Ñandú

P.A.Y.S.

“Did you have a good sail?”, asked the Dominica one-person welcome committee. It was Lawrence (of Arabia, as he likes to be called) on his skiff, who motored towards us when we were about to enter Prince Rupert Bay, in the northern tip of Dominica. He pointed us to the mooring buoys in front of Portsmouth, and went back to his strategic position to wait for the next visitors.

Soon after, to grab the buoy, we got unsolicited but welcome help from Titus on his own skiff. He then went off to help another boat, and came back before long to let me know what documents I needed for clearing in, and to instruct me to be ready in five minutes to go to customs. He left again before I could say that I’d rather have lunch first, and came back four minutes later while I was gobbling whatever I could find.

Titus took me and five other sailors to the municipal dock and directed us to the customs office. The other guys said they didn’t need a ride back, so Titus was going to wait in the dock just for me. When I got back he wasn’t there. Uh oh. I was pondering my options (Walk two miles and then swim to Ñandú? Call Kathy to see if she could radio a water taxi?) when Titus showed up and gave an apologetic explanation. I stepped aboard the skiff but to my surprise he climbed to the dock with a dirty dish in his hand. The engine was running and the skiff wasn’t even tied to the dock. “Hold the boat please. I have to return something to my cousin”, he said and walked up the dock. I could have been bewildered with cultural shock, but instead I was just fascinated with the cultural imbuing I was being administered.

“Would you like to go on a tour around the island?” Titus asked us once I was back aboard Ñandú.

“Yes, sure,” we answered, since the tour was in our plans.

“OK, I have a group for tomorrow, so be ready at 8.”

“Looks like we have a plan for tomorrow,” Kathy and I told one another.

In some of the windward islands boats are approached by a multitude of vendors before you even anchor, to offer tours, produce, craft, take your garbage (to be disposed off responsibly, or perhaps not) or any help in exchange of money. It can get intimidating and winds up having the opposite effect: instead of bringing business to town it scares it off. Tour guides in Portsmouth recognized the problem and got organized forming PAYS, the Portsmouth Association of Yacht Services. When a boat comes in they assign one PAYS member and that’s the one person that approaches your boat.

From our standpoint, it worked very well, including Titus’ somewhat dictatorial but well-intended manners. They have an office with information, they provide security, they maintain the mooring buoys, they offer good services, and they are very punctual (which is rather unsual in these latitudes).

Around the island

Titus picked us up at the agreed time and brought us and the crew of two other boats to the dock, and introduced us to our guide and driver.

“This is Winston,” he said. “He wants to marry my mother”, he added gratuitously.

Skeptics might say that a size of just two samples does not constitute overwhelming evidence, but after touring Montserrat and Dominica I’m concluding that “Winston” is used in this corner of the world as short for “tour guide and van driver”.

Anyway. Around the island we went, Winston at the wheel. First stop was a nondescript corner where Winston picked up a monumentally large sound system and loaded it in the van. Second and third stops required the system to be unloaded first so that we could get off the van. Fourth stop was his modest house where he dropped it off. He stopped multiple other times to crack a joke with people on the streets in an unintelligible patois. I still wonder whether he knew all those people or not.

Dominica and Maria

The Caribs or Kalinago were the original inhabitants of Dominica. About 3000 remain in the Kalinago Reserve. The island was a French colony from the late 17th century to the middle 18th. In 1761 it was taken by Great Britain, after which the French went through a couple of cycles where they’d sign a treaty that formally conceded the island to the British and then have second thoughts and try to recapture it. Dominica gained independence from the British Crown in 1978.

Dominica’s unspoiled natural beauty makes it a dream for hikers and divers. And movie makers too: several scenes of Pirates of the Caribbean were filmed here, and the map you get in the Tourism Office shows the locations where each scene was filmed.

Last year hurricane Maria, the first category five to hit Dominica in recorded history, flattened the island with 160 mph (256 km/h) winds. Dozens of people lost their lives, 95% of the buildings were damaged or destroyed, and the once tropical paradise nicknamed the “isle of nature”, became a war zone stripped of its green layer of vegetation, obliterated by nature itself. Images post-hurricane are sobering.

Seven months later, we saw a resilient island recovering from disaster. Signs of destruction were evident everywhere (toppled trees, closed roads, piles of debris, houses without walls or roofs, bridges washed away). Walking the streets of Portsmouth I noticed a somber mood, in stark contrast with the other islands we’ve visited. But people are coming to terms with their losses and are working hard to rebuild their lives. Temporary bridges reconnected the island, the noise of frenzy construction fills the air, tourism is making a comeback, and the scarred island looks remarkably green again.

