We are spending a very pleasant couple of weeks in Martinique, anchored in the capitol, Fort-de- France, which is a very large and bustling city. It is also a very old city, settled in the 1600s by the French. It was fought over by the British and the French in the 1800s, and is now a departement of France (the equivalent of one of our states). We realize that Martinique and Guadeloupe are very similar to Hawaii for Americans - an overseas tropical destination on home soil for the French. We see tourists from France here in Martinique. France also subsidizes the islands here, and it shows in the infrastructure of a modern bus system, good roads, a drinkable water system, and other outward signs.
We helped our friend Sue on Enee Marie deliver her boat about 10 miles down the coast to a boatyard, where she will leave it for hurricane season while she and her husband go to Chicago. We had some adventures getting back to our boat after the delivery - from Marin, about 30 kilometers away by road, collective taxis are supposed to run until 5:30 every afternoon, but we couldn't find any. So, for the first time, we hitchhiked back, and were picked up by several wonderful Martiniquans, the last one who sought us out to deliver us directly to our dinghy dock.
We also had a package delivered to us at the FedEx office, at the airport. Our water jugs from Reliance had all failed with cracks in their seams. Larry found the telephone number of a vice president of the Canadian-based company, who was very interested in our problems. She found mistakes in their manufacturing process and wanted to replace our jugs, free of charge - almost unheard-of for a company to stand behind its products in this way! Kudos to Reliance.
We also have had a very good time walking around the city, seeing all the French shops, walking to the suburb of Schoelcher for a large supermarket (they call it a Hyper Marche), and visiting tourist sites in town. We've developed quite a liking for French bread of all types, from baguettes to pain complet (whole wheat), pain compagne (country bread), pain de cereales (multi-grain), batard aux noix (bread with walnuts). We will miss the French bread, French cheese, and French mustard, among other culinary delights available here.
We will be sailing on to St. Lucia and St. Vincent in the next couple of weeks, as we make our way south for hurricane season.

Many of the Caribbean island nations have colorful flags. Here is Dominica's.
I'm not sure if the parrot shown in the center has a special meaning for Dominicans. Maybe it's their national bird, although when we toured the island, not a single one of these vivid creatures flew by. In fact there are more wild parrots noticeable in the Hyde Park area on the south side of Chicago, near the Museum of Science and Industry. How they got there is another story.

As the country's emblem, a parrot does not quite project the bold, inspiring image that nations seem to prefer, a la the American eagle. You can't seriously picture a platoon of Dominican soldiers marching bravely into battle under the banner of the happy parrot. But then imagining Dominica at war isn't easy either, with St. Kitts? Martinique(France)? over bananas? tourist attractions? For the record, a symbolic force of Dominican troops was sent in support of the U.S. invasion of neighboring Grenada back in 1983. In appreciation, the United States increased its foreign aid to Dominica which helped build the fine paved roads all over the island.

Dominica's gentle flag could be a good thing though, toning down the usual aggressive, nationalistic tendencies and replacing them with an unpretentious, let's-enjoy-the-moment island attitude. Besides, parrots are not only attractive birds but no doubt feisty as well as renown for their verbal talents, compatibility and unexpected intelligence. Not a bad national mascot after all.



We spent about a week and a half on the island of Dominica, most of it anchored at the northern town of Portsmouth, and just one night at the capital city of Roseau. We took an island tour with another couple, Bill and Sue from Unchained, given by one of the tour guides named Alexis. He was a good guide, took us to the Emerald Pool, over to the Atlantic side of the
island, through the Carib territory, and back. The tour was set up by the other couple; we would use a different tour guide, probably Martin on Providence if we had to do it over - Alexis was good, but he tried to overcharge us at the end. The quoted price before the trip, to Bill and Sue, was $135 US, and at the end he wanted $200 US - pretty sleazy way to give himself a $70 tip. We talked him down to $140 total.
We did enjoy Dominica very much, including the open-air vegetable market in Portsmouth on Saturday morning, and the fish and vegetable market in Roseau. Dominica is a significantly poorer country than others we have seen in the eastern Caribbean, but the people are friendly and the public buses are efficient and cheap.
Now we are in Martinique as we make our way south for hurricane season.

