A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back

The apples of love...

Sam and Alex Fortescue

Mon 14 Feb 2011 21:17

Cough. Coughoughoughoughough. Splutter.

(silence)

Vrooooooooooooooooom.

Vrooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom....

Try saying this out loud, and you'll realise just what a glorious series of noises it really is. It, of course, relates to the restarting of the outboard, which fell into the briny while running the other day. Despite completely dismantling the thing three times, it still refused to start. However, fourth time lucky. And fixing it ourselves saved a great wodge of lobster tokens - all it cost was one tin of hugely expensive, environmentally destructive petroleum distillate. So far so good.

Meanwhile, we've ascertained that the damaged lower shroud cannot be fixed here in Guadeloupe. To the rigger's obvious relief, I picked up the un-mended cable, which we'll refit tomorrow, allowing us to rumble up gently up to Antigua.

This is good news for us, as we've already tired of Pointe-a-Pitre: one of the least attractive places we've visited either in the Caribbean or anywhere else, for that matter. The city is set out on a grid formation, laid out in dilapidated concrete buildings and rotting wooden ones. Shops tout low-cost bikinis; entire streets are given over to the sale of oversized women's undergarments and there is nary a cafe or shady local resto to be seen. On the other hand, the streets buzz with youths on scooters, ressembling nothing more than giant mosquitoes, and just as irritating. The one exception to the overwhelming unpleasant impression left by the place as its abundant, but expensive, markets. Here we saw stalls carpeted with ripe exotic fruit, including some that we'd never seen before - small red affairs called 'pommes d'amour'. I suspect they may be considered inedible by locals, but are just flogged to clueless tourists; certainly, they taste of slightly brackish water. On the fish quay, they were busy slicing up a gigantic 100kg tuna and descaling a host of surprised looking reef fish.

Our social life has come on in leaps and bounds, just as we were lamenting the friendly ways and days in European marinas. We met a Danish couple, Tomas and Line, who crossed the Atlantic in a 27 foot boat. They came onboard in Portsmouth and helped us polish off a bottle of rum, poured out in tots mixed with brown sugar and squashed lime - the infamous 'ty punch' beloved of the French. In Les Saintes and again here, we bumped into a French couple (Remy and Laurence) that we'd met on the hike to the boiling Lake in Dominica - a few years younger than us and sailing a 37 foot Oceanis. They'd chucked in jobs with Pyrex to sail here and had seen much better luck with the fishing line than us.

Finally, we were hailed two days ago at sunset by an English pair in a dinghy. They recognised our Cruising Association pennant and had stopped for a chinwag. They invited us over to their 42 footer for post supper drinks, and we finally rowed home at 1.30 (this was before the outboard was fixed).

Anyway, happy Valentine's Day to you, dear reader. I'm treating Alex to cocktails followed by a four course boat supper. I haven't yet decided if my efforts extend as far as doing the washing up... Time will tell.

A cloudy view of Les Saintes