Of rivers and waterfalls

Question: how do you say “a whole lot” in the tropics? Answer: 365. That’s what I gathered after hearing a Bahamian say The Exumas has 365 islands, an Antiguan say Antigua has 365 beaches, and a Dominiquois say Dominica has 365 rivers. So, yeah, I doubt the number is accurate, but Dominca for sure has a whole lot of rivers: certainly enough to keep you busy for a whole year if you are into potamology (thanks Google—I had to look that one up). And what do you get when you put a whole lot of rivers in a steep island? A whole lot of waterfalls.

Cabrits National Park

Cabrits National Park, on the north side of Prince Rupert Bay, protects tropical forests, wetlands and coral reefs, and includes Fort Shirley, an 18th century garrison impressively restored. Cabrits is an extinct volcano, and it used to be an island until the action of tides deposited enough material to connect it to the main island.

Our last stop in Guadeloupe was Les Saintes, a small volcanic archipelago where only the two largest islands are inhabited, accounting for a population of around 3,000 souls. In contrast to the larger islands in the area, slaves were not brought to Les Saintes because the rugged terrain and dry weather made the land unfriendly for agriculture.

Bourg des Saintes, the only town, is charming and picturesque and it attracts a lot of tourists who come for the day by ferry. It’s also an attractive, almost mandatory destination for cruisers like us, so the 80-something public mooring buoys in the large bay were all taken when we got there. We were motoring away from the mooring field trying to find a place for our anchor that wasn’t too deep, when Kathy had the foresight to look back, and saw a buoy that had just been freed. A quick U-turn and max engine power got us to the parking spot before our competitors. Soon after tying to the buoy we were aboard the dinghy, en route to the boulangerie.

On mechanical/electrical news: we finally fixed the dinghy motor, but because some idiot invented the second law of thermodynamics (that shit about entropy and the degree of disorder never decreasing), then the starboard side fresh water pump, the vacuum cleaner, and Kathy’s phone all broke down in quick succession.

 

Au revoir, Guadeloupe!

It took us a full day of sailing to round Basse-Terre and reach Guadeloupe’s largest city, Point-à-Pitre in Grande-Terre, which we used as a base to explore both islands by land, enjoying the pleasure of driving on the right side. This time we stayed at a marina, but we had to go through a rite of passage that every sailor dreads (or at least sailors who didn’t grow up sailing in the Mediterranean Sea): the first mediterranean mooring. With med-mooring, marinas fit more boats in a dock because you dock stern-to, separated by other boats by mere fenders. In the hard version you drop your anchor a couple boat lengths from the dock and then backup to the dock. It usually leads to a tangle of anchors that only a diver can fix. It’s good business for the divers guild. In the easy version there’s a line of buoys parallel to the dock. You first backup to the dock, passing through the line of buoys, some of the buoys on either side, one or two between the hulls; then tie to the dock; and lastly the marina boys in their dinghy tie your bows to one of those buoys. I had the easy version. And I flunked it.

In my defense I can say that I had the hard version of the easy version, because in Marina Bas-du-Fort’s fairways there’s not much more than a boat length of space between the buoys for your dock and the buoys for the dock in front (see picture above). And it was windy. And I should have listened to my first mate, who suggested to enter the fairway stern-first. Instead I decided to turn around in the fairway, trusting that I could turn Ñandú on a dime. The wind showed absolutely no respect for my dime and  pushed the boat just enough towards the opposite line of buoys, which I didn’t notice until the port engine shut down with a terrifying shudder. The propeller caught the buoy’s line and we got helplessly stuck. Jean-Marc from the marina had to come with his dinghy and push us back and forth to set us free. How embarrassing. Luckily things went smoothly from there, and in the end the only thing that was damaged was my pride.

Point-à-Pitre

La Soufrière

La Sufrière is an active volcano whose last eruption occurred in 1976, and the highest peak of the Lesser Antilles (1500m/4900ft). We climbed it accompanied by one third of the entire Chilean population in Guadeloupe. It turns out that a high school classmate of Kathy lives here, and they reunited after 35 years, thanks to the magic of social networks. They do as they please with your data, but they do connect people!

A great day around Basse-Terre Island

Grande-Terre Island

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.