6/16/01 | Turning the big corner

encore îles

After bashing through big seas for the last week, we found a welcome respite at the Îles des Saintes, a cluster of tiny islands off Guadeloupe's southern shore. Inside the open bay formed by the islands the water was much flatter. We anchored off the largest of the Îles, Terre-d'en-Haut, which is sort of the Guadeloupe version of Block Island or Nantucket. There are several small but luxurious hotels, and rooms to rent here and there, but most visitors come on one of the dozen or so ferries, spilling out from the dock onto the main square at around 9 a.m. and leaving with the last boat around 6.

Even the biggest of the Saintes is a small place, and in two days we managed to hike and bicycle just about everywhere. We hadn't had our bikes out since Puerto Rico, because the roads on all the islands we've been on have been incredibly steep, narrow, and choked with fast-moving cars. The concrete roads on Terre-d'en-Haut are even narrower than most, barely a lane and a half wide, but there's very little traffic, and what traffic there is mostly consists of rental scooters. The steepness, though, seems to be an inescapable fact of Caribbean island life. We huffed and puffed up the hills, resting only at places which were level enough that we had at least a reasonable chance of being able to get started again. Then it was zoooom downhill, a battle between braking enough so that we'd stay in control, and keeping up our momentum to help us up the next grade.

We thought the symbolic sign at the turnoff for Le Chameau, the highest hill on the island (a little more than a thousand feet), meant "No bikes, scooters, or cars", so we parked our bikes and hiked up the road to the top. Later we saw a similar sign on another road where bikes, scooters, and cars clearly were allowed, so we probably would have been legal to ride up -- but I'm not sure it would have been physically possible! Our calves burned just walking up the switchbacks. At the top is an old stone lookout tower, unfortunately locked, but an old telephone wire with big knots tied in it dangled from an upstairs window and Britt climbed up to get a better view.

We also walked across to a pretty windward beach, then took a trail along the ridgeline back to town. The Saintes show the effect of the double whammy of this year's drought combined with a too-large population of goats; every bit of plant life that wasn't dried to a crisp had been nibbled down to the ground. The rocky ridge sloped away to empty brown fields, fenced-in dirt squares which showed no signs of life. Waves crashed against the windward cliffs, churning the water in the coves into a boiling white mass of foam. Beautiful, but bleak.

All this exercise made us hungry. Unfortunately we arrived in the Saintes on a weekend with only a few francs in our pockets, and the bank is only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays; fortunately, as in tourist towns everywhere, the restaurants gladly take Visa (which we learned is called "Carte Bleue" in French, probably the second most useful word to know, after "toilettes"). The French food is fantastic, of course. Even though we had to guess our way through the menus, and sometimes what we got wasn't quite what we expected, it was always delicious.

The drinks, in particular, have been an adventure. Our first lunch out, after a hot, dusty hike, we made the mistake of ordering "punch" as a drink -- hey, it was cheaper than Coke! It turned out to be a small glass of mostly rum with a little fruit juice, not bad for a cocktail but somewhat low on hydration value. The next time we saw the waitress we added a 1.5 liter bottle of water to our order. With another lunch I picked "limonade ordinare" off the menu. Ordinary lemonade, right? Nope, it was soda pop flavored with anise (i.e., licorice-flavored -- kind of like Sambuca and soda, but nonalcoholic), made in Guadeloupe. Not bad though, and definitely far better than the too-sweet watermelon soda I tried back in Saba.

I finally picked up a French-English phrase book when we got to Martinique. Of course, the only thing I could find was geared to French speakers who want to learn English, not the other way around. Only the English is transliterated phonetically, so I'll have to guess on the French pronounciation. It's British English, too, not American English, which is not really a problem, but it's sometimes hard to keep a straight face while reading "I'm absolutely knackered (aïme absoloutli nakeude)". But I'm looking forward to having at least a tiny bit of French for the next time we come through these islands, because we are frustrated with our ignorance and illiteracy. What makes it all just a tad surreal is that some French words are the same as some English words which mean entirely different things. It wasn't too hard to figure out from context that a French "tuba" is an English "snorkel", but not until we got this phrasebook did we realize that "location" actually means "rental". We'd seen all these signs around Terre d'en Haut, "Location des Scooters" -- yup, they were located there, all right. The word which confused us the most was "evasion". We saw a day charter catamaran with the words "Sun Evasion" splashed across the sail cover in big letters; how odd, we thought, avoiding the sun? In Martinique I bought a new wetsuit from a dive shop called "Sub Evasion", so I took the opportunity to ask the man working there, who spoke some English.

