Welcome back to the French West Indies.  No.  It’s not over yet.  I didn’t get my crepe yet!

Pigeon Island (also called Penguin Island and Pelican Island, by Erica, who refuses to remember which one is correct)

January 4-5, 2013

We decided to try Pigeon Island, which was supposed to have wonderful snorkeling and diving.  We headed there on a gorgeous day and didn’t look back on Deshies…

There are mandatory park moorings off of Pelican Island, so we tied up, but we didn’t feel safe.  Our boat seemed way too close to the exposed rocks, which had waves crashing on them.  If there was a wind shift, our boat would be gone in minutes.  We found a different mooring, but we were kicked off by a professional dive boat, whose captain merely screamed at us in French until we moved.  We’re pretty sure he was saying, “No crepes for you!”

We finally got in the water but kept a close eye on the kids in the rough waves.  They didn’t last long, but Chris and I were jonesing to dive.  We donned all our gear and took turns.  Craig tried it as well, and loved it.  I saw some great reefs, corals, fish, and some interesting wreck items.  I was especially pleased to see my favorite tropical fish, the Black Durgon, which is in the triggerfish family.  There was a whole little family of them.

 

In the afternoon, we took the boats on a search for the “hot springs” a few miles south, but we only saw some very industrial-looking areas.  We were pretty impressed with the megayacht we passed, whose owner arrived via helicopter!  When I looked it up, we discovered that Ice is the 32nd largest yacht in the world at 295′ 3″.  We turned back north and anchored in the harbor across the way from Pigeon Island.

 

The kids had had enough excitement for one day, so they played Legos while the adults swam into shore (AFTER a shark AND barracuda sighting)!  We found a black beach, which we decided was just a cute and fancy name for Dirt Beach.  It really just looks like dirt and sticks to everything.  We found a dive shop and arranged to have our tanks filled the next morning.  We also….wait for it……found a Creperie!  We were very excited to try this little beachside food shack and decided to come in the next day with the whole gang.

That night, the wind started getting up.  The kids all played at Anything Goes while Wendy and Craig came over for barbecued chicken, carrots, and fried plantains.  Squalls kept coming through with heavy rain and wind.  We eventually went to bed, but I stayed awake listening to the creaking and straining of the anchor lines.  I had that same feeling I had in Anegada (do you remember what happened there?), so I went up top several times to look around the anchorage.  I took sightings on land and looked at where we were compared to the other boats.  It is difficult to do this at night, because the darkness plays tricks on your eyes, making stars, anchor lights, and street lights from shore all look like they are in one plane.  Nevertheless, I was sure that our anchor was holding, but I kept an eye on the boat just upwind of us.  I was getting more and more tired, so I started just popping my head out of the hatch above our bed to look at him from time to time.  I felt like a prairie dog.

At 1230, I woke Chris up.  “This guy is definitely dragging down on us!” I screamed. Chris was groggy and thinking that I was worrying needlessly.  But by the time we got up on deck, his boat was only about 20 feet away from us.  We shouted, but he was upwind of us.  We shined our flashlights on his portholes and even blew the foghorn.  This was one heavy-sleeping French family.  I was having serious flashbacks to our scare in Anegada.  The other boat downwind of him was awakened by our ruckus, but all we could both do was watch and wait.  I suggested getting fenders out and tying them to our bow, but Chris hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

The man finally woke up when his stern was swinging within six feet of our bow.  The new potential problem was that his prop, keel, or rudder would snag on our anchor chain, which, of course, sticks out straight from the bow and lies just under the surface for a good 15 feet.  If that happened, we would get tied up together, which could be disastrous, especially at night in a storm.  The man started his engine and woke up his wife.  They struggled to take their anchor up for about 45 minutes, with a lot of screaming and yelling.  We stood on the bow and watched along with the other leeward boat’s owner.  The boat started pulling away and we breathed a sigh of relief, but then it swung about in a circle and the skipper dropped his anchor in the same place!  Oh no.  Not a chance.  I told Chris that he’d better go tell that guy right now that he’s not anchoring right in front of us again.  I’d be awake all night!  But the wind was screaming and the man didn’t have his VHF radio on.  The only way to tell him would be to launch the dinghy and try to pull up alongside in the fierce waves and wind, in the dark.

