Stopover in Prince Rupert Bay, Dominica

So JUST as I began typing this, the flowers you see here took a tumble right onto the cabin sole, two cups of water and all.  It is very rolly here - has been since we came in late Monday afternoon after a great sail from Guadeloupe - and though we have had the flowers since Tuesday - a gift of friend and local guide Martin - just this minute they decided to go.  Oh well - tropical flowers like these are pretty sturdy. I've put them into the galley sink for the moment.  
JP and Susan are off for a second day of hiking with Martin, so at some point I will have some good pictures of that - yesterday they did Section 11 of the Waitukubuli Trail, and today they are off to Victoria Falls.  I'm hanging out, enjoying my last few days (now down to last few hours) on the boat before I head back to the States for some contract work.  JP and Susan will take Raconteur on to Grenada, and we will haul out there for this hurricane season.  JP also has some work, and of course we have the upcoming wedding of Aude and Rus on the 22nd of June.  Meanwhile, we have a new addition to the family as well - my niece Cass and her husband Adam are the very happy parents of Reese Olivia Lawson, born on the morning of Tuesday April 30.  I can't wait to see her - one upside of leaving the boat a little early.
It's been a short sailing season for us - we arrived in Trinidad in early January, made our way to Grenada, to Saint Lucia and to Guadeloupe by early March, and then headed for what was to have been three weeks in Europe.  JP's mom landed in the hospital after we had been there a week, so we stayed to see her through that and safely back home, now with wonderful help.  So far, so good.
Since we set out on this sabbatical in October 2010, we have managed to spend about 15 months or so on board - I think we had hoped for more, but we always knew that our window probably wasn't open as far as it might have been earlier.  Still, we have had an unforgettable experience - and we are open to whatever comes next when we get back to her in the fall.  No particular plans yet - and there is still much of the Caribbean to be explored.  We STILL have not made it to Antigua for the April Classic Yacht Regatta - we were too late in 2011, too lazy in 2012 (when we sailed only as far as Dominica) and just plain away from the boat this year.  2014...???
I haven't posted a sunset picture for a while.  This is actually a rainbow picture, taken just before sunset on Wednesday the 1st of May.  Dominica remains one of our favorite places - the unspoiled landscape is something to see.  They have started doing some high-end resort properties here, though with a strong eco-tourism bent (see http://secretbay.dm/)  but so far much of the island is pristine rainforest.  I've probably mentioned this before, but this is one of the few islands in the region where there were no sugar plantations, so the forests are still more or less untouched.  They struggle economically - many of their best and brightest leave because there is no work - and we wonder every day why it is only the Japanese, the Chinese, the Venezuelans and now (of all things) Moroccans who invest here.  These islands are so close to the US - the needed investments are not enormous - it seems so foolish that we leave our Asian friends to build roads, schools, docks and other needed infrastructure.  End of political comment.  If you love nature travel - come to Dominica.

Strange day, ending in paradise

I'm on a somewhat limited Internet connection, and I brought my personal laptop - most of my photos are on the boat pc - so I may have a little trouble adding photos to this post.  Here's a slideshow of photos I took on a visit to Pointe a Pitre.
On Friday, we intended to navigate the Riviere Sallee, which runs between the two butterfly wings that form the island of Guadeloupe.  It is a kind of Intracoastal Waterway experience, narrow and shallow, and there are two bridges at the southern end.  The southernmost one is actually two bridges, one for pedestrians and one for motor traffic; it opens daily at 0500, and you have to be there about 15 minutes ahead.  We anchored near the bridge on Thursday night, got up between 0415 and 0430, and were in place awaiting the opening.  At 0500 - nothing.  0505 - nada.  0515 - rien.  We tried hailing them, though we had seen nothing that indicated that they monitor VHF.  We got a crackly response a couple of times, but we could not understand what they were saying, who was saying it, or even whether it was meant for us.  At 0520, knowing we couldn't get to the second bridge anyway, we headed back to our anchoring spot, dropped the hook, and went back to bed.  
I had made coffee cake batter the night before, so I popped that into the oven.  We got up for breakfast around 0800, and we called the Marina Bas du Fort.  It turns out the bridge is closed for repairs - for a year or two.  I'm sure if we had ASKED at the Marina when we stopped on Thursday for fuel and water that we could have been saved the trip and the oh-dark-thirty start to the day.  
So - on to Plan B.  We are in Guadeloupe for another week-plus, before Susan flies to the States on the 4th and JP and  to France on the 5th.  We have been to the Saintes (islands off the southern coast that are also part of Guadeloupe), so we looked to see what might be interesting in the southern part of the Grande Terre side of the island (it was already too late to head around to the west coast, which we were planning to do after exploring the Riviere Sallee and environs).  Susan found an anchorage at Ste. Anne, about 12 miles or away.  We motored, of course - heading more or less dead into the wind - and had the hook down (again) around noon or so.  We had lunch - but we were rolling so badly that it just didn't seem like the place to spend even one night.  SO - hook up (again), and on to the town of St. Francois, another eight miles or so to the east.
When we approached St. Francois, we were mildly alarmed because the anchorage looked very full - it's not reported to be very big, and it looked like a lot of masts.  BUT - after a very tricky entrance - lots of swell, a small opening (well marked) through the reef - we saw that they have put down mooring balls.  A couple of them were still free, despite the Friday afternoon timing - and we snagged one right in the front row, nothing between us and the gorgeous reef and the waters beyond.  As soon as I can, I will post pictures and a couple of videos I took of sail- and kite-boarders.
There is a marina here, surrounded by vacation villas and condos and a couple of hotels, several restaurants and cafes (lots of crepes and ice cream), and even a supermarket not far up the road.  What's not to love?
Hook up three times, and down three times, in one day - but an amazing place to be.  We may still go and visit Marie Galante (another island of Guadeloupe) but it will be hard to leave St. Francois.

