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January 20th, Friday - Pointe-a-Pitre,
Guadeloupe
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The weather takes on a whole new dimension when you live
on a sailboat. Granted, it is a big part of your
day wherever you live. Everyone is always asking
about the weather. It's the first thing you look
at in the morning and, if it is particularly horrible,
the last thing you look at at night. Is it going
to clear up tomorrow? Will we get a snow day?
On Zia, we just learned a nasty lesson about the weather
and making plans while living on a boat.
Leaving Anguilla on Monday, our plan had been to spend
the afternoon at a nearby deserted island, and then sail
to Saba. We had heard about a big northerly swell,
10 to 12 feet, that was going to move in, but we figured
we might be able have our day at the beach before it
reached us. WRONG. We sailed northwest for a
couple of hours from Road Bay, past Prickly Pear, and
arrived at Dog Island in time to see huge waves crashing
on the very beach that we had hoped would be our
afternoon playground. There was no way to get the
boat anchored in a safe spot, much less ourselves safely
to shore, so we did a U turn and examined our options.
(We did catch a decent sized Rainbow Jack on the sail
up, so it wasn't all for naught!) The only
deadline we had in our future was to meet my sister,
Kimberly, back in the Virgin Islands in about 10 days.
It was already 2:30pm so our options were to go back to
Anguilla or to hit St. Martin again. Anywhere else
we sailed it would be dark by the time we got there.
I guess we could have made Saba in daylight, but the
anchorage there is supposed to be uncomfortable even in
the calmest conditions, so we had already ruled it out
due to the huge seas.
Just when we were thinking we had no more options, a
light bulb went on in Joe's head. "We could just
keep sailing and see where we wind up." There are
a ton of great islands over here and we were going to
miss a lot of them by returning to the Virgins so soon.
If we did one big passage, we could get well south and
start working our way north before heading west to meet
Kim. Although the seas were a little big, the wind
was behind us and we were sailing very comfortably in 20
knots of breeze. Why not? Not once did we
think about the long range forecast. The trip back
to the Virgin Islands was well over a week away, and the
wind is generally behind you so, a piece of cake, right?
We
plotted a course and figured we would make Guadeloupe
our destination. We bombed on "down island" past
Saba, Statia, St. Barts, St. Kitts, Nevis, Barbuda,
Antigua, Monserrat, and pulled into Basse Terre, on the
southwest coast of Guadeloupe, around 11am. Joe
and I switched around our normal night watch schedule
and he took the first shift from about 8 to midnight,
and I took the midnight to 4am shift. We both
wound up with plenty of sleep and were feeling pretty
good. We wanted to clear through customs and
immigration before they closed at noon, so we made a
beeline for the dock. After one false start, we
managed to find the dinghy dock and took off on foot for
the customs office. Our guide book proved to be
way off base on their directions. Basse Terre is
the second largest town in Guadeloupe but not much of a
tourist destination and NO ONE spoke English. We
found the tourism office but they kept pointing us in
the wrong direction. I still don't know if they
didn't understand us or just plain didn't know where the
immigration and customs offices were located.
Persistence and pure luck guided Joe to it while I
hunted down a cash machine (Euros only - we had been
using dollars up to this point on our trip) and some
food for our very hungry and very grumpy kids. We
hit our first fast food restaurant since we left the
states (pizza doesn't count, does it?): McDonalds.
I'm hoping it will be a while before we resort to that
again because not only is it just McDonalds, but a Happy
Meal set us back about $6 each. Ouch!
Anyway, we saw enough of Basse Terre to realize that we
should keep moving and decided to head for The Saintes,
a small group of three islands about 12 miles south of
the big island of Guadeloupe, and part of the same
political entity. We spent a couple of days there,
enjoying the quaint and picturesque town, and swimming
at a lovely nearby anchorage. We knew we needed to
come up with a plan for the next week, so we started
listening intently to the weather.
A
little late for that, boneheads! A nasty low
stalled out over Bermuda and another one over Venezuela
were combining to create a pattern of heavy wind and
seas in the northern Caribbean. 25 to 30 knots of
wind out of the northeast, higher in squalls, and seas
up to 20 feet were called for over the next week.
It isn't forecasted to start letting up until next
Wednesday. Shit. We were supposed to be 200
miles northeast of here by next Wednesday. How the
hell did that happen?
We
made a call to Kimberly. "It looks like the
weather is going to make it tough for us to get back to
St. Croix to meet you on the 25th. Can you look
into what other options you might have? Can you
get a flight from Puerto Rico to Guadeloupe?" A
few phone calls and emails later, we figured we could
get her to St. Kitts, only 100 miles north of us, on the
same day without too much trouble. I'm sure it
freaked her out, having to scramble around and change
plans at the last minute. I had told her that she
could safely book a flight to Puerto Rico and we would
tell her at the last minute where to go from there.
I guess I told her too soon, though. We had looked
at our bigger picture plans which put us in the Bahamas
in early March, and decided that we should be making our
way back west by the end of the month anyway, so we told
her to meet us in St. Croix. We are happy to have
a little more time to explore the Leeward Islands, but
sorry to have made such a mess of Kim's plans in order
to do it!
So, we still have a lot to learn about making and
keeping an itinerary on a sailboat. We will know
better than to take the trade winds for granted next
time. We will look harder at the weather a couple
of weeks out and try to use this information to make
better decisions on where we go and when.
Normally, it doesn't really matter, except when we have
plans to meet people. Many cruisers have warned us
about how difficult it is to coordinate this. It
is well worth the effort, but it adds to the challenge
and potentially to the danger if you find yourself out
in rough conditions so you can make it to a rendezvous.
Thank you, Kim, for your understanding and willingness
to work with us. I know you'll love St. Kitts just
as much as you would have enjoyed St. Croix!
Have a great weekend, everybody. I got a few great
emails after asking you to write in my last update, so
I'll say it again: we LOVE hearing from you.
Please do drop us a line to let us know what you are up
to. How's the weather?
XOXO
Christy, Joe, Cassie and Juliana
Next entry
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Many thanks to our
friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up
the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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