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We are now in Guadeloupe, in a group of islands called Les Saintes. It's been a wonderful stay, with some great hikes to see magnificent views. The anchorage here at Terre de Haut is quiet, peaceful, flat as a pancake, protected, and has a small reef to snorkel on. The only downside is jellyfish - Debby has suffered three jellyfish strikes in as many weeks, and is now wearing a wetsuit to swim.
The town here has a very French flavor, with no fast food or chain stores. We have been enjoying fresh French bread every day, hot from the oven in the morning, along with fresh fruits and vegetables grown in Guadeloupe. The weather has been perfect, every day about 80 degrees with light trade winds.
We'll be taking advantage of the light trades and sailing for Dominica at sunrise tomorrow.

Can you see our boat down there? We hiked up to the old fort in English harbor (every island seems to have its own fort, lots of fighting over the island real estate amongst the European powers a couple of hundred years ago). At English Harbor they have preserved and restored the old dockyard where Horatio Nelson was in command.

We moved on from English Harbor, Antigua, on Friday May 2, and anchored in Des Haies, Guadeloupe. The highlight of Guadeloupe so far was Pigeon Island, on the west coast, where we took a mooring for the day to snorkel and swim in the Cousteau National Underwater Park. Lots of coral and more reef fish than we have seen for a while.
We stopped in Basse Terre, where we spent two miserable rolly nights, trying this and that to stop the roll. A whole day on anchoring, re-anchoring, setting a stern anchor, trying a swell bridle, and it still rolled so we couldn't sleep well.
We gave up and sailed over to the Saintes, a lovely group of islands south of Guadeloupe with a wonderful protected harbor. And, yet another fort to explore!

We never expected to go to Antigua, but here we are. The wind blew us here instead of Guadeloupe. We lefft Nevis on Thursday, April 24, and sailed to Montserrat, where we anchored for the night and left at dawn. When we rounded the northern tip of the island and set a southerly course for Guadeloupe, we found a south wind against us on the nose, with a southerly chop washing over the bow. We were looking at 30 miles of motoring against that wind and chop, or - look! There's another island over to our east! That would be a close reach, so let's do it! So we had a nice sail over to Antigua.
We just happened to be here during Race Week, with all the hustle and bustle of a major international regatta in town. We'll stay for a week, see the sights, and then escape to quieter anchorages in Guadeloupe.
We found this shop in St. John, the capitol of Antigua - imagine a shop named after our boat!

Our new instrument display is pictured here. That's probably the best thing we did for the boat in St. Martin, replacing our instru- ments. The old Datamarine instruments worked for 25 years, so we feel they gave good service. The depth sounder went out in Luperon, almost a year ago, and we've been using a Humminbird transom mount unit, lowered on an old boat hook into the water and hose- clamped to the monitor. It worked very well and now we know we have a good backup unit for the depth. Speed and distance would work sometimes, but not often.
We chose a Navman unit, which so far we've been pleased with. Our requirements are simple - we don't have a chart plotter, radar, or console GPS, so we didn't need to interface with other instruments and displays. We have been living without speed and distance now for a while, but now that we have it we really like to see. Our unit displays a log (like a trip meter), a total log distance, speed, average speed, battery voltage (!), depth, and .... it slices, dices and makes our life easier !
Our instrument display unit, with two thru-hull transducers, was about $440 at Island Water World. The comparable unit at Budget Marine was Raymarine, and just over $700. So we feel like we got a good deal and are having fun learning all the features of the display.

We stayed in St. Kitts a few extra days at the marina to fix our head. That's the toilet for land-lubbers out there. It had been increasingly difficult to pump, requiring extra pumps, and on the way over to St. Kitts it overflowed with sea water - not a good situation. We closed the thru-hulls and knew we'd be facing another go at the toilet. It's a Lavac, supposedly one of the more maintenance - free varieties of marine toilets. But ours has been a problem off and on, requiring taking apart every few months. Now we wish we had bought a whole extra pump in St. Martin, that will be on the list for purchase in Grenada!
Boy what a mess when we took it apart - calcified crud with sea salt, thankfully not too smelly, as it was all petrified. Lots of buckets of vinegar later, the crud came off and all parts looked much better. A new valve at one end - and put it back together.

