In the morning, in the wet and stormy bay at Deshaies, Guadeloupe, I was surprised our anchor had held all night! The wind had been very strong, coming down in psychotic gusts through the mountains. The water was deep where we anchored, crowded among a bunch of other boats, amazing that we found a spot at all in there! And even more amazing that we didn’t drag or swing wrong and crash into somebody. But Mary Jo does have an invisible bubble of protection around her, it works wonders for us sometimes! I saw a powerboat run right across our anchor line once, and it was as though the anchor line was yanked down by an invisible hand to allow the powerboat to clear it. Anytime Mary Jo is going to crash into anything, it hits that protection bubble first and bounces off. So that’s been pretty helpful on this trip!
The skies were cloudy in the morning, the water was clear and a dark shade of blue. We pulled the anchor around 7:30AM and headed for the ocean and toward our next destination, Iles Des Saintes. This is a small group of French Islands about 10 miles off the coast of Guadeloupe, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. The sun shone brightly through the morning mist that gathered above Guadeloupe’s dark green mountains, and soon it was obscured again by rain. A squall blew through, with a big rainbow behind us over the ocean.
Guadeloupe is a very big island! And very mountainous. It is different here than the other places we’ve been to on this trip so far. The Caribbean islands are divided into a few groups, first you have the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, DR and Puerto Rico), and the Lesser Antilles (the island chain from St. Thomas down to Grenada.) So we’re exploring the Lesser Antilles, the graceful arc of rugged ridges which wall off the Caribbean Sea. These islands are divided into the “Leeward” and “Windward” islands, The Leeward extending from the Virgins down to Guadeloupe, and the Windward begin at Dominica and go down to Grenada. The Windward islands get hit by hurricanes much less frequently than the Leeward, so that’s a big motivation to make this journey! But… In order to sail from Leeward to Windward you naturally have to beat into the wind! That’s not easy, but someday if I want to sail back the way I came it will be really easy! The Leeward islands also happen to be smaller than the Windwards, except Guadeloupe. This island is starting to feel like the Windward Islands, very big, and after we pass on to Dominica we’ll officially be in the Windwards and the mountains and land masses we see will be much bigger! The sailing should also get easier for us…
These huge islands have an interesting effect on the wind and weather. They actually stop the wind completely! I had to see it to believe it. As we passed by the verdant green and uninhabited slopes of this mysterious land, we had squalls and rain blowing plenty of wind off the mountains. But the ocean had no waves, completely calm and pleasant. So we motored for a while, and then we sailed for a while. The sailing was getting slower… and then after we had made it ten miles or so behind Guadeloupe, the wind died 100%.
Our sails flapped around in the complete calm, and I actually felt relieved. Wow, thank god, the wind stopped. Although we do need it! But I was sick of the wind, there had been just so much, unrelenting, for weeks! Just to feel the calm air was relaxing and I needed the break. My nerves…. Haha! Let’s motor. The motor had been running great since the maintenance in St. Martin.
We passed a very beautiful bay on Guadeloupe called Malendure, and if I ever come back through in the future I think I’d choose to anchor here instead of Deshaies! Lots more space around here and more calm and protected. The land was now vivid green in the bright, hot sunshine, but misty storms clung to the mountaintops. It did look like the weather was being blocked from hitting us, with all wind and rain staying behind these peaks. For a while… we motored another ten miles. Then the breeze came back in light wisps.
The city of Basseterre sprawled along and the mountains grew a little smaller, and a little father away. Then the wind hit like a wall, we turned the engine off and went back to sailing. There was one peak left marking the end of Guadeloupe and it was enveloped in a massive squall, which whacked us with heavy wind and rain. The waves grew from nothing to little choppy monsters. We could see the point so far away, we would have to get around that point and then get 10 miles offshore to Iles Des Saintes.
It looked disheartening, the wind was blowing almost directly from that point. The sailing was tough. The wind was too strong. I was annoyed by it! And Dad told me I need a break, to let him sail. I was being kind of a control freak, sailing about 90 percent of the time and only letting Dad take it when he really wanted to sail. And he was pretty content relaxing 90 percent of the time so it all worked out! I was content sailing! But I let him relieve me here so I could just look the opposite direction for a while, and not keep having to face my fears of traveling in the ocean when the weather is rough. But that was the point of this journey I guess, no way around it but to keep going.
