped into a wooded shack we passed and picked up the stray bananas as we drove past the Banana plantation! All in all a very nice day.






The secret walk








Keith can't communicate via a coconut he realises!
























Andy and the Rasta man








Us at Latille Falls

















Banana Plantation




Keith spent a few days dealing with the never-ending problem of trying to get the SSB radio to work with help from Andy who is a wiz at these things. Still no real joy though. We really need this to be working so we can get weather forecasts during the return crossing.


Marigot Bay

An overnight stop at Marigot Bay where a British Admiral hid his fleet from the French by disguising the masts as coconut trees by tying coconut fronds in the rigging, the french reputedly sailed right by! The Bay is well hidden from view, but it would be impossible to hide here now as the mumber of tripper boats coming in and out of the Bay is astonishing and it is certainly not a quiet place!











Marigot Bay



Rodney Bay (St Lucia)

Another couple of hours sail saw us enter Rodney Bay, home of the famous maina were the ARC rally boats finish. Pigeon Island stands to the north end of the bay and was the main base of the British Navy in this area in the old days, apparently because you can see Martininque on most days which was the French main base






Pigeon Island on left of picture












Rodney Bay is very commercialised, but it is a premier yachting haven and we needed to get work done on the alternator and one of the reefing lines needs changing. We were there during St Lucia's independence day (1979 they gained independence from Britain). We didn't see much in the way of celebrating in this area, though we were told there were parades in the capital town of Castries.





St Lucia Yacht Club near our anchor spot, had to try it out......several times






There is a desperate water shortage in St Lucia at the moment as the rainy season brought no rain last year and they have no desalination facitities. We have been conserving water as much as possible but we needed to have some jobs done, so a trip into the marina for the night was needed, and they have water.......or so we thought! The day we wanted to go in there was no water to the marina. The next day there was, so we went in and managed to fill our tanks, get a problem with the reefing system sorted and some other jobs, all at considerable expense. Still not got the spare alternator sorted unfortunately so another job still outstanding for our next port of call.