The Caribbean 

We arrived in Martinique early in the morning.  Our first stop was the fuel dock as by the time we arrived, we were down to 1/8 of a tank.  Check-in was a breeze, done on the computer at the fuel dock for just €5.  We had repairs to do after crossing the ocean.  Our sails needed repair and the furler for our main sail needed bearings replaced. Our electronics were also giving trouble but after both the mother board and power board were replaced, it was discovered that there was just a little software glitch on our card for our American charts!

Refreshing waterhole

We rented a car and travelled around the island.  John and Mary wanted to visit a waterfall that they had noted on Tripadvisor.  We thought this would be an easy  15 min. walk. When we arrived at the start, there was a chain across the path with a “No Entry” sign.  This we duly ignored.  We hiked along a steep and muddy path, had to climb over/under a fallen tree and walked along the top of  a slippery water pipe through a long and very dark tunnel (thank goodness for iPhone torches) in which there were bats.  There was much grumbling from Dimitri, who refused to take off his sunglasses in the dark tunnel, about the things we got him into! In the end we arrived at a lovely river in a gorge and Mary and John found their waterfall.  We had a swim at a second, more accessible waterfall  on our way back to Marin.

The next day, Mary and John went for a swim at a beautiful beach which was fringed by shady trees. When they came out of the water, they found that the crabs living amongst the roots of the trees had attacked Mary’s dress and had eaten large holes in it.

Crabs feasting on Mary's dress

The next day we headed for Dominica.  This is one of the poorer islands in the Caribbean.  We arrived to total devastation.  From out at sea it looked as if the forests had all burnt down as we could not see foliage.   As we got closer we saw that the trees were actually denuded of their leaves and some had even lost their bark.  Hurricane Maria went through here, taking almost all the poorly built homes, there was no electricity and the people had resorted to doing their washing in the rivers, as in old times. We took a tour of the island.  Many of the roads were closed, some of the bridges were down and we were told that it would be 18 months before all the electricity on the island was restored. It is sad that the poorest island was hardest hit. 

Washing day

Both Martinique and Guadeloupe on either side of Dominica and only about 20 nm. on each side across the strait were relatively spared.  We did find an interesting man whose grandparents had moved to Dominica and built the home he was living in. He makes boutique chocolate from locally-grown Cocoa   beans. He showed us the whole chocolate making process and it was interesting to see how much work goes into one chocolate bar. We especially enjoyed his “Spice Chocolate”.

We had an overnight stop in both Guadeloupe and  Nevis, anchoring off the beach. Our next stop, Saba was very interesting.  Saba, belonging to the Netherlands, is a small volcanic cone that rises sheer out of the ocean with very deep water all around.  Most of it is marine park and they have installed buoys for boats to tie up to. In days of old, goods were offloaded in waist deep water and then carried up 800 steps to the settlement above.  Nowadays, there is a little port.  We motored the 1.5nm. to the port via dinghy to check in and then took a taxi to the town above.  There are two villages on the island, “Bottom” and “Windwardside” and two roads on the island – “The road that couldn’t be built” and “The road that shouldn’t have been built”.   Up until the 1950’s the only way to get between the two villages was to walk.  Dutch engineers from Holland said that it was impossible to build a road there so one of the residents took a correspondence course in road building and over several years the Sabans hand- built the road. Today there is a very short airstrip, enabling tourists to fly in by short-haul plane.  Saba has one of the best dive sites in the Caribbean. On our way back to the boat after dinner, we were surrounded by large garfish.  They were thrashing along the surface of the water as we startled them with our torchlight but some went the wrong way.  One jumped up and hit Dimitri on the arm and another went into the side of the dinghy with such force that I thought it was going to puncture it with its sharp jaw.  We also saw a large shark in the little port where we had left our dinghy and some turtles.

Our next stop was a lovely bay in the BVI, on Norman Island.  Here we enjoyed snorkeling. A lot of the reef had been destroyed by the hurricane but there were pockets of intact areas, mostly under rock overhangs where beautiful tropical fish were congregating to feed.

We decided to give Puerto Rico a miss because it too had been damaged by the hurricane.  We sailed for the Dominican Republic instead,  to Luperon, a bay on the  northern coast.  We arrived just at sunset, a bad time as the bay is fringed by mangroves and we were attacked by thousands of mosquitoes.  Luckily we have insect netting to enclose our cockpit.  The bay supposedly has three marinas.  Two of these are no longer operating and the third has a single dock, holding a maximum of 6 boats, taken up by local boats. There are mooring buoys in the bay though ($2/day) and plenty of space to anchor.

Check-in here was quite a saga We went from one office to the next, to the next and then back to the first to start all over again.  Over and above that, the commandant visited the boat as did Drug and Security inspectors - twice. They were happy to depart with a bottle of wine for their dinner.

Luperon is very poor and run down. However the people are very friendly and we enjoyed the food.  There is a small community of sailors living here on a semi-permanent basis as this is a good hurricane hole and living expenses are minimal.   Some of them had been there for over four years.  They were pleased to see us and gave us good advice for our next leg, through the Bahamas.