The sky darkened, and then got darker still. But it was about then that we realized, we had misjudged the distance. I thought we had to round that point of land before we’d see the 10 mile open water crossing to Iles Des Saintes, but that point of land WAS Iles Des Saintes! Ohh, nice!! It’s closer than we thought, just right there… Ok, then… the city of Basseterre and the land dropped away from us, exposing the open water between Guadeloupe and Iles Des Saintes. The point of land in the distance revealed that it was a small group of multiple islands, and they had a couple of sizable mountain peaks on them. And fortunately the open water here was actually a lot more sheltered than the other ocean crossings, there’s a big island called Marie Gallant to the north which blocks the waves in this area. These positive factors made us feel better about the massive low pressure system of jet black clouds overtaking the sky all around us.
There was a mountain coming down to a cape and lighthouse on the end of Guadeloupe, and behind that over the open water, the storm clouds kept rolling in. Dad sailed this one! A big squally squall coming our way! Soon the land was disappearing behind curtains of white rain. Then boom! It hit us like a ton of bricks, the wind driven rain thoroughly pressure washing everything. I had felt a little tormented with fear as the squall was coming, you just never know what strength they can possess. A hurricane is really just a massive squall… But once the thing hits us and the suspense is over, the fear melts away in the driving rain. Not so bad… it’s only the unknown that is scary.
And after it finished, it left the breeze steady and the sky dark. Now we could see the south coast of Guadeloupe, rolling deep green countryside, patched with farms and towns by the seaside. It rolled away into the distance, with heavy clouds resting along the tops of the hills, making them fade out into the sky. But in stark contrast in the other direction, the cloudiness parted above Iles Des Saintes in ice blue skies. The effect was beautiful to watch it morph and change as we sailed there, and the cloud cover kept us comfortably out of the sun.
And within a few hours we closed in on Iles Des Saintes. We were coming into the island chain a few miles south of the main town, so we would have to motor the last bit of distance, and have a scenic tour of the place! It was very isolated feeling! Just a group of small but rugged islands, cut off from the world. We saw birds with spotted wings that we had never seen before. The trees were green around the rocks and cliffs, no cactus here! These aren’t desert islands like you’d expect in the Leeward Islands. They are lush. I felt like we were coming into a place like the Galapagos islands! Foreign, exotic, and isolated.
There are two main islands in Iles Des Saintes, Terre-de-Haut, and Terre Basse. Names that are constantly recycled in the Caribbean, meaning ‘high ground’ and ‘low ground’. Terre-de-Haut is the island that is developed with a bustling village, Terre Basse and the other small islands are almost totally uninhabited. But where we arrived in the Saintes on the rugged coast of Terre Basse, there was a crazy little village built into a notch in the cliffs. It looked so hidden, even ancient, tucked away from the world completely. It was built with a road that steeply snaked between the brutal rock faces, through the dozen ramshackle houses to the ocean. At the beach there were red flowering flamboyant trees and an anchorage, not very protected, with one sailboat rolling around at anchor there. What a haunted bay! What kind of freaky energy is this place giving off?
This is a howler village if I ever saw one! Ok… So… Disclaimer: I’m gonna tell a ridiculous gruesome ghost story I heard once about Iles Des Saintes! …My friend Robbie is full of these tall tales, having sailed through the Caribbean as a 10 year old boy, with his parents in the 1970’s. He then continued to live on a sailboat for the rest of his life in the Caribbean, never having a bank account or social security number, and in St. Thomas he was the last true pirate. He told me… Iles Des Saintes is cut off from the rest of the world completely. And it’s village at a glance seemed idyllic and serene, with smells of fresh baking bread wafting through the hills. But the island has a dark secret: howlers.
Back in the 70’s, Robbie heard them at night, wailing and screaming from somewhere in those hills. You see, Ile Des Saintes according to him, being such a remote colony, has some problems. For generations they had no contact with the outside world. Unfortunately, some of the population wound up becoming incest. But not only that, they had so many extra babies, with extreme mental problems, that, allegedly, they would cut off the children’s tongues and then raise them as dogs.