So anchor he did.  Right in front of us.  After three tries.  My trust and faith in his boathandling had plummeted to zero, especially after we identified the boat as a charter boat (this means that he rented the boat, and may not have a solid feel for how that particular boat handles.)   It’s not really cool to drag down on another boat and then park yourself in front of them. Bad form.  So we sat in the cockpit for another 45 minutes and watched to see how his anchor set.   Then we went to bed and set our alarm to go off every 20 minutes.  Every time it went off, one of us went up top to see how things looked.

By morning, we expected a knock on the hull, with a thank you for saving his a&%.  Nope.  We popped our heads up after one of the alarms, and his boat was GONE.  He hightailed it out of there.  I saw him in the distance rounding the point of the harbor.  We later learned that the other boat he might have hit was just as spooked.  Its owner slept in his cockpit, with his head next to his anchor alarm (a GPS driven electronic device that tells you if your boat has moved out of a set radius. Super cool.)  Another miss and run.

The next morning, Chris and I were obviously wrecked, but this island owed me a crepe.  Big Time.  Chris banged his head pretty badly that morning, so he stayed back and rested.  We stood in line and ordered 10 crepes from the guy in the crepe truck.  Well, we ordered the crepes AFTER staring at the sign for about 15 minutes trying to figure out the menu.  In the end, we decided that we could decipher “chocolat”, “Nutella”, “jambon”, and “frommage”.  Everything else was a big question mark and we were not about to get help from anyone within a ten mile radius.  Trust me, we tried.  So we ordered chocolate and Nutella crepes for the kids and ham and cheese crepes for the adults.  We thoroughly enjoyed them as we sat on the dirt, I mean “Black Beach” and watched all the French women saunter around topless next to their “Big French Man – Teenie Tiny Little Speedo” husbands.

But Wait, There’s More!

Basse Terre

January 5-6

By 1400, we had our crepes and had no further use for this place.  So we tried our luck in Basse Terre.  Hmmmm.  I am trying really hard to think of something good to say about this one.  The anchorage was rolly and Wendy and I had a tough time trying to buy food in town, since everything was closed.  Maybe Wendy remembered something fun.  Check out her blog on Basse Terre at threekidsandaboat.com.  We only lasted 16 hours here.

Pointe a Pitre

January 6-9

By 0600, Anything Goes and Patronus were on their way to Pointe a Pitre.  The harbors we had visited so far in Guadeloupe were on the west coast of this butterfly-shaped island.  Pointe a Pitre is the city located on the southern tip of the center of the island.  Basically, the butterfly’s butt.  To get there, we had to sail south around the left “wing” and then north up to the city.  In all, it was 33 miles.  But it was dark, windy, and rough.  We kept in close radio contact with Anything Goes.  We were both having a really hard time and considered both going back to Basse Terre (it was that rough) as well as bagging Guadeloupe altogether and heading straight for Les Saintes.  We would have done the latter, but we didn’t know if we were required to check out of Guadeloupe first, since they are technically two different countries.  So we plugged on in seasick misery. (We later found out that you do not need to check out of Guadeloupe to go to Les Saintes.  In case you were planning on traveling between these two countries anytime soon.)

We arrived at noon and anchored outside of Marina Bas du Fort.  We had a quiet afternoon on the boat to recover from our ordeal.  We had a nice visit from Rick on s/v Island Time and rallied to have him and his wife over to Patronus that night for some drinks.

The next morning, we went into the marina and schmoozed our way into using the laundry room there.  It did not go smoothly, as the power kept going out and resetting the machines.  We also found a nearby supermarket.  More importantly, we had Wifi for the first time since December 30^th!  Everyone went to bed early, but I Skyped with Lana and Dave and blogged late into the night. (Hey Friends!  Get on Skype so we can talk!  Our top secret code name is erica.conway)

The next morning, we dinghied over to the city of Point a Pitre and had our best experience in Guadeloupe yet.  We found a little outdoor café and ordered lunch, completely in French.  I even managed to get kid’s meals, ask for the check, and paid, without speaking a word of English!  I did use a lot of hand gestures, though. : )  Afterwards, we walked by the fresh market, gazed through the windows of many city shops, and even watched a man painting graffiti on a main road in broad daylight.

 

Reese: “Mom. Mom.  MOM!!!  That man is doing graffiti!  Is he allowed to do that??!!!  Should we call the police?”

Erica: “Yes, Reese.  Let’s call the police.  Do you see a payphone?  Oh, and do you know how to say, “There’s a guy painting graffiti on a crumbling, broken-down old building” in French?