Les Saintes (Guadeloupe)

We’ve been to Les Saintes more than once before, and one day I’ll write up our previous visits here both of which we did on El Mundo (our sailboat which we sold in New Zealand back at the start of 2018).

I love it here.  It has an almost magical feel to it.  Obviously that will be an entirely personal response to a melting pot of reasons, but I hope that I can convey at least some of that sense of calm I get here over to you.

Our anchorage this time has been fabulous.  There was masses of room here in the bay between Pointe Boisjoli and Pain de Sucre.  We had to anchor outside the yellow buoys which delineate the mooring field protecting the underwater environment from being chewed up too much by repeated anchoring close in to shore.  That was a benefit to us because everyone here has been on the mooring balls but we have been in our own huge space with the cliffs of Pointe Boisjoli rising above us close enough to hear the waves crashing gently but far enough away to be able to see them properly.

As the boat swings back and forth on the anchor chain we have near-panoramic views from the saloon including over to the island of Terre d’en Bas with its pretty village nestled into the hill, Pointe Boisjoli and the land between it and Pain de Sucre, a clear view of the whole southern side of Ilet a Cabrit and a very clear view over to Guadeloupe.

With everything so open here we can see quite clearly the weather patterns as they come through.  The easterly trade winds bring through either long periods of blue sky and relatively calm winds here in Les Saintes but at the same time we watch big rain clouds develop on their way towards Guadeloupe as the air approaches the volcano of Soufriere.  We rarely see the summit as it is almost always blanketed in cloud and as the rain clouds pass across the main island it too becomes obscured from view.

Food has been a focus here for us, as you might expect from French islands!  Robbe Steak (a butcher / deli on Terre de Haut) was closing the next day as the season is coming to an end.  We managed to get plenty of wonderful Parmesan cheese at a knock-down price and a delicious rotisserie chicken.  I wished she had stayed open a little longer.  We made a bee-line for Ti Kaz La (probably the best restaurant here) and enjoyed more mango soufflés with raspberry coulis than we should over the course of our stay!  The chef there has worked as a pastry chef in top restaurants and that soufflé is worth travelling for… 

We also remembered having enjoyed some good crepes at L’Ilet Douceur and returned there several times too.  They have Wi-Fi, their savoury crepes are good and their beurre sucre crepes are heavenly. One can even get a half-decent baguette at the sandwich shop a little further along the road after Carrefour.

With all that eating, exercise was needed!  We replaced school with P.E. / history classes.  A trip up to Fort Napoleon was worth the hot walk up 325ft / 99m as it has a fabulous approach for imagining being an enemy as one approaches the moat and tall walls of the fort, the stones in the walls tell a story of how the fort changed over time, one can immerse oneself in their somewhat eclectic museum and its enjoyable walking around the lovely grounds with all sorts of cacti, aloes, yucca etc. with more spectacular views.

We also walked up a much longer and steeper hill to Le Chameau, an old lookout tower that sits right on the top of the tallest hill in Les Saintes at 1036 feet / 316m high.  It was quite a challenge, particularly for Tom as he is still working on regaining his muscular strength after such a long time being bed-bound with his herniated lumbar disc.  It was well worth it all though, even for James who struggled at times but learnt a lot about the strength of the mind, how it affects how our bodies feel and how achieving our goals can be enormously satisfying, however difficult.  The views on the way up were lovely and those from the top even more so, including a peek at the other side of the island looking south which we will see again from the boat when we finally head south.

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While we’ve been here, some friends of ours that we’d met a few times before in Antigua joined James and me on the beach.  All three boys had enormous fun playing on our SUP (stand-up paddleboard) and, as usual, the sand had them occupied for hours.  The mothers had a chance to share ideas, stories and a general chinwag (there was even talk of future cocktails…) and we joined them aboard their boat for sundowners the evening before they left to head south.

James has been having regular swims off the boat.  His favourite activities seem to be jumping from the highest boarding doors (it’s a long way dooooown!) and playing “woobliere totalis”, his SUP game he plays wobbling as much as he can back and forth before falling off with a flourish.

We haven’t been neglecting the boat though.  Now that the outside of the boat is looking lovely (more on that in “Antigua”), we’ve turned our attention inwards again.  Both the main engines and one of the generators were due oil changes, we’ve been tracing cables to work on improving the wifi and cellular reception, checking the hull for growth, and we had our first heads (toilets) problem…

Changing the oil on Alchemy’s engines (the main engines that drive the boat as well as the two generators that power all the electrical things and charge the batteries that allow us to turn off the generators for most of the day and night) is much more straightforward than it was on El Mundo.  There is a oil change system with various valves here and there that, so long as you pay attention, pumps the oil out of whichever engine you’re servicing into a Used Oil tank.  Then, the oil filter is changed and clean oil is pumped from another tank full of new oil.  We’ll do a video about oil changes one of these days! I find it quite satisfying, like I’m saying thank you to the engines for serving us so well.

We’re becoming pretty adept at cable tracing and this time it required Tom to climb up on the roof of the flybridge.  I don’t like it when he’s up there but he’s very sensible and is in the process of specifying all sorts of new kit to improve the boat’s comms.

When Tom dived the hull to check for growth, he was a little stunned by what he found.  We had the hull cleaned by someone when we were in Antigua (I’ll include some details of that in “Antigua”) but the amount of growth on the hull suggested that either he didn’t do nearly as much work as he said he did or our antifoul paint is becoming ineffective.  So, Tom looked into where we could have some applied and found a dry dock on the mainland in Guadeloupe.  We will head there next and I’ll report back on that little adventure once it has happened.

Unfortunately, we also had to attend to a blockage in our VacuFlush toilet system.  Yuck.  This is the first time we’ve had any problems at all with the heads which is an enormous improvement on El Mundo’s record.  I have vivid memories of Matthew struggling to remove a blocked hose from our spare heads and trying to dislodge the contents over the side while we were in the middle of the Atlantic in December 2015, not long after we bought her.  It was not pretty, it was not a pleasant smell and my poor brother was rather fed up by the end of it!  Our problem here was also a blockage but thankfully not caused by previous owners using sea water to flush their heads (a choice we never resorted to on El Mundo for exactly that reason).  Sorting it out has helped us move forward with our understanding of the system, has helped us appreciate all that work we did cataloguing the spares so that we could put our hands on a duckbill valve within minutes and it has made me clean out the area under the floor of our bathroom which I’ve been avoiding for ages.  Lots of positives!  It has also meant that we can make a couple of simple adjustments to the toilets which may well have led to the problem in the first place.  We had them installed new last year and the settings the installers used were not what we think are the optimum to avoid this happening.  Lots of moving forward!

So, am I going to end writing about Les Saintes with a commentary on toilets?!  No!  I have to mention the wildlife here.  While I am not keen on swimming in open water / off the boat, I absolutely love seeing the wildlife in the water, in the sky and ashore.

Today, our last day here before we leave to prepare for the dry dock, I saw yet another sign of how full of life the water around us is.  We often see fish jumping clear out of the water, presumably try to escape from predators lurking beneath the surface.  Sometimes it’s one big fish, other times it’s a big group of them.  Today was no different except that this time I managed to capture the last of several episodes of a school of fish jumping in unison very close to the boat.  The frantic nature of their behaviour is evident but their movements are beautiful despite this and the circle of life must continue. I can’t publish it here though, frustratingly, as our website doesn’t currently support videos.

We’ve enjoyed seeing such a huge range of plants and animals, some of them familiar and others a variation on what we know already.  How I wish I were a better photographer and able to share them with you.

And we must move on.  I’ll really miss it here but I have a feeling we will be back next year…