Les Saintes Guadeloupe

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Wed 30 Mar 2016 17:35
On March 12, 2016 we let go of the mooring lines in Dominica, and headed towards the islands called Les Saintes. They are part of Guadeloupe, and are just south of the main islands. We left rather late, 11 am or so, but it wasn't supposed to take that long to get there, maybe 3 or 4 hours. Plenty of time to pick up a mooring before the inevitable stragglers arrived. Or so we thought! Made it to Les Saintes in decent time, by mid afternoon, and started to look for a place to moor or to anchor. But no moorings available anywhere. Plus the weather was horrible with a north east wind and swells entering the anchorage area, making it severely rolly, and it was empty of anchored boats. This didn't give us a great feeling. Plus Guadeloupe isn't the best place to find an anchorage either, so that wasn't an option. So we had to pick one of two plans, either anchor in a bay called Anse Fideling, where we would have to be closer than we like to the shore, with waves crashing, or do an overnight to Antigua. We decided after motoring around for over an hour looking for a mooring, to try the small anchorage on terre-de-bas. We dropped in about 5 m under the keel, and the water was clear, and there was a swell coming around the corner into the bay. The anchor was set, but the bottom was coral "scrabble" with some sand underneath, so not the most reliable holding. But there we were....so we toughed it out. We were both a bit spooked and were up a lot of the night checking things, even with the iPad plotter right there in the back cabin plus our anchor alarm on. Early the next morning, we got up, and we didn't drag at all as it turned out, pulled up anchor and headed towards Le Bourg mooring field. Thankfully others had left early so we got a spot, and went back to sleep!

The town was a french fishing village, with decent provisioning( except for white wine...not so great). We didn't have many euros. So I looked for a bank machine, using my imperfect French, and managed to figure out the directions. But it was out of order. Found out about another one, also out of order. It was a weekend, so they run out of cash! The next day, we found out the post office had one, so got cash thankfully! We had fun wandering around and relaxing. There was a wreck of a small ferry near our mooring so Pavel and I went to explore, except at that point we didn't know there was a wreck. I thought it was just a place to snorkel with a reef....so we swam over, and all of a sudden, saw a whole metal ship sunken in the water below me! Lots of fish. Pavel was very taken with the whole thing and learned how to use my snorkel so he could look down there longer.

After a while, and taking 3 days to complete formal customs and immigration to the country( first day closed, second day, computer broken, so the third day it was), we changed to Les Cabrits mooring field. It is located just around the corner from where we were, but was behind an uninhabited island. The snorkelling was great! I saw many lobsters, some eels, lots of fish, and a few spotted drum fish, that I have never before encountered in any place I have snorkelled! We met a lovely Canadian retired couple and had them aboard for a refreshment. The next day a "classic" American boat came into the mooring field, where I might add anchoring is forbidden and there are power lines running, and dropped their anchor right next to a mooring ball! Very strange! Then one of the people on board, a fairly old lady probably about 75, swam to the ball with a rope to attach themselves to the mooring! Then the "skipper" pulled up the anchor and chain with a manual ratchet system to get it aboard. Needless to say we mentioned to them that anchoring wasn't allowed, as we really weren't expecting them to swim out to attach to the mooring( it really wasn't hard to do it from aboard and we have NEVER seen this kind of behaviour before). The the American captain got into outrageous mode, cursing at us and the other Canadian boat who took notice and then told our neighbour how it was easy enough for him, a young guy ( he was at least 65), to get the mooring.....then the Canadian graciously offered to help, and was met with dead silence. These were very weird people. If you can't pick up a mooring with a load of people on board, maybe it is time to call it a day and give up this kind of sailing.

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