Bequia to Antigua then St. Barts. 27.1.09

Swiftwing
Tue 3 Feb 2009 14:55

Nevis, St. Kitts and St. Barts.     N 17.53:85    W62 .51:38

 

After spending a very pleasant New Year in Bequia we again started to retrace our steps North for our rendezvous with Sarah and Will. A shy reach took us back to Wallalabu and the day after back to Rodney Bay, St. Lucia where we spent a number of days having another meal at Razzmatazz with cruising friends and enjoying the very good ice cream. Our friend's catamaran was berthed close to ‘Blue Tarn’ Mike Foreman’s boat. Unfortunately we did not meet up with Mike and Tony as they had returned home to Carradale for Christmas and were not due back until 27th January. Looking at Blue Tarn it was nice to think that she too had sailed all the way from her mooring in Campbeltown.

 

After an all too short a stop we headed for Martinique then on to Dominica. As the trades had well and truly established themselves the winds were a bit stronger than Mike and Tony experienced. We had a close beat in 33 knots to Martinique then the next day another in 31 knots of wind but with much bigger seas. We left our friends behind in St. Lucia as they don’t have such a tight schedule and didn’t want to venture out in such strong winds. We then hopped from Dominica to the Ills Des Saints and on to Guadeloupe ,then back to one of our favourite islands, Antigua where we spent the best part of a week. By this time the winds (and seas) had calmed significantly and we enjoyed pleasant sailing with full rig in 22 Knots. In Antigua we met up with Mike and Anne from ‘Orchestra’ (see John and Helen’s blog for Antigua and Barbuda) and watched Obama’s inauguration on a large scale TV in the ‘Mad Mongoose’ To see all the locals wearing Obama T-shirts you would think that he had just been made president of the West Indies. Whilst we were in Antigua they announced on local radio that in honour of the inauguration they had changed the name of one of their ‘mountains'!! from Boggy Peak, to the much more serene sounding, ‘Mount Obama.’ Anyway, we’ll see how he gets on as we travel up the American East coast in a few months time.

 

We are now at anchor in Gustavia Bay, St. Barts which is French owned and very pretty. To be honest, on a run ashore yesterday you would think that we had landed in Cannes in mid summer. There were half a dozen superyachts anchored inside and the street furniture and buildings are manicured to perfection. The island’s claim to fame is that it was fought over repeatedly by the French and Spanish. One Frenchman was so horrified by the atrocities carried out by the Spanish against the native populations that he decided to avenge them. He became the pirate ‘Montbars the Exterminator' and with an indigenous crew who all had axes to grind he was the scourge of the Spanish. He finally disappeared in a hurricane, his weather routing provider obviously having let him down that trip. St Barts didn’t have much in the way of agriculture so it was given by the French to the Swedes in exchange for trading rights with St. Martin. Under the Swedes it prospered as a Free port and during the war of American Independence, the American rebels would sail here for supplies. After a hundred years or so, trade waned and the island was sold back to France.  France has done a very good job since and St. Barts is now a place where the ‘betifl people' come to hang out. It is so chic and full of the in crowd that two fruit juices at a local bar (to use WiFi) cost us ten pounds. The pension won’t last long at that!

 

You’ll have noticed that I haven’t said much about Nevis or St. Kitts. We thought that Nevis looked uninspiring from the sea and St. Kitts was overdeveloped for the American cruise ship market making what we saw tacky in the extreme and false as regards the culture of the island, so between that and very rolly anchorages we didn’t hang about, staying only one night at anchor then moving on. On speaking to some of our readers whilst home, the view was expressed that you wanted less text and more photographs. I’ll try to bear that in mind in future.