Wake Up and Smell the Guano

After an unchar- acteristically smooth, comfortable sail of 5 hours from Rodney Bay, St. Lucia, we arrived down island at the fishing village of Soufriere. There are many Soufriere place names in the Caribbean islands — it means “sulfur” in French - a testimony to their volcanic origins. Soufriere, St. Lucia happens to have one of the most distinctive landmarks in the Caribbean for a backdrop — the twin pitons looming over a large bay.
These jagged peaks rise nearly straight up from the water’s edge to over 2500 ft. Likewise water depth drops off from 15 ft. at spitting distance from shore to 600 ft. a stone’s throw away.

We picked up a mooring ball, available for a small fee, since anchoring was not permitted (or very practical) in this area which turned out to be a protected national marine reserve. Luckily for us this meant great snorkeling and swimming right from the boat with thousands of tropical fish scooting around as if we were floating in a giant aquarium. 50 ft. away from our boat a vertical rock wall with clinging shrubs rose to about 100 ft. With breakers hitting the rocks so close to us, especially at night when they sounded a little too close, we glanced nervously in that direction for the first day or so. Fortunately our mooring was snug with short strong rope and a solid anchoring in the sea bottom. A scenic bonus was a spontaneous waterfall that materialized next to us during and after every rain.
Just forward of our boat on shore was a remarkable geologic formation. A fissure split the 100 ft. high wall from top to bottom creating a soaring A-shaped cave. We would sometimes notice a faint urea-type scent in the air, but assumed it came from the outskirts of town. Not so. Now and then a small guide boat filled with tourists from a nearby resort would slowly motor up to the cave entrance. People would peer up into the dark chasm and snap photos. After a few days we realized we had moored next to a local spectacle called the Bat Cave. The odor that occasionally wafted past us was the byproduct of hundreds of bats roosting during the day. Our consolation was that all these squeaking creatures probably kept the mosquitoes to a minimum at night after they fluttered out of the cave at sunset. So another ecology lesson aboard the Debonair about nature’s connections: scenic landscape, intriguing cave, strange smell, bats galore, insect control. At least these bats were not of the vampire variety, I think.