Guadeloupe

Tuesday 7th April 2009, day 262. 17° 00’.89 N, 061° 46’.47 W. Falmouth Harbour, Antigua

We had another cracking sail coming up here: 40 miles in just over six hours, with the wind on the beam the whole way, at a nice steady 15 – 20 knots. The sea was slight, and we romped along with all three sails up. Tomia was delighted not to have to carry around her layer of weed, poor thing, it was like being asked to run a marathon in a sodden winter overcoat. No fish were caught on the way, though – they couldn’t swim fast enough to keep up with the lure!

Now, on the subject of fish, has anybody read Moby Dick? We all know it’s the story of Captain Ahab and the great white whale, that his boat is called the Pequod, that the book begins “Call me Ishmael”. But has anybody read the book itself – or more to the point, finished it? Because it is causing me great trouble, and Melville’s orotund, fleshy sentences, inability to get to the point, acres of heavy-handed moralising, or exhaustive catalogue of each mention of sperm whales in histories dating as far back as Pliny, are making me almost scream with boredom and frustration – and, just over half way through, there are still a further 323 close-typed pages to come. Please tell me that it gets better.

We stopped at Deshaies, on the north western corner of Guadeloupe, to pick up the new sail, and explore the island a bit. Deshaies is another simple, pretty town, perhaps Woodbridge to Bourg des Saintes’ Southwold. It boasts an excellent boulangerie (I’m not sure that life holds many greater pleasures than rowing ashore first thing in the morning to bring back fresh baguettes and pains aux raisins), a charming if steep Giverney-styled bridge to cross the little inlet, and a post office (closed due to yet another strike). Vive la France!

As a treat, and because the buses, although large, properly regulated and clean, don’t run very often, we hired a scruffy old car, and did the circuit of the island, on the look-out for a spot of culture. The Maison du Bois was closed as was the Caféière Beauséjour, but hurray the Maison du Cacao was open. The deal is that you don’t get to the tasting session without doing the tour, so we bought our tickets and spent a respectable amount of time walking round a small tropical garden, learning various interesting, but quickly forgotten facts about the different types of cocoa trees, the amount of moisture they need, the quantity of cocoa that can be expected per hectare, the place of cocoa in the global economy, associated Mayan legends … before agreeing enough was enough, and making for the hard stuff.

We went through the whole range: raw cocoa beans, roasted beans, cocoa paste, cocoa butter (disgusting), drinking chocolate, 70% chocolate, 80% chocolate, chocolate made to an old Guadeloupian recipe, hot chocolate as it would have been drunk in the court of Louis XIV, rum infused with chocolate … the visitors stood around like little nestlings, mouths open, waiting for the lovely guide to spoon us another mouthful of nectar.

Finally tearing ourselves away, laden down with souvenirs (not all for us), we carried on, taking the cross-island road, up and through the forest, coming down onto the east coast for lunch, and then back round the bottom of the island.

ps sorry there hasn't been a blog for a while, we have been busy sailing! More soon

Les Saintes

Saturday 4th April, day 259. 15° 52’.17 N, 061° 35’.06 W. Bourg des Saintes, Terre de Haut, Les Saintes, Guadeloupe


Apart from a supermarket and a sail-maker, Basse-Terre hasn’t got much to recommend it, so we quickly moved on to Terre de Haut, the largest island (but still tiny) in Les Saintes, a little group of islands off Guadeloupe. The island lives on tourism: the main street is a collection of brightly coloured weather-boarded shops and restaurants, all with white-painted wooden fretwork round the eves. The whole place comes to life in the morning when the ferries come in, disgorging their visitors from the “mainland” who stroll around the shops, disappear into restaurants, hire scooters or are swept up by taxis, and scatter round the island. Mid afternoon, they all come back or are ejected from the restaurants, do another sweep through the shops for hand-painted T shirts and €70 bikinis, and vanish.

The whole is brightly coloured, neat, colourful, totally aimed at tourists – think Southwold with sunshine and added garlic. The inhabitants are nearly all of French stock – there were no slaves imported onto these islands, as the lack of rain meant no agriculture – so we have chic, elegance and a certain formality, to take the place of the noisy cheerful exuberance of the islands with a stronger African heritage.

