Hello Guadeloupe!

After a few hour sail from beautiful Dominica, we made it back to Les Saintes. Our original plan of grabbing a ball at Terre-de-Haut resulted in disappointment and rather faul language. While there were no human casualties, we almost lost our mooring hook (thank you to a fellow sailor for help retrieving it) and forever lost an Apple Watch.

It felt so good to wonder around familiar streets of Terre-de-Haut. I put Ian and Alex’s navigation skills to test. Task: take mommy to town. Prize: ice cream! Oh we missed our favorite ice cream place.

After thinking about indigo died dresses for nearly a year, I decided to try a few at Maogany. Not much of convincing had to be done in order to make the purchase.

Time to leave Les Saintes has arrived, and after a short but bumpy sail we made it to Basse Terre. Plan for the day was simple: get fresh croissants and an eSim data plan (Google Fi got tired of me not useing my phone predominantlynin the States, so they shut off my data). The plan turned out to be too ambitious and only about 75% were successfully accomplished. Conclusion? The paradise is not ready for SIM-less phones. Solution: get a handy SIM card adapter that will magically produce wifi for the phone to use data. The catch is, the device works for up to 6 hours on a single charge, so now (if remembering just the phone, wallet and children was not enough) I \240need to remember about 3 additional items.

Bouillante is a small town with a sulphur smelling hot spring pouring right into the bay, making the water near the dinghy dock warm and… full of people. It turned out to be a very popular place among our friends and friends of friends and soon to be friends.

I got a new foiling board. This one is big, stable and non-inflatable. Storage will be fun. This is my last attempt on progressing at foiling.

While in Bouillante we enjoyed a rainbow every single day.

Tired of carnival celebrations we arrived at much quieter location, right in front of Reserve Cousteau. On day 2 the police kicked us out of our sweet spot behind SV Ella, because the boundaries of the park were moved since last year and now we were anchored within the park. We moved outside of the park, which ended up to be a perfect location for provisioning (right outside of the dinghy dock by carrefour and leader price). It was a bit rolly there so the next day after receiving thumbs up from our friends on Ella (someone left the anchorage) we moved the boat back closer to the park. We ended up very close (maybe a foot away) to SV Cartolana’s Promise. Paolo dropped most of the chain into the water while fixing his winch. This effectively prevented his boat from moving when the wind/current changed while not doing so to other boats (including Tenacity). We shook hands, watched the boats closely for a minute or two and went snorkeling to Japanese gardens. Boys got to sail Jamie’s (from SV Enke) dinghy (his dinghy has a sail!!) around the anchorage in exchange for Jason (Kim’s husband, SV Mimzy) and a beer.

We had Josh and Chris from SV Ella for a sleepover. Boys had a great time behaved very well.

We had a great time snorkeling around Jacques Cousteau Reservation, but we were ready to find some wind. Mimzy and Enki left in the morning, because it was supposed to be a good day to sail. Our plan was to leave tomorrow, but after morning coffee clarified our senses Greg re-analyzed the weather and we decided to leave as well. It took us about 4 h to get to Fajou. It’s a small island right in the middle of the butterfly north of PTP. This was supposed to be a perfect location for wingfoiling. And it was!!! Windy yet protected by the reef.

Day 1. Evening - Drinks at Caralota’s

Day 2. Morning - reevaluation of promises from evening 1. Yep, we are still going to make Irish Cream. We need Irish coffee. We can’t have Irish coffee without Irish cream. Greg makes a wicked Irish cream.

Day 2. Not even noon. We’re not quite out of Irish cream but all adults need to nap. No foiling will be happening today. Dang, that’s too bad because the wind is so good.

Day 2. Evening. Spring rolls and fondue at Tenacity. That was a loooong day. SV Zook with Craig and Shelly and Zac (4 yo) \240and Luke (6yo).

Day 3. No more Irish cream for breakfast, we’re here to foil! The wind is ok, so let’s at least blow up our wings. We all tried, we all sucked at the same level and we all had a great time. Then Craig and his pro skills put us all to shame. Not really, we didn’t care. We loved it.

Day 4. Geez we’re old. Everybody is sore. Craig says that the wind is perfect, so he’s dropping his board in. That completely kills the wind. Thank you Craig, we had high hopes for this day. Wind came back, we all got to have fun.

Day 5. Wind is officially dead. We moved the boat to Baie Mahault and rented a car.

We managed to restock all our hiding holes with delicious French food and wine.

Ever since Maciek (a friend from a polish boat we met in Dominica) mentioned this Libanese restaurant in PaP: Le Petite Cedre, \240I wanted to visit it. Now that we got a car, we were finally able to go! We made plans to meet there with SV Ella. They’re staying at the marina in PaP, because Adrian is flying out to UK tomorrow. We all made it there only to find out that French were already celebrating the upcoming Fat Tuesday so they didn’t open the restaurant on Monday. Thank you Google. The trip ended up being a moderate success, because we found honey. Right next to Cedre, we found a big market with local spices, rum and honey. Oh, all the smells!! Hungry but stocked up on spices and honey, we found the only non-burger place within the walking distance: Fresh Sald Bar. As the name indicated, the salads were fresh and surprisingly delicious. They also had pasta that some of the boys preferred over greens (surprise). Sadly we had to say our goodbyes, as nearly empty storages hatches back home were calling our names.

Hello Destreland and Carrefour! A ton of food, 1 guitar, 4 pairs of shoes and other stuff heavier and about $800 lighter we got back home exhausted and definitely not ready to unpack all shopping. It was a long day, followed by a long evening.

The plan was ambitious, we were going to visit a coffee plantation and a honey farm and go to some awesome waterfalls and last but not least provisions. Plans must have been changed because French celebrate a lot. The coffee plantation was closed, because of Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. Honey farm was unreachable because nobody would pick up the phone Luckily waterfalls were not affected by celebrations so Ian and I had a great hike and lots of fun at Cascade de Bis.