Guadeloupe, Part I

Guadalupe is an insular department of France, comprising several islands between Antigua and Dominica. The two largest islands are Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre. Informally, Guadeloupe is also used to refer to these two islands as one, since they are connected by several bridges across the narrow mangrove channel that separates them. As such, Guadeloupe would be the largest of the Lesser Antilles islands and, at 340,000, one of the most populous ones.

Guadeloupe’s landscape is breathtaking, particularly the National Park in Basse-Terre. And, being French, they know a thing or two about food. The first question Kathy always asks when stepping into a new town is “Où est la boulangerie?”

The one thing we didn’t like that much were the rather unwelcoming anchorages: few, small, crowded, deep, difficult. We got stressed out in all of them. Oh, and they speak a language we don’t understand. The challenge was part of the fun, but I do have to wonder why they use 8 (eight!) letters to spell Deshaies, and when it comes the time to pronounce it they use only three phonetic sounds. What a squandering of symbols! In Spanish, I’d just write Deé and be done with it.

Deshaies

We had read horror stories about the Deshaies anchorage (remember, weirdly, it’s pronounced DEH-EH): winds funneling to 30 knots through the mountains only to reverse direction at night. Boats dragging and having to re-anchor, with some just giving up and disappearing into the night. Boats racing for the few and coveted mooring buoys next to town. Boats tangling their anchors with each other. It is, however, essentially a mandatory stop when coming from Antigua, since it’s the only one reasonably located where you can do the paperwork to check into the country.

After a day of sailing we got there mid-afternoon, and it looked hopelessly full of boats very close to one another. Deshaies is a long and narrow indentation in Basse-Terre’s coast, with mooring buoys close to the beach. Outside the mooring field, depths increase quickly as you go farther out, until there’s no more bay.

Well, we saw some boats anchored far out, even in the no-more-bay part, in very deep water. We threaded through the swarm of boats to assess the situation further in. Perhaps we could find a precarious space somewhere to anchor for an hour or so, just enough to go ashore to check in. Then, without believing our eyes, we saw it: a free mooring buoy! The only free one, right in front of us.

Our first thought was that there was obviously something wrong with it, and that’s why nobody took it. On a closer look, it did look battered in a strange way. I say strange way, because I (and, remember, I’m a creative engineer) could not come up with a realistic way of inflicting that kind of damage to a small floating object: at the very least you’d need two tugboats and one sledgehammer.

Perhaps that’s why nobody took it. To us, it still looked a lot more attractive than finding a place to drop the anchor where there were already more boats than the bay could safely fit.

Also, I don’t know if it’s a Guadalupean or a French thing, but mooring buoys around here are not as user-friendly as the ones we are used to. They don’t have a pendant or a pick-up float. Instead they have a ring that’s more difficult to grab and harder on your lines.

Anyway, as soon as we grabbed the buoy with our lines (a feat by itself given the blustery weather, the buoy design, and the conditions of our particular specimen) the guy in a trimaran in front of us shouted something unintelligible to Kathy in French. (Note: if a guy wears a speedo, he’ll talk to you in French first). When he switched to an accented English she understood that the night before, a catamaran “just like yours” had broken free from that buoy and smashed into the boat behind. He intended that as a warning, but I found it actually reassuring, thank you very much. My reasoning was that if the catamaran was gone and the buoy was still there, then the buoy must be firmly attached to the bottom. We just needed to make sure that we remained firmly attached to the buoy, which was where the unfortunate previous soul failed. The trick was to not let that menacing ring chafe through our lines, which was something I was planning on doing anyway once I saw those unfriendly, line-eating devices.

Easier said than done. After temporarily catching the buoy with a pair of dock lines, we prepared two other lines, each with a length of firehose in the middle. Then I had to use the dinghy to reach the buoy and rethread the lines, with Kathy helping from the bows, while wind and chop shook and whipped everything. The dinghy almost capsized when one of the lines got taut in a gust and pushed the dinghy down. Feeling observed and judged by every neighbor didn’t help with the sleekness of the operation, but we eventually succeeded. And I remained mostly dry.

After that, and already exhausted, I had to row upwind to town with our passports to clear into Guadeloupe. Remnants of the ‘bomb cyclone’ swell (see previous post) were still pounding the shore—periodically engulfing the municipal dock in whitewater,—so I had to find an alternative place to tie the dinghy, farther away.  We may have sailed a short distance from Antigua, but it was a long day.

The buoy and the lines held us in place for two windy nights. Ñandú separated from the buoy only when we decided. Ha!

Pigeon Islands

The Pigeon Islands are two small islands one nautical mile off the coast of Basse-Terre. The area is a popular diving and snorkeling destination because of the Jacques Cousteau Marine National Park.

As a kid I was glued to the TV on Thursday nights to watch “Jacques Cousteau’s Underwater World”, dubbed to Spanish by a narrator with a fake French accent. In part because of that, I wanted to become a marine biologist, zoologist, paleontologist, or whatever studied animals. My grandfather nicknamed me “Cousteau”, and I played zoologist by catching lizards and freeing them after marking their belly (surreptitiously, of course) with my grandmother’s lipstick. I wasn’t going to miss the chance of visiting a park named after my childhood hero. The park did live up to my expectations.

You cannot anchor on the Pigeon Islands; you have to reach them by dinghy from the anchorage in the main island. When anchoring in a steep-sloped bottom such as Basse-Terre’s, it’s not easy to judge swinging circles. You drop the anchor and pay out rode as the wind pushes you away from the shoreline. After enough rode for your depth,  you’re hopefully still separated by a couple boat lengths from the boat behind you. It might feel safe, but what if the wind switches and blows onshore (which happens here because the tall mountains can block the trade winds)? The boat behind you now becomes the boat in front of you, and since its anchor is in deeper water it has more rode: the boat might swing onto you… which is what happened to our neighbors.

We still hadn’t fixed the dinghy’s outboard, so we had to row the one mile to get to the underwater park. It was an easy ride with the wind, but when coming back the wind picked up to at least 20 knots. It was a hard battle that at times I thought I was going to lose, particularly at the beginning, with the wind funneled between the two Pigeon Islands. People on the big motor launch that had just arrived looked at us for the five minutes it took me to get some distance from them.  I couldn’t switch places with Kathy to rest, because in the time it would take to swap we’d drift back precious distance. I just kept rowing at a pace I could sustain, which was barely enough to make progress. If that much effort is required to snorkel in a place like that, I’m ready to do it again.