Well I have been most remiss with the blog posts. Serious lack of Internet and time. So I left you all as we were leaving les Saintes for Guadeloupe. The seas were pretty huge due to rough weather in the preceding days but the trip was uneventful. Basse Terre is the capital of Guadalupe or Gwada as the locals like to call it. As a town it has a lot more personality than many we have visited. There is no cruiser terminal here so there are real shops for real people. Women are selling fruit and vegetables at every corner. You have to watch them like hawks because they are real rip off merchants. You buy five tomatoes carefully chosen and the woman insists on putting them in your bag for you. When you get back to the boat you find you have three tomatoes, one of which is the overripe one you told her firmly three times that you did not want. Buyer beware! There were several cheap material shops and I bought grey and white stripy material to replace the saloon curtains and recover the cockpit scatter cushions. So the trusty sewing machine has been hard at work. The rhum in Gwada of choice is Bologne , a white rhum, and is very tasty. In the Ecomax, a wonderful supermarket chain which needs to exist everywhere, you can buy it in three litre boxes for about fifteen euros. I've always been a fan of wine in boxes although they don't ever last the six weeks it promises you in the blurb. However three litres of rum is something else entirely. We bought two!

A highlight of Basse Terre was the great rescue. It was very windy there in the anchorage due to a funnelling effect caused by great chunks having been carved out if the protective mountain by the gravel works. Also the water is very deep close to and you have to get quite close to the land in order to anchor safely. A charter yacht had been there for several days anchored in very deep water and seeming abandoned. Every time we went past it Colin would express his disbelief that anyone had anchored in such deep water. Ideally one would have five times the depth in length of chain. Boats only carry chain for anchoring in shallow water and the depth where they were would have probably not have given them double the scope. Still it hung on in there. Then came the day with forty knot gusts of wind. Just before dark sitting having sundowners in the cockpit we had a suspicion she was moving or dragging as we nautical types like to say. We got the binoculars and even as we were watching she started moving backwards at speed. So it was a frantic rush into the dinghy and out to rescue her. Colin took his trusty head torch as it would be full dark within minutes. Luckily she had an anchor light on her. The yacht was locked and the engine couldn't be started. So Colin had to break in through a small hatch. Lucky for them that he is a man of slight build. Finally the engine was started and the navigation lights on by which time she was well out at sea so it was a long trip back to anchor her safely. Without this action the boat would almost certainly have been lost at sea. I got on the radio to the French equivalent of the coastguard to explain that we had “found” 350,000 euros worth of yacht.

From Basse Terre we did a long day and night sail the morning after the rescue. We started off with the intention of going to St Kitts and Nevis but the wind kept changing its mind and so therefore did we. We went the wrong side of Mustique just before dark and it was interesting to see the volcano still smoking away there and sad to see just the roof ridges of houses poking out from the volcanic ash. We toyed with Antigua but the wind veered again so we just kept on going watching the lights of islands we couldn't get to disappear behind us on both sides. It was a windy night and we stormed along eating up the miles we did three hours on each. Unfortunately first light showed that the mainsail had ripped again! Saint Barthélemy was the nearest island that we could comfortably reach so we headed there. Colin read the pilot book while we chugged along with half a mainsail and found that
you have to pay to anchor there which is not something we condone. So we went a little further on to Isle Forchue a delightful small deserted island with a horseshoe bay, turtles and seabirds. Quite lovely. It was now nearing midday and we had been sailing three hours in three hours off since six the previous morning. The three hours off is not terribly accurate. Colin is not so confident with his night sailing. He needs to see the sails. So he got himself into a couple of pickles which I had to get up and sort out, so we were tired! We had a rum, of course, and went to bed. Picture of bedroom attached! Oh how welcome...

We stayed at Isle Forchue in perfect calm for about four days while the wind howled and huge waves rushed past just outside the bay. We were well victualled so we ate well, I made cushions and curtains, Colin struggled with his engine and other broken things and in the evening we binge watched Ripper Street. Oh and we had six litres of rum! Not a bad life.

To be continued….