We spent a day exploring on foot, and walked up to Fort Napoleon to admire the impartiality of the naval historian who had devoted so much time to making innumerable scale models of the progress of a battle which his side lost. Among the heroes of the battle was the Chevalier de Soissons, who had had a spectacular naval career, improving the accuracy of sextants, bettering the lot of the average seaman, rising quickly through the ranks … “He only received one set-back in his entire career, when his head was blown off during the Battle of Les Saintes” the exhibition tells us.

From there we went on to a little beach, and swam, with some pale blue geckos keeping a beady eye on our belongings.

I wish I were a gecko on a tree-trunk by the sea
With a frill around my neck, oh, what a splendid sight I’d be.
I’d catch butterflies for breakfast and mosquitoes for my tea
Just a happy turquoise gecko on my tree-trunk by the sea.

The rest of our three days in Les Saintes was spent starting to clean up Tomia, in preparation for the Oyster Regatta in Antigua. European anti-fouling doesn’t quite seem up to local wildlife, and the poor girl has developed quite a thick coating of weed and crystalline white growths.

So we had a happy few hours harassing barnacles (don’t tell the RSPCA), armed with our WMDs (Weapons of Mollusc Destruction i.e. a polyfilla knife for Anthony and the kitchen spatula for me). The thrill of the chase is such that after a while we forget about the tons of water and boat above us as we try to lever them off (or should that be winkle them off?) their footholds. Underneath the keel, where the anti-fouling never reaches, was a veritable octopus’s garden, with beautiful fronded ferns waving gently among the barnacles – rather peaceful, like an upside down Japanese Zen garden. All gone now!

The weed and growth comes off in a great cloud of dust and gunk, which makes the local fish very happy. We are swimming in a great cloud of little silver ones; they keep out of the way of the flippers when we thrash our way downwards, but otherwise seem very unbothered, happy to mop up the free fish food.

Marie Galante

Tuesday 31st March, day 255. 15° 58’.98 N, 061° 43’.11 W. Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe

Before Powerpoint, before even overhead projectors, there were slide shows. The white tray was painstakingly loaded with upside down slides, on the command “Next” a button was pushed to advance the cassette, the room held its breath to see if the contraption would jam, and with a brief pause and an audible, grating grr-thwock, the next picture arrived. It feels like that here in Marie Galante, with the discontinuity between one scene and the next, in these islands off Guadeloupe, so firmly part of the Caribbean, so immutably part of France.

Slide one: In the Caribbean, in front of the fish market, a small covered area by the dock, where, in a welter of blood and flies, mahi-mahi and kingfish are gutted and sliced. grr-thwock: Turn round, and you’re in France, faced by the Hôtel de Ville, a Rachel Whitehead-like construction, with the ghost of a concrete building surrounded by plate glass panels, and shaded by a twenty foot high metal lattice, woven to look like bamboo. grr-thwock: Back in the Caribbean, in the market, choosing christophenes, pineapples, sweet potatoes, plantains, then grr-thwock: The boulangerie across the square is sending out wonderful smells of croissants and pains aux chocolat. grr-thwock: Still in France, we have dinner at Footy’s restaurant, slices of fresh baguette come in a wicker basket to accompany the delicious local pork chops, cheese is offered before pudding, French television is muttering in the background, grr-thwock: We go behind the bar to the nightclub and feel utterly, uselessly, unredeemably Western, faced with the sinuous undulations and dapper footwork of the locals.

The houses all have blue and white enamelled numbers, the road signs come from the same factory as all the other ones in mainland France; the road that leads from Grand Bourg (pop 1,000) to St-Louis (pop 750) is marked the N9, which in another life we know as the road between Montpellier and Béziers.

We set off on Saturday for the second town, St-Louis: there are proper buses with timetables – but because this is France, and the buses are state run, unlike the cheerful free-for-all of the other islands, the fonctionnaires tend to take Saturday afternoons off, so we got a lift with a farmer on the way there, and hitch hiked back.

Marie Galante is lovely and peaceful, but, to be honest, it is at the very end of the road to nowhere. Stay there too long, and you would become rooted in the sand, swaying gently in the breeze like a palm tree on the beach. So we moved on to Basse-Terre, on the main island of Guadeloupe, to be measured for a new mainsail, the old one having reached the point of no return. This definitely felt like France – everything closed up, behind graffiti’d roll-down shutters.