"But it is the same in English!" he replied, surprised.

We shook our heads doubtfully. "To get away from?  That doesn't make any sense."

"Oh, yes, you know. Evasion. You are at work, you dream about getting away from it."

It hit me in a Eureka moment. "Escape!" Britt and I both laughed, then we explained the English connotations of "evasion", although I'm not sure the dive-shop guy quite understood.

outre mer

In a sense, the Saintes were our turning point. Since then we've been able to sail nearly every mile, although it's still hard into the wind most of the time. After Martinique, our course has been southwest rather than southeast, which is almost a beam reach. With lighter winds forecast, and with hurricanes becoming more likely as summer tropical weather patterns become established, we decided to push for the Grenadines, where we will slow down and become cruisers again. It seems a pity to miss all these lovely islands, but we'll explore them in earnest next winter.

Either the drought has not been as bad further south, or the wet season has already set in. Dominica's high mountains are green, although the lower hills by the coast are brown, and the same holds for Martinique. St. Lucia and St. Vincent, though, are verdant jungles. We paused for the night, without officially checking in, midway down both Dominica and St. Lucia, choosing unbusy anchorages known for the absence of boat boys. (We made a slight detour as we sailed along the coast of St. Lucia to a close view of Anse Chastenet resort, where we honeymooned just over ten years ago.) In neither place did we have problems with officials or locals, although at St. Lucia a boatload of fishermen misjudged the wind when placing their net and got it tangled up in our underbody. When it was clear that their net was drifting down on us, they came over and asked us to move, so I started the engine and Britt started pulling in the anchor. But the net drifted faster, and Britt was afraid of tangling the anchor in it, so we just sat there with the engine in neutral while the fishermen worked on gathering in their net. As they pulled it across our boat, it must have turned the prop, and it stopped our engine. They had to dive down and cut it free, and we felt bad for them, but they didn't seem to blame us. It was interesting to watch them, five guys with a wooden skiff with both outboard and oars:  one rowed, two gathered the net into the boat, one bailed the water out of the boat, and the last, in the water with mask and snorkel, directed the whole operation, all of them shouting in Creole the whole time. Then they turned on the outboard, and zoomed off to another spot.

We're starting to get the hang of this tradewind sailing thing, although maybe that's just because we're no longer bashing directly to windward. First, we've figured out how to interpret the weather forecast. We get the weatherfaxes, the offshore report from NMN, and David Jones's SSB forecast, then believe whichever is forecasting the worst conditions. To that forecast, we add 5 knots, and expect occasional gusts of 5 knots more than that. Finally, if the wind was forecast to be northeast, we expect it from the east, and if the forecast is easterly, then we expect southeast winds. (A forecast of southeast winds means really southeast winds.) This gets us pretty close to real conditions, minus island effects.

The chain of Caribbean islands acts like a big diffraction grating to the wind and the waves, and things get interesting in the diffraction zones. We've figured out that when we get to the south end of an island, the wind will accelerate and whip around into our faces, forcing us off course to the west -- but that's okay, because when we get to the north end of the next island, the wind will back and we'll be able to move back on course. But it's important not to get too close to either end of an island, because the waves will get really fierce. Then we have to stay about three miles offshore as we go alongside the island, and even there we get wind holes behind the big peaks and gusts through the valleys. It's challenging sailing, and still quite rough much of the time.

It was not so rough, though, that I wasn't able to break my no-fish mojo. Up to now, every fish I've attempted to reel in has gotten away, but on the way to St. Lucia I landed a small mahi. Finally, a fish! Since we haven't caught anything since Saba, and our last mahi was the monster we caught in the Mona Passage (not counting a cute li'l baby mahi we caught a few days ago which we threw back), it was welcome indeed. The next strike was something even bigger, but not only did it get away, it took the lure and all the line on the reel.

The Grenadines, alas, are a no-spear country, but maybe we can do some line fishing off the boat or dinghy. I think our enjoyment of cruising is directly related to how much fish we eat. (Better that, than how much rum we drink!) It also looks like there is some good hiking on Bequia, and good snorkeling a little further south at the Tobago Cays, both activities which keep us happy. These are all bite-sized islands, our favorite kind. We're still a little north of our "insurance line", but we can easily run south to a good harbor if necessary, so we're looking forward to slowing down and relaxing.