Monday 21 January: Leaving St. Eustatius and motor to St. Barth.
Heavy rain throughout the night and we wake up to a really dull day. Black sky, more rain and a dinghy full of water. We are booked with the Immigration Office at 10am for checkout formalities so we head ashore to complete the paperwork. Takes a bit of time since we had to wait for the Customs Officer to return to the office, but by 11am we are cleared to leave.
One last stop at the Scubaqua dive center was in order, for one last coffee and to say our farewell to the great team here. Perfect timing, as they were just returning from the morning dive. Really wished we had time for more dives around here, but big wind is coming tomorrow and will be a tougher sail to St. Bart’s.
Back at Cloudy Bay some admin on emails, finances and paperwork, then we are ready to pull out the anchor.
And we wave our goodbye to St.Eustatius at 1am, quite a bit later than we planned. 29nm to St. Bart’s, so approximately 4 hours to get there. It will be a slightly upwind sail, but after such calm weather over the last week the swell shouldn’t be too bad. We round St. Eustatius to the north, and we pass the huge oil terminal and the bare coastline along the rest of the west coast. There’s no habitation on this side of the island.
Forecast showed light wind today, but what we didn’t expect was this light: only 4kts of wind, so we continue to motor. Then touching 7kts but not more than that. Not enough to drive us through the oncoming swell. We run the watermaker since it was due and we are motoring anyway, so we should have plenty of hot water for the showers this evening and fully topped up on batteries.
On the passage we have a go with fishing, but attempt is all we do. The only thing we catch is lumps of seaweed, as usual. We need some guidance on how to fish, because just putting the hook in the water doesn’t seem to be enough these days 🙂 And then motoring some more. Hm, motoring between the islands in the Caribbean, this must be unheard of! Well, it surely is a possibility, and we have the proof of it. But this is a first for us.
As we approach St. Barth the wind picks up to 11kts, but it’s slap on the nose and too late for sailing now. We see lots of masts in Gustavia Harbour and we call on VHF to inquire on mooring buoys availability. No answer though. Well, this is France… So we go strait in and gently motor between the boats to look for buoys. Boats would be a flattering name for some of them. The accurate description would be “we motor between jalopies”, quite a collection I would say. Rust running down their hulls, hardly any paint left on some, and we counted at least three with no mast! Hm, last time we were surrounded by a similar collection was in Le Marin, Martinique. Another French island. Must be a trend. St. Bart’s is likened to those classy Southern France ports, but we are sure Cannes and St.tropez would not have such boats…
We find a mooring buoy and pick it up. But the second we put the lines on the cleats a French guy from the boat in front of us starts wagging his finger and shouting at us “no, no”. And he goes on and on in the same manner. We asked him why, but he is not able to explain us in English why we shouldn’t take that buoy. Then his wife shows up and starts with the same “no, no”. All we can think of is “welcome to France”, they do seem to have a wonderful way of making you feel (un)welcome. We can only think that he doesn’t want another yacht moored close to him. Well, we assume the moorings are laid in a fashion so boats don’t hit one another? But maybe not in this case.
We are in no mood to listen to them both shouting at us endlessly (plus their dog yapping at us!), so we drop the mooring lines and move on towards another available buoy. We pick it up, but it says “private” on it. So we drop this one too. Then on to the third attempt, a buoy with no loose line to pick it up with. The only way is to lift the actual ball, which is bloody heavy! And I vouch for that, as we had three attempts at lifting it and putting a line under it through a loop which was underwater.
Phew, we are moored now. But not for long… We swing and get close to the boat to our port. And then closer and closer. They are onboard and judging by the fact they don’t even pop their heads out to see what’s going on we imagine they don’t seem to mind an engine being so close to them. Well, their boat is one of the jalopies, with no mast even. I guess it doesn’t really mater if somebody touches their boat. And as we swing even further, the mooring buoy goes under their dinghy. That is too close! And still no reaction from the de-masted boat residents!
Obviously we drop the lines, again, and after this attempt decide to give up on the mooring buoys and anchor instead. After a couple of circles we find a nice sandy spot and drop the anchor in 10m of water. A bit too deep for our liking, but it will have to do.
Glen goes for his usual snorkel to check if the anchor grabbed ok, and he comes back all excited. While he was swimming down there he was surrounded by a shoal of 40-50 big barracudas, most around 1m long, all showing their teeth. Normally you only see barracudas as solitary fish. And there were several sting rays on the bottom too. I suspect we are going to have some very interesting snorkeling on this island, if not even scuba diving again.
Just before sunset we manage to sit for our lunch (well, let’s call it dinner at this hour) and enjoy a very nice orange glow over the horizon as the sun pops out from below the dark clouds just before it sets. Then it is a quiet rest of the evening onboard. No point rushing ashore as the Port Authority office is already closed. We’ll check in tomorrow morning. And as it starts raining, again, we congratulate ourselves for not venturing ashore. Looking forward to explore this famous Gustavia Harbour tomorrow!
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