Day 17: Guadeloupe

We slept like rocks last night in the marina.  The showers were a bit sketchy, but the running water was amazing!

This morning we walked a mile into the "city" of Bassetwrre, one of the main cities in Guadeloupe. We went to the local market which was amazing.  This is how most of the locals buy their produce, fabrics and other items.  It was fun to watch mom and dad try to communicate with the people in French. One lady was awesome and she kept giving dad samples of some kind of fruit liquor until he finally bought some passion fruit rum.  We also bought a coconut and cucumber.  They seem to really appreciate when we try to speak French to them even if it is kind of jumbled.

After town we finally cleared customs at a "station" in a local restaurant.   It was a family run place and a boy there who was about 16 was incredibly helpful.  Try speaking French to people who can't speak English, and double that complexity when you try to clear customs and port authority because they need to know all the specifics of the boat (like gross tonnage, length at the water line, engine capacity, and stuff I know they don't cover in high school French class).   The boy has been in an English immersion program at school in Guadeloupe.  He was so excited to speak to us in English and he was incredibly helpful to his parents who were trying to enter our information for customs.  When he saw that we had US passports his eyes lit up - he was so excited and told us he had never seen a US passport before.

The highlight was we got ice cream cones at their restaurant which were awesome!!  We had to he back at our boat by noon to get fuel and leave for the Saintes.

Getting fuel was interesting.  The catamaran takes diesel.  The dinghy takes gas.  We needed both.  In French, gazol is diesel and sans plombe is unleaded gasoline.  The diesel had brown handles and the gas had green handles, which is the opposite of the US.  We were really nervous that we were going to put the wrong type in the boat.  But it worked out ok.

The best part was that we got ICE!!!!  OMG the things we take for granted!  We miss ice more than anything!  We also met some people from Canada that we've been sort of traveling along the same route but we had not met until today.  They were really incredible people - an older couple who have lived on their boat for 10 years.  The wife teaches classes at a college in Canada via the Internet.   Ten years ago they were sailing from Dominica to Guadeloupe when they found a small fishing boat that was in trouble.  People in Dominica try to transport their produce to Guadeloupe to sell at the market, but it is really far.  They had a small boat that got swamped by a big wave.  Two of the Dominican people drowned and they rescued the other two.  They are hoping to reunite with the two survivors in Dominica in a few weeks (they haven't seen them since).  It continues to be the people we meet who make this trip such an incredible experience.

We headed to the Saintes and are staying here for a few days.  They are a beautiful group of islands off the coast of Guadeloupe.  Mom and Dad were here almost 20 years ago with their good friends the Kolebucks....long story (that they didn't share with us before going on this trip), but they were anchored where we are tonight and took the dinghy out.  They intended to go "just around the bend" to explore a bit and hit a fish trap.  The prop on the dinghy got stuck and fell into the water.  The engine was useless and they started drifting out to sea with a few cruddy paddles that didn't fit the oar locks. They paddled like crazy against the current to reach a deserted rocky island in the distance where they spent the night.  They were rescued by the French coastguard the next morning.  Had they missed that little island (see the photo below) the next island they would have hit going wi th the current would have been Belize several days (weeks?) later.  Good news is they survived, and their friends Paul and Meaghan got engaged that night.   Perfect, right?  They have not been back since so it was kind of a big deal to sail past the deserted island today.

And as far a fixing things today, Dad got frustrated that only one speaker is working in the boat (it has been that way the whole time, btw).  So he rewired the radio - the speaker wire for the right speaker had never been connected.  We said he deserves an award....which is probably right.

So as we sit here in the harbor at sunset, we are blasting our American Music with our fully functional stereo:  Devil Went Down to Georgia, Dixie (the Elvis version) I Will Survive (Donna Summer),  Bruce Springsteen,  Cindi Lauper, the Village People (seriously? ) and some other awful 80s tunes. Dad keeps quoting Jack Sparrow:"...but why is the rum gone!?!"