Much of the Bahamas is shallow and more suited to motor boats.  We stopped on the western shore of  Mayaguana Island, outside the tiny settlement of  Betsy Bay. Most of the houses were still boarded up as hurricane season only ended on 1^st December and we were there on 30 November!  John and Mary decided to camp the night on the enticing, deserted beach.  Early next morning, John arrived at the boat, having swum out to our anchorage, desperate for them to get off the island as they had been attacked by thousands of sandflies.  They were covered in hundreds of bites and spent two very uncomfortable itchy nights.   We moved on to Cat Island.  This is a very long, thin island with the highest mountain in the Bahamas, Mount Alverna at a height of just  220 ft.  Atop it sits “The Hermitage”, a miniature,  one-man replica of a Franciscan  monastery built by   hand by Father Jerome in his retirement. He lived here as a hermit until his death and is buried under it.  From this vantage point, one can see right across the breadth of the island, from the reef-strewn Atlantic shore to the leeward shore.

We stopped overnight at Great Abacos

and then moved on to Bimini.  Here we only just managed to negotiate the shallow canal into our marina.  We enjoyed swimming with feeding bottle-nose dolphins and watched the bull sharks circling for food below one of the restaurants.

We have arrived in Fort Lauderdale and are now snuggly tied up  alongside a  dock in one of the canals which belongs to a family member.  We plan to be here for several months before going on to Cuba, Panama, the Galapagos, Pacific Islands and then home.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean

The Atlantic Once again.

On our way from Gibraltar to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, we managed to catch two lovely dorados (Mahi Mahi). They were each large enough to make several meals for the four of us. Our first  was sashimi, complete with soy sauce, wasabi and pickled ginger.  We had two great meals of grilled fish and the heads and tails went into the pot to make a delicious fish soup so every scrap of the fish was used. 

We were accompanied on this leg of the journey by a little canary.  It would fly off for a while and then return and rest on the top of our mast or on the boom.  It would not eat or drink anything  and disappeared on the second last day.  We were hoping that it had  arrived in Lanzarote a day earlier than us.

The Canary Islands are volcanic and evidence of earlier eruptions are everywhere.  Lanzarote, our first stop in the Canary Islands turned out to be a disappointment in that it is extremely dry.  The island south of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura is even more barren so we decided to give the rest of the eastern islands a miss and head for the western ones.  We visited Tenerife and La Palma. 

Tenerife  is home to Spain’s highest mountain, El Tiede. We took a drive around the northern, greener half of the island, to the base of the cable car which takes one up to the top of the mountain. There was a four hour wait to go up and cloud at the top so we gave that a miss  and  drove instead through  large valleys filled with larva fields. The quaint old capital of the island, La Laguna, was built in the 16^th century and  has  cobbled streets, churches and monasteries.

Our next island, La Palma, a World Heritage Biosphere, has wonderful forests and plenty of water. It is a popular spot for hiking, although few tourists stop here. We chose to stop in  Tazacorte, a small town on the western side of the island.   The marina is situated at the very edge of the walls of the towering caldera, the world’s largest, La Caldera de Taburiente.  Pressure is building in the volcano and it is predicted that the whole western half of the island is going to break away and slide into the sea sometime before 2515.  We drove through banana plantations and  cloud covered forest, along a multitude of  dizzy switchbacks to get to the mountain ridge. We were well above the tree line and the clouds when we reached the edge of the  caldera.

 The International Astronomical Observatory is situated here.  Many nations have partaken and there are large telescopes dotted around the ridge. One of them. the British Sir Isaac Newton reflector is controlled via satellite from Edinburgh.  It was cold and windy at the top but the view  is breathtaking.

Although it was raining lower down in the cloud layer, we had a lovely walk through the forest to a waterfall.  Later we sat in a little tavern and dried off in front of  the  fire in their fireplace.

One cannot get a correct impression of the size of the caldera from close up.  It was only once we were many miles out to sea that we could see the whole mountain with its huge top blown off.

Departing the Canary Islands

Caldera de Taburiente

Halloween at sea

We returned to the Atlantic Ocean once again and around midnight on the first night, we crossed our path that we had made from the Cape Verdes to Madeira, back in 2012. Once again we were seeing the long ocean swells that  the Atlantic is known for.  Although they are large, they were mostly behind us, with a fairly comfortable motion. We were  dogged by  long patches of no wind. When the wind did come up, it was always a gentle breeze, under 10 knots and directly behind us, not ideal for sailing.  As a result, we resorted to doing a lot of motoring.  Our tanks have a range of approximately 2,000nm. if the engine is run at low revs., so we kept the boat moving at  only 5-6 knots.

By the time we arrived in Martinique, we had settled into a daily routine. John caught more fish, a barracuda and  more dorado, we did a lot of reading and Mary and Dimitri had a daily backgammon competition.  We had a roster of 3 hour night watches which worked very well.  The crossing from the Canaries to Martinique took us 21 days and we were happy to make landfall at dawn in Marin, on the southern end of Martinique.