Death in Paradise!!! (Guadeloupe)

We left Antigua at dawn heading South to French Guadeloupe. We’re hoping for a slightly better crossing than our previous attempt; trying to head North to St. Barts the previous night. That journey had us turning around amid fierce moonlit squalls.

This trip began well - My trailed lure caught a large Cero (looks like a cross between a pike and a salmon). This is supposedly one of the tastiest fish in the Caribbean. It was good - firstly in sushi, then with mash and veggies, and finally in a white wine and tomato concoction.

As we headed South we had a good strong wind from the East, which we sailed with cautiously reefed sails. The large swell, which unlike the day before is now at least visible, is still of sufficient size for us both to don life jackets without much debate. After a couple of admittedly quite intense squalls - the deck moving so much you can barely stand, ferocious wind and waves crashing over the side - Chez tearfully came to the conclusion that she really has had enough - suspect today may be the beginning of the end of our sailing adventures, although the writing has probably been on the wall since the Atlantic crossing. We’ve always said that we’d carry on sailing while we both enjoyed it, and in the conditions we’re currently experiencing, however much of a brave face I try and put on it, we’re not. We just need to work out what’s next...

So, once again, not the day we’d hoped for.

This was further compounded when we arrived at our destination, the town of Deshaies. The anchorage is close to full, the spaces which are left are deep and the bottom is rocky. This makes for close to impossible anchoring. We eventually managed to set on our 6th attempt, by that stage we are both utterly soaked from the torrential rain which had marked our arrival.

The rain did however give rise to the most perfect rainbow across the small pretty bay. Once we’d anchored and calmed down a little, taking in our surroundings, it is a rather lovely spot. High sided lush wooded hills either side of the bay slope down towards the middle, where nestles a colourful pastel town of red tin roofed buildings dotted with palms, and a pretty steepled tin roofed church in the middle which chimes the hours.

It being close to sunset, we simply raise the yellow Q flag and decide that checking in can wait until morning.

Next morning, both feeling slightly brighter - and drier, we take the tender ashore and check in. This is achieved by visiting a gift shop and typing in our details onto a computer at the rear. Once done, the helpful French shopkeeper prints the completed form out for us. We ask him where Customs is (‘Duane’ as Chez cleverly remembered) - he replies in good English:

“Why do you want to go there?, you’re all done!” - if only all country’s entry requirements could be so simple!

After that we strolled the small town, it has a quaint French air, shuttered wooden buildings, occasional free ranging cockerels crossing our path, and a couple of bakeries whose wares we’ll hopefully investigate in the next few days. We make our way to the Police station - not the real one, but the building used as one by the long running TV show ‘Death in Paradise’ which is filmed here on Guadeloupe.

Later in the day back on the boat we begin some future planning - initially chatting through what we should do at the end of this sailing season (Julyish).

We agree a break away from the boat would be a good start, but no easily formulated plan came out of that conversation.

...two slightly strange things happened after that:

#1: We realised that the theme music to ‘Death In Paradise’ is the somewhat apt song ‘You’re wondering now, what to do, now you know this is the end’

#2: Near to sunset, I was reading below, Chez listening to podcasts up on deck. On a whim, I headed up for a kiss - a nice thing to do, but not really an overly regular occurrence. At the very second our lips touched, there’s a loud gasping breath about 3 meters away from the boat - it’s two large dolphins arcing out of the water and coming up for air. These are the first dolphins we’ve seen since crossing the Atlantic 2 months ago. This has us both laughing at the amazing timing. We watched them head off into the slowly setting sun.