On March 16th we hoist sail and glide over to Roseau on the next island Dominica in 7 hours. We were confident to catch fish this time because T has caught a huge beast of a Blue Marlin during this passage 14 years ago.
I prepared our fishing rod with the newest and biggest lure I had, assembled for a day like that and my hopes were high that it would perform very well. We had to wait for quite a while but just before we reached the southern tip of Dominica it happened….
T ran to the fishing rod and while I was still thinking if it was necessary to furl in the genoa and slow down the boat or not the fishing rod bent to a proper U shape. I expected to see it break within the next seconds. But instead it was released suddenly.
A 100kg tuna? 200kg tuna? No idea! But what we do know is that the beautiful lure was gone together with at least 100m of 0,4mm line which had ripped. Now there is hardly anything decent left in our fishing gear box and only a sad rest of fishing line. The last 2 lures we lost in Martinique – one because a motorboat was speeding past too close … and one because it caught a fishermen`s ground tackle. Hmmm, 100€ gone… no fish in the stomach … maybe it is cheaper to buy fish from the market 😦
Roseau is deep anchoring and when we go on land we are greeted by a sign: quarantine alert. Hmm, bad conscience … 
Dominica is one of the English islands were Sparrow is illegal. As much as we would like to go on a trip to the Souffriere (the local volcano) – it´s just one of these things we cannot do. T walks all the 2km to town to clear us in. So next morning we sail on to Prince Rupert Bay on the northern tip of Dominica. There is no big town, not many officials really and the place is just much bigger. If you do not walk into the police department with your dog it will probably be ok. On the way we hang out a nice but small lure on the sad rest of our fishing line. I have not much hope with this device and ‘I was not disappointed’…
Since we are all moving up north we try to keep in touch with our friends from Sapphire. So at 10am local time we have a daily leisurely SSB calling appointment. For the boys it seems to be fun to play with this equipment – I usually flee to a quieter spot as all this squeaking and croaking noises, this guessing what was said on the other end drives me nuts! Still, like this we knew that Sapphire will be in Prince Rupert and so we can look forward to meeting up again.
We instantaneously like this bay even though we are greeted by a “boat boy” offering a mooring a long way out. But the guys are decent and except our declination of their offer easily. Everything in Prince Rupert is heavily organized from moorings, to collecting garbage, to offering a big variety of trips, to taxis, to security, to weekly BBQ parties for yachties playing a mix of reggae and oldies. The guys set up the cooperation PAYS and work together sharing profits. They have found a decent level of not marketing their services too aggressively, being friendly, fun guys and most people feel taken care of and happily part with their money. The season is short and prices are not at all cheap – a day trip in a booked out van would set you back about 60 USD to give you an idea. On an island where many people scramble for a living these guys own new vans and big fat out boarders. To protect their source of comparatively extremely high income they set up nightly patrols to make sure nobody is hurting their “sheep”. This is actually the nicest side effect. If walking second row streets in Portsmith one gets a very good idea of the rough folk hanging about, trying to cheer up their up miserable lifes with lots of rum. Granny´s good advice: Beware of the man who´s got nothing left to loose! springs to mind easily…
We personally like to organize us ourselves, also our trips. With EU money a big trail system was build, the Waitukubuli trail. It starts close to the bay, although the most exciting
sites are too far to walk to. Except one site: the Indian river. It was one of the locations filming ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ (I guess it was this one) and it is incredibly pretty. Boat tours are marketed heavily and it is forbidden to enter the Indian river with your own dinghy. Oddly enough everybody forgets to tell you that there is also a nice trail along the river that you can walk. The entrance to the trail has not only no sign, it is very, VERY well hidden and the only chance to find it is via GPS …or with a guide ($$) of course. The website www.garmin.openstreetmap.nl provides free downloads of maps and for many Caribbean islands, also for Dominica, those are pretty good. We love to roam this area, having swims between these crazy shaped roots, admiring big strelizias, watching colibris, harvesting lots of lemon gras for making tea and plundering grapefruit trees…
It is also in Prince Rupert that we have a big discussion about our further travel plans. I hate to rush through all these pretty places and would like to spend more time getting to know those islands. On the other hand there is this plan to haul out Christa in St Maartin and than sail up to the US for hurricane season. Weather dictates the pace and hurricane season comes closer fast, starting officially on the 1st of June. We still do not have a visa and from what we hear it is a lengthy, painful process culminating in a personal interview appointment with cross questioning in a geared up US embassy. It takes several weeks and not many embassies come into consideration for us. To make a long story short we decide to drop the US plan respectively postpone it to next year and stay in the chain. Where exactly? No idea yet! Just one thing is for sure: NOT IN THE DEPRESSING RAINS OF TRINIDAD!!!
