Position: 17:55.449N 62:52.159W

Date: Thursday 23rd January 2014

There was little to keep us anchored near to Gustavia and so Sunday we moved a couple of miles along the coast to Anse du Colombier, a quite beautiful anchorage still on St Barth. It’s horseshoe shaped, open to the west, has shallow turquoise water and has a perfect fine sandy beach at its head. The authorities have laid mooring buoys in the bay to protect the seabed from the effects of anchors and as a result quite a lot of marine life is happy to co-exist there with the yachts.  Turtles cruise between the boats quite unperturbed, and whilst snorkelling I saw a lot of fish, including the largest porcupine fish I have ever seen (about 3 feet long).

Looking west over Anse du Colombier.

As it is now a nature reserve there are no buildings ashore, apart from one house built some time ago by the Rockefellers and now looking a little tired.  There is no road access but there is a small coastal path running from the bay to the nearest town at Anse des Flammandes.  We thought we’d see what it was like so on Wednesday we took the dinghy ashore and walked the path.  It was a stunning walk along unspoilt hillsides looking down onto azure seas with small offshore rocky islands.

Here are some of the photographs taken from the walk:

A tortoise crawled across our path:

There were also a large number of these interesting ground lizards:

As we neared Anse des Flammandes we could hear a solitary flautist and as we got closer we came across the musician.  It turns out that he was the principle flautist with one of the major USA orchestras and he was on the island to play at the music festival.  Once in the town we found a small restaurant for lunch that combined French and Creole influences:

Another fantastic day on St Barts.