The supermarket. I gotta start with the supermarket. So predictable… But we walked into the Geant Casino after complaining all the way down the back streets of Pointe a Pitre’s marina. Were we in Europe? It was like a trick of the mind, an unbelievable fact that 100 nautical miles away in Antigua you have maybe five types of cheese (all expensive) and here you have forty (comparatively inexpensive). What is going on? We knew that as far as the French Antilles are concerned, this is a department of France. The things you get in France therefore, you get here. But still it’s hard to believe. It’s even harder to believe that we haven’t used this knowledge to provision specifically in a French island before. And everyone really had told us…   

Delphine’s birthday was a gritty sailing day south.The stretch between Antigua and Guadeloupe has always been a rough one for us.. it’s where Fin took her unexpected swim last year. This time we rode the sea like we were on the surface of a deep blue towel being shaken out. Behind us, Antigua was long and low-lying. We could have been leaving a tropical Somerset. To the side was Montserrat; tall and always dramatic. Today, white clouds were plugged into into her volcanic cone as if stopping the volcano from exploding again. Flying fish skittered out of the water, shaken out of this towel too, hitting the surface and back into the water wall. Back to the other side.  

We got as far as the bottom of Guadeloupe’s lee side and picked up a mooring buoy outside Basse Terre marina. We scratched our heads. This was a strange buoy. A metal shackle connects to a chain that you pulled up from the middle of the buoy. In fact, it would have been impossible to pick it up if not for the supernatural strength of our captain. And then during the night we discovered why this buoy was built like a reverse anchor; katabatic winds coming from surrounding mountains repeatedly tried to push us to Panama… we woke bleary-eyed and left at first light. Took the corner and hugged the land to Pointe a Pitre, getting ever wetter from the solid line of grey cloud. At midday we made it, came into the marina, tied up and excitedly plugged into shore power. Charge everything! Live like landlubbers! At this point the rain was torrential but it didn’t stop us.. go and get the wifi code.. ‘Sorry,’ the lady at the marina informed us, ‘some people find the code works and some don’t.’ Really? It didn’t. Umbrella in hand, undeterred we went to the mall, found Digicel, bought data and walked home triumphant. After 123mb it stopped working. With Lu's school due to begin on Monday, the Cap walked the 20 minutes back to the store again. ‘You need to give me forty Euros first,’ the man at the store said. ‘I just gave you forty Euros,’ our Cap said. ‘The main office is closed. You have to come back on Monday.’ That was it. No school for Lu, no dealing with work back home. This is how we found ourselves on Saturday night. A strange, plentiful cheese situation with no internet. Do people eat cheese here and consider the technical a bonus, we wondered?  

On Sunday, Jo and Gareth arrived. They walked down the wide marina pontoon with a suitcase of goodies and ten days of adventure planned. The rain had just stopped. They took one look at us. ‘Go back to bed. We’ll put the kettle on.’ ‘Ok,’ we mumbled. Quest crew's going for a rest. 

Love from Quest and her crew xx