Robbie claimed he saw one, a man running possessed on all fours, howling, and tearing through the aisles of a grocery market. Until another man grabbed him and wrestled him onto a leash to drag him out of the store. Needless to say, Taylor, Vadim and I were all shocked by this ghastly story, as Robbie told it around a campfire. Embellishing much more than I can remember I’m sure. But he swore it was true! So let’s see how Iles Des Saintes treats me in real life, making landfall in this- at a glance- exotic and beautiful destination.
Haha, so anyway, the waves and currents were quite bizarre and slammed us around as we furled the sails and turned on the engine to motor past the dramatic rock cliffs that rose from the ocean, and the slopes of tree covered hillsides and islets with birds dancing throughout. Then we were in the interior of the chain, in a beautiful and protected bay surrounded on all sides with the irregular island landmasses. One peak rose the tallest, a big pointed cone that loomed over the rest of the area. Ooo… I wonder if I can climb that mountain! Put that on the list. We were thrilled by the natural beauty of the area, and we motored towards the town.
Dad had been here on his trip through the Caribbean with his mother and step father, and his ex-wife Tina, back in 2003. (He remembered just the quaint village, no howlers, and has very happy memories from this place.) We thought we would anchor in the same area that he anchored back then. And we did notice the chart said “Anchoring Prohibited” in many of the different bays around there. It also showed on the chart, 3 designated anchorages in front of the town. Where Dad and stayed back in the day seemed like the designated place to anchor. So we would go there!
Well when we got there we noticed about 50-100 boats, mostly catamarans, all on mooring balls. We dropped our anchor, around 3PM, and finally it was time to rest. Or so I naively thought! Mind you we anchored directly next to a coast guard boat, sitting empty at a mooring ball. But we also still weren’t checked in to customs… Whatever! I’m not gonna worry about it, or check into customs! Hadn’t learned my lesson from Montserrat, but here in Iles Des Saintes, we’ve been lead to believe one needs to be vaccinated with not 6 months elapsing ones latest booster dose, as well as one’s latest dose being received at least 2 weeks before scheduled arrival to the islands, as well as producing a negative covid test taken 48 hours prior to arrival, and applying for permission to visit through the online portal 3 weeks ahead of time. Total cost for the Canadian citizens who told us this story was over $500. I’ll take my chances. We don’t need to stay here long. Then it’s off to Dominica. However… we do need to stay here for two full days. Because the storm at sea is getting worse, and I’m not trying to sail again until it has passed.
Plus I’d like to see this place! It’s beautiful… But within a half hour of being anchored a powerboat came zooming up to us. A man was piloting it, he also had two young kids on board. He was not smiling, they were not happy to see us at all. He yelled at us in French, which we didn’t understand, but gathered that he was saying we can’t be here. So then he told us in English, you can’t anchor here. You also can’t anchor there. You can’t anchor anywhere near this town.
Can we take a mooring ball? We asked. No. You have to leave. He said, you can anchor out there, beyond some buoys in the ocean… Or you can go to Marigot Bay.
He sped off. Very rude and a total jerk honestly, definitely not happy to see us, probably related to the howlers. But at least he wasn’t a real cop… maybe he was a harbormaster, but we couldn’t figure out how the other boats went about getting on one of those mooring balls, and he wouldn’t explain the process. I suppose they were all rented privately.
So we went to anchor out in the ocean… We got back in gear, our faces feeling strained and burned from the sun, we had just started taking shelter, and now had to go back into it. I pulled up the anchor, we moved to that spot he had told us, and I dropped it again… No… This spot is really bad! It’s very rough. Big waves rolling under us. We’ll get no rest here… There’s a beach right there, a “lee shore” as it’s called, and a storm blowing in. I’ll never feel safe here, never comfortable enough to leave the boat unattended here. Nope! Hate this!