The Saint Lucia Enigma

We took a taxi tour of the northern part of Saint Lucia yesterday (I posted the photos here) in an effort to get to know the island a little better.  You could say that Saint Lucia is one of the more Americanized islands; tourism is very developed, there is a lot of airlift from the States, there are several very high end resorts, Oprah says the Pitons should be on everyone's bucket list...you get the idea.  The marina here in Rodney Bay is of course staffed mainly by local folks, but we have never really felt that it was possible to get to know people in the same way we have in, say, Grenada or Trinidad.  We have spent more time on those islands, of course, but (for example) we spent less than a week in Cumberland Bay on the west coast of Saint Vincent last year and we felt much closer to the "real" island than we ever have here, and this is our third visit.  The taxi tour didn't yield much - the driver was nice and wanted to be helpful, but he (like many) has kind of a set tour that he offers, and though he knows his local fruits and vegetables (which include almost nothing that we don't find elsewhere), he didn't know enough about other Caribbean islands to help us understand what might be the same or different in Saint Lucia.  We heard one thing that is at least a partial "difference".  It seems that many residents (and this is the case elsewhere) still own family lands; some have been sold off to developers over the years, but much of the interior is still in local hands.  What we noticed, however, is much more building of new (concrete) houses - and very few stalled projects.  AND, our driver tells us (and we saw a number of billboard advertisements on the subject) that banks will loan residents money, using the land as collateral, to build these houses.  These are likely very long term loans (we don't know that, but are guessing that it's so), and of course if the family is at some point unable to pay, they stand to lose both the house and the land.  Until recently, many houses that were built on the land were built with materials from the land itself, not from the much more expensive (albeit more durable) materials for which they have to borrow.

The other oddity in Saint Lucia relates to the cruiser community itself.  This photo was taken from Rodney Heights, looking across the Lagoon that is at the back of the marina, and then on to Rodney Bay, with Pigeon Island in the background.  You can't see the marina in this photo; that's where we are at the moment, and there are a lot of boats here too.  But - with all these cruising boats here, you would think that there would be a social life and community of cruisers that would look at least a little bit like that of Grenada, or even Trinidad.  There is a morning net here - it tends to be very short, and extremely light on the kinds of regular or ad hoc social activities that we are accustomed to in the other two islands.  There are plenty of restaurants, both at the marina and off the Lagoon (in dinghy distance), but none of those establishment seem to engage with cruisers or the cruising community in the way of, say, Da Big Fish in Prickly Bay or Clarke's Court or Whisper Cove marinas in Grenada...I mean, really not at all.  I've been scratching my head over it, and I really don't get it.  It's true that no one typically stays here as long as many people (including Raconteur last season) do in Grenada - but I don't think that's the whole explanation.

Anyway, end of sociological, political and economic musings for the day.  We are planning to proceed northward to Guadeloupe in a couple of days; the Captain has a head cold, so we shall see.  We are scheduled to fly from there to Europe on the 5th of March, so we will get there one way or another in the next 17 days.

Back on board, looking north

Well, we're actually looking south in this picture, taken from about 15 feet off the ground, just before we headed into the water on Thursday the 10th.  We had arrived back in Chaguaramas, Trinidad on Monday the 7th, but there was the usual rather long THINGS TO DO list - ours and the yard's - so we stayed at the hotel at Crews Inn and worked on the boat on Tuesday and Wednesday before splashing in the early afternoon on Thursday.  We've been provisioning and working most days since; the sails are on, the dinghy engine works, we have refrigeration again (needed a new controller), and the boat is generally livable again.  We've gotten to do a little socializing, and we've heard a couple of steel bands in practice for the upcoming Carnival, so it hasn't been all work.  Our water heater is (still) leaking, so it's out for one more attempted repair, but really it's time to replace it.  I will probably make a trip back to Florida, and try to bring one back.  Despite the allure of Carnival, we are planning to unstick ourselves from the all-too-comfortable docks of Crews Inn and head for Grenada on the weekend.  We still don't have a season plan - we had tentatively said we would point ourselves toward the Chesapeake, to be there in early June before Rus and Aude's 22 June wedding, but we are really not 100% sure we are ready to leave the Caribbean, so - to be seen.

This is a photo of the sky behind Crews Inn taken a couple of days ago; we have been having lovely sunsets here.  It's been incredibly windy - but from the north, so not exactly the desired direction - and there was a terrible north swell that sent several boats crashing onto shore in Tobago.  All that is supposed to end in the next couple of days, and we should see a more easterly wind and nice seas (three or four feet), at least long enough for us to make the 85 mile passage to Grenada.  The only problem with this plan is how incredibly easy it is to get Velcro'd to the Spice Island (we went for a week or two in December of 2011, and stayed until late February).  We are anxious to make it to a couple of new places this season, and are tentatively planning to make our March trip to Europe from Guadeloupe, so perhaps we will be motivated to keep moving.