With this new relaxed mind we leave Dominica on the 22nd of March and sail the 20nm over to Les Iles des Saints. The anchorage at Pain de Sucre is zuckersüß indeed.
Nice snorkeling, nice strolls with Sparrow. He was herding some goats for fun and earned some slaps when he hunted a chicken and bit it (gently) in it´s arse… Thankfully it was a runaway chicken… The population of the Saints is quite unique – purely white, no slavery on these islands as they were too steep for farming sugar cane, all descendents from Bretonniere emigrants. Today they are fishing only for fun – the source of income are the many tourists that come over with a ferry from Guadeloupe for a daytrip. Restaurants are the most expensive we have seen so far, a salad goes for 20€ plus. Making money is so easy here – status symbol are the fattest outboards of 115HP to 250HP on poor old wooden boats.
All French islands are in election fever and The Saints are no exception. Big gatherings, speeches with microphones and big speaker systems, posters, big flags, small flags the whole mad program – we are happy to be away from it all at the Pain de Sucre anchorage. Sparrow is sporting a couple of warts on his lips that grow fast. We are once more super worried what our precious little captn contracted by sniffing around in the darkest of holes. The worst is: we have no internet to check what it might be.
On the 25th we sail on to Guadeloupe. We had a short discussion which way to go: through the middle at Pointe A Pitre or along the western coast. Well, this discussion was extremly short as I definitely did not want to miss the Jacques Cousteau underwater reserve around Pigeon islands on the west coast. I was not disappointed! For the fist time I dug out my diving equipment. Finally. I had been waiting for that for months!
We anchored opposite the islands on playa Malendure and T was so friendly to chauffer me over to the Pigeons every day. Wonderfully clear water, big fish, nice coral gardens and a underwater statue of Mister Cousteau 🙂 Like always it was a case of: you cannot have it all! The anchoring was extremely rolly and drove us mad. At the same time I did not want to leave so soon as it was nice diving for the first time of our Caribbean travels. Unfortunately my brand new Mares dive computer broke during the second dive and all efforts to reset it failed. After 20 minutes underwater it switched off into pre dive mode and would not even show the depth nor dive time. That was a bit scary as I was solo diving and so I retreated to the easiest dives only. Some dickhead had screwed off the hand of Commander Cousteau as a souvenir tsstsss… 
Down the village we found a Leaderprice supermarket and a vet who turned out to be a nice German girl. We had a good chat and she reconfirmed my assumption that Sparrows problem was the contraction of the Papillom virus and the unsightly growths would most likely disappear by itself.
On the 31st we had definitely enough of this rolly spot and sailed on the 14nm (with tacking) to Deshaies, the hiding spot of our friends Jean and Huck who we knew from Mindelo and who we tried to meet since we arrived
in Carriacou. We had not so much hope that this bay would be much quieter but were pleasantly surprised. Super quiet, super pretty, totally unspoiled. Jean showed us the nice gurgling river for swimming in little pools and jumping from rock to rock and the huge sandy beach in the next bay with a fresh water lake right behind it. People and dog heaven!!! Even the water tap in the little fishing boat port worked and so we could slowly fill our tank by making daily runs with all out jerry cans. Our tank was totally empty the day after we arrived and so we were really really happy to busy ourselves with the schlepping and rowing of 350l of water, filling it can for can into our tank. Our next stop will be St Maartin which is a flat island that relies most likely on desalination for water. Guadeloupe is mountainious and has lots of rainwater which is of much better quality.
MISCELLANEOUS
sometimes it was not too pleasant to wait for me in the dinghy because it started raining. being underwater no problem…
sychrista 