A Visit from the Gendarmerie

Just a quick update from northern Guadeloupe. Boredom is lurking. For you and for us. You can move the photo below around, it’s a 360-degree photo. Drag with your mouse inside the photo. On a phone or tablet you can also try moving your device in the direction you want!!

We were, and still are, anchored in the big bay on the north side (between the two butterfly wings, so to speak). At first we’d picked a spot south of Port Louis, near a tiny village called Petit-Canal. The great thing about the bay is that it’s quiet, it’s enormous (28,000 hectares) and it’s very sheltered. Zero swell, which makes a nice change! Anyway, the limited supermarket started to get to us: here you are in France and you can’t buy French cheese! Beer, wine and frozen meat, yes. Oh, and “La Vache qui Rit”, of course. The bakery only had baguettes, plus a croissant and a pain au chocolat if you got there early. In other words, the village was very poor indeed. The atmosphere was really easygoing, though; the four times I went ashore nobody gave me so much as a second glance. The day before yesterday we “moved house” to a bay a bit further southwest, about 5 miles in behind the reefs and close to the villages of Lamentin and Destrellan. After two weeks of sitting still it was lovely to be under way again, even if only under engine. When we were nearly at our chosen spot, an orange RIB from the Gendarmerie came over to check us out. Gentlemen of French origin. They asked where we’d come from. Marion explained nicely that we’d already been in Gwada for weeks, so everything was fine (even though, strictly speaking, the French government no longer allows us to move the boat…). They had a good laugh at our complaint about the supermarket and agreed: “Les Créoles ne mangent pas de fromage!” In short, nothing but friendly, curious about what kind of boat we had and so on, and they wished us the best of luck with our “isolation sociale” and said our spot was gorgeous now that there are only two flights a day. That’s when we found out: we’re anchored right under the approach path, you can count the wheels! If we move any further (beyond the bay), we’re expected to contact Pointe-à-Pitre, which can be done on VHF. Scooted via Baie Mahault to the supermarket in Destrellan. A seriously huge Carrefour. You could get anything there, lots of face masks among the shoppers and a whole crew of security guards letting people in in batches. A 10-minute wait (inside, in the air conditioning, so it could have been worse). They even still had cakes, so I could make up for Marion’s birthday last week! Loaded to the gunwales with, among other things, white wine, beer, French cheese, cold cuts and beautiful steaks (also part of the catch-up operation), flour for baking bread, baguettes, brown bread, Pringles, burgers, an HDMI cable and plenty more, I only just made it back on our little scooter. Luckily they’re very careful around two-wheelers in traffic here! In short, we’re extremely well and comfortably anchored here. One small downside: we’re close to the mangroves, so we’re having to get used to mosquitoes and no-see-ums: those tiny little black specks that buzz and bite viciously!