The French Antilles

Evil Giraffes

Martinique was lovely, startlingly similar to France and we would have loved more time to explore it properly. We sailed into Marin on the south west coast and anchored. Customs was a dream in comparrison to most of the other islands and it was free. The supermarket was excellent! Gorgeous French cheeses that weren’t ridiculously expensive, freshly baked baguettes and affordable red wine.

Fort De France – Out of fuel

We then tried to find a new sailing guide because we’d reached the end of the Windward Islands, and Dominica, our next island, is the first in the Leeward Island chain. We have relied heavily on Chris Doyle’s sailing guides because they’re so useful with well written snippets of history and all the best anchorages and we couldn’t bear the idea of sailing into Dominica without one, but Marin had run out of them. We even sailed around to Fort de France, the capital, in search of one but to no avail. The city had a real French feel to it with cobbled streets, colonial architecture and large parks lined with restaurants and bars.

Ou est la bibliotheque? – Martinique

Fully stocked with provisions we headed up the coast to St.Pierre which was once the island’s capital and had been known as ‘The Paris of the Caribbean’. However, in 1902 Mt. Pelee volcano errupted and killed all but 2 of the towns 30,000 population, one of whom was a prisoner protected by his thick stone cell walls. We wandered around the lovely town where a lot of the old ruins remain and had an early night ready for our sail to Dominica the next morning.

Dominica is known as the wild island because of it’s lovely unspoiled country and dramatic scenery and again, we were sad to have only one full day to explore it because the hiking is said to be fantastic. We wandered around Portsmouth which seemed poor and quite run down but we did manage to find a copy of our sailing guide. The rest of the day was spent walking in the Cabrits national park and preparing for our next sail.

Cabrits National Park – Dominica

The wind was favourable leaving Dominica and we arrived in the gorgeous Iles Des Saintes well before lunch time. Checking in was even easier, we didn’t even have to see anyone, just input our details into a computer and printed off a copy, leaving us time for lunch and an afternoon sail on to Guadeloupe. We anchored at Point a Pitre and then ended up getting drunk on ‘ti punch’ (rum, lime juice and sugar – lovely but lethal) with our friendly ‘next door neighbours’ who came and introduced themselves after being excited to meet some fellow young cruisers! It was a lovely evening but a 4am rise to navigate through the Riviere Sallee after too much rum wasn’t so great. (The Riviere Sallee is a sort of canal that runs through the centre of Guadeloupe and acts as a short cut for those who want one).

Bridge opening – Guadeloupe

But we made it and it felt like a real adventure, setting off in the dark (hastily following another boat in case it wasn’t clear where to go), and then waiting in the canal mouth with about 8 other boats for the bridge entrance to the Riviere Sallee to open. By the time we’d chugged through the mangroves to the north exit, it was light, which was lucky because we had to follow beacons through quite a treacherous channel, in fact a yacht that had overtaken us 15 minutes earlier got stuck and had to hail down someone in a speedboat to pull them off.

Galleon Bay from Shirley Heights – Antigua

After a much needed breakfast we decided not to hang around in Guadeloupe because we didn’t really have the time to enjoy it, so we headed straight to Antigua where we arrived, with plenty of daylight, in the very beautiful English Harbour, to await the arrival of Joe.