We went to the local supermarket to stock up. This meant getting into the dinghy, bouncing up the coast for a mile and a half, scrambling up onto the remains of a partially collapsed dock, more scrambling over rocks to get out of the port, and picking our way through a rather manky underpass. The supermarket appeared, just across the road. “Oh that’s convenient” says Anthony, and can’t understand why I collapse laughing.

Because there is (yet another) strike here, the shelves were a bit bare, but we found frozen smoked salmon, some lovely blue brie, and the last two pots of crème fraîche, all of which we haven’t seen for many months, so the trip was worthwhile (probably).

Farewell to Dominica

Thursday 26th March 2009, day 250. 15° 34’.88 N, 061° 27’.83 W. Portsmouth, Dominica

We haven’t moved very far since the last post – just as far as it takes to pull up the anchor, mosey out of the bay, find 25 knot winds on the nose and a nasty lumpy sea, decide that Guadeloupe can wait another day, and come back and anchor in almost exactly the same place.

But we are, however reluctantly, leaving Dominica, because we have to go and find a place where you can buy sails. Our mainsail, with the boat since new, is starting to give up the ghost. It is 18 years old, and on the theory that sail years are as long as dog or cat years, it has done well. But a couple of small holes have appeared on the leach, and soon they are going to be joined by several others. So after a couple of days’ searching for quotes and wondering if there is any way round spending that amount of money (which there isn’t, we were just kidding ourselves we had a choice, like a fish flapping on a hook), we’ve made arrangements to meet a sail maker in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.

Yesterday we did our last exploring of Dominica – for the minute. The usual stuffed-full minibus took us over the hills to Calibishie on the north east side of the island, with the big Atlantic rollers thundering in. We had lunch of Mahi-Mahi on a balcony overlooking the long shallow stretch of water between the town and the reef, watching a three-foot long barracuda lazily patrolling the rocks, on the look-out for an unwary morsel slipping out of the safety of the shallows. A few hundred yards down the shore, two men with snorkels were harvesting something from the reef into a white sack, getting submerged by each breaker as they crouched on hands and knees.

There is never any point in waiting for a bus – these are not the sort that run to a rigid timetable – so we set off up the hill out of the village. We were just passing a family (grandmother, mother and son) climbing back, machetes in hand, from working on their fields, when a bus sped past, then screeched back down to see if they had missed any potential customers – perhaps it goes without saying that they are all private enterprise? A full bus means a full wallet. We rode up to Bense, and got off to follow the steep unmarked path to the Chaudiere, where a waterfall creates a little boiling cauldron of a pool, surrounded by ferns and balizés, ginger lilies and tumbling creepers. We swam, forging up through the tickling bubbles to as close as we could get to the foot of the waterfall, then drifting back to the rocks at the edge with the current to catch our breaths before starting again. The water was a perfect temperature – fresh enough to cool us down from the humid day, without any of the flesh-shrinking frigidity of an English mountain stream.

A horn reverberated around the valley as we walked back to the village. Not a car horn, more like a hunting horn or a one-note trumpet. Down we went, and up it came, fading away behind a hillock, bursting out as the view opened up. Down in Bense, a small red flat-bed van had layer upon layer of needle-nosed silver fish, kept from the sun by the leaved branches of mango trees. Every few hundred yards, the mate leapt out and held up a pink and white whorled conch-shell, blowing a single resonant note to announce the van’s arrival. We kicked ourselves; we’d been hearing the same horn sound in Portsmouth since our arrival. Down there it sounded more like the grating of a ferry ramp, or a tuba tuning up. The guide book had said that a conch shell is blown to signal the arrival of fish in the market, but in our modern and cynical way we discounted this as a piece of tourist-theatre that didn’t happen in real life, only when there was a mini-bus in from the cruise ships in Roseau. We need to spend more time in Dominica.

And then another bus to bounce us back to Tomia, to share fishcakes and lemon meringue pie with two sailing friends, who had serendipitously appeared next to our anchoring spot, on their way south to Bequia. A jolly, raucous and argumentative evening!