Okay, let’s go try out Marigot Bay… It doesn’t look much better, and it’s far away. We pulled the anchor again, and motored out clear of the protected harbor surrounded by the many islands, (where there were at least 6 different bays, all excellent protected anchorages, and despite the info on my chart, they were ALL off limits,) back into the passage with Guadeloupe’s hills edging the distant horizon. The waves were big now, and the sun was low. We motored around the island of Terre-de-Haut to the rough backside, where a huge peninsula jutted out into the ocean. It created a deep bay cut into the island, and we motored back into there. Way back in and the water was only 5-10 feet deep, so we anchored there! There were small waves, but the spot was relatively calm! I got in the ocean and set the anchor in a sand patch, around a seabed which was mostly a forest of turtle grass. The area was so spacious, with no other boats at all. So with all that room I let out a few hundred feet of anchor line, and this way felt like the boat was anchored very safe and secure, even though the wind and small waves were blowing us towards the lee shore.
There was a few houses on shore, although we were far away from that, with one rock island in the middle of the bay behind us. On each side of Marigot Bay were huge cliffs, and some of the rock formations were very dramatic like something out of Tahiti. Mostly the place was untamed nature, but there was a bizarre and minimalistic looking resort, or some sort of compound, built on a grassy hilltop that met the sea below some of the cliffs. We were kind of anchored right beside that for the coming 3 nights and two days on Iles Des Saintes.
So I was content with this spot! And in the morning we would explore.
We did, we went to a remote and rugged beach in the morning, with awesome rock formations. Although that bay was so full of Sargasso seaweed that the water was colored brown, and the sight was tragic. This stuff has been everywhere.
In town we had a strange experience too, I remember Dad asking me if I liked it here and I was like, “uhhh, I don’t know…” As we sat in a patch of shade in a tiny public park, full of people and having a hard time finding any place to sit. Something about the place was throwing me off! Maybe it was that I didn’t speak French! And we couldn’t find a restaurant meal because it was only customary to eat at certain times, which we seemed to be woefully off-schedule for! The place was full of rich tourists from Paris and seemed a bit snobby. A woman was making pizza in a storefront by the side of the road and when we asked her if we could order something she yelled at us in French and in English just screamed, “no food!” We also noticed that people were not friendly to each other, didn’t say hi. Everyone was frowning! Seemed so odd here in this lovely paradise…
We couldn’t find a bakery, but did get a great French baguette at the supermarket, as well as some goat cheese and some really awesome guava and coconut cakes, which were like a flaky pie crust with filling and topped with an angel food cake. Yum!!
The town was very small, and kind of very developed and touristy. But it was so tiny, and so overrun with the tourism, it was just a strange combination, and anyway, something about it wasn’t the lovely, quaint village that Dad remembered. More like a little cruise ship attraction. The place gave us weird vibes over and over, and back in Marigot Bay, the resort we anchored next to was feeling more and more like a cult! Many people would always be just idly wandering the grassy grounds, standing on the hill and staring out to the sea, or staring at us. I told Dad we were gonna wake up one morning and see a line of them along the hill, all just staring at us! But the second night… as I was reading aloud to Dad from our book, (story time!! we call it), we heard some howling… What was that, Dad asked. We went silent. Then a loud howl! And some cheering.
We got out the binoculars! Pointed them right at the “resort” or whatever kind of strange, European government summer camp that it claimed to be on it’s website. There was a throng of people all gathered in the light inside a building. There were dozens of chairs but all the people were standing. And they were hooting and hollering having some kind of big party, or a big gathering of some sort! A tribalistic sacrifice? Who knows. Bunch of howlers as far as I’m concerned.
And meanwhile the storm was raging at sea and Marigot Bay got really rough. The waves weren’t too huge because of the shallow water we were in, but the wind and waves were coming right in from the ocean and slamming us. The whole time anchored there we sort of felt like we were still at sea. So not the most restful stay, but I actually was able to rest pretty good. We needed the days off from sailing anyway, we had sailed continuously through the Leeward islands, just stopping to rest at night.
The second day exploring Terre-de-Haut, we climbed that highest peak, on a lovely paved road that went all the way to the top. The view was gorgeous. The island is very small, with fascinating geology, and a village that’s just a little too big for the tiny island! Haha, but I don’t mean to be so harshly negative about Iles Des Saintes! It is a beautiful place! But it’s not my favorite destination, I don’t think I’ll return. Glad I checked it out. We had a very nice dinner that night on the waterfront in the town. The town started to grow on me, a little bit… and the colorful houses and winding streets built on the hillside behind it was very quaint.
In the morning, we pulled the anchor and took off.