Woops! Larry threw the bucket of old vinegar water with crud overboard - and the black plastic nut required to hold it all together. Here's the nut pictured with the scuba gear he needed to go diving after the part. Not a chance we'd find one of these nuts on the island.

We finally left St. Martin and started our way south. After 1,000 miles of upwind motorsailing from Miami in the last year, we turned the corner and are able to sail. We are still beating into the wind, but conditions are improving.
We sailed from St. Martin south to St. Eustatia, where we dropped our hook for the night and then kept going to St. Kitts. If you stop at Stasia and don't intend to go ashore, leave at first light or the park patrol will charge you for anchoring.
In St. Kitts we stayed in the Port Zante Marina, a real treasure at fifty cents a foot per night. We have not been to a marina in over a year and it felt good to treat ourselves to a dock and fresh water showers.
The people of St. Kitts are friendly and helpful. We explored the town of Basseterre, and took a bus up the coast to the restored fort of Brimstone Hill. That is well worth the excursion, we got an audio tour guide and learned all about the history of the extensive fort. The public bus leaves you a short 30 minute walk to the fort, but it's all uphill and a good hike.

We tackled some climbing here in St. Martin. For weeks now, we've been anchored in front of Mount Fortune, so we decided to try climbing it. Mountain goats scamper up and down the face of this rock every afternoon. We put on our hiking boots and jeans and made it to the top, for spectacular views of the Simpson Bay Lagoon, Marigot on the French side of St. Martin, and Simpson Bay on the Dutch side. At the top the wind really blows like a banshee.
We've been waiting out strong trade winds and high seas (25 + knots, with squalls coming through regularly, and 10 to 12 foot seas). We went into the boatyard to chat with our friend Lindsey and others.
Our instruments are now in and working (at least the depth; we'll have to wait until we're underway to test the speed and distance). We chose Navman instruments to replace our original Datamarine setup, which lasted over 20 years of good service. Of course we had to do some carpentry to make the display fit, and the wire stringing around the boat took days to finish, mostly grunt work of taking everything out of all of our lockers to access the hidden panels and painstakingly shove wire through small holes. But we are delighted to have a working depth sounder and a crisp display with large, easy to read numbers.

While we were waiting for our instrument display to arrive, from France no less, by ship, the international Heineken regatta was held in St. Martin. Almost 300 boats of all sizes and classes raced from March 6 - 9 in fine weather with crews from France, England, the Netherlands, Brazil, South Africa and the U.S.. Larry volunteered to drive a water taxi for the racers to get to and from shore before and after the races. We both helped deliver these big dinghies, with 30 and 40 horse power outboards, on an ocean run from Philipsburg to Marigot. Larry got very used to that much power in a small boat; our little Portabote with a 3 hp engine was quite a step down after that experience.
We saw some amazing racing machines, some up to 100 feet long, in the racing class. It was quite a busy time in St. Martin with sailing and celebrations, though we missed the really hot parties with such acts as Shaggy, King T-Mo, and White Knuckle Weekend.

We spent three weeks in the boatyard, an intense time of working on the boat all day, every day. We had a lot of work to do on the bottom - she is developing tiny micro-blisters all over the hull, which we popped, dried, sanded, filled, and primed before painting. Next time we haul we will probably have to grind down to the gel coat and start fresh.
We also noticed some bare spots on the rudder, so we spent time grinding it down. We drilled holes in it to let out water in its core, let them dry, filled it in, did fiberglas on a crack, and primed the whole rudder. We used Interprotect 2000 to prime before painting.
The bottom paint we used is a new brand, called Ameron ABC #3, which we bought over on the French side of St. Martin at the Time Out Boatyard. At $120 a gallon, it is less than half the price of commercial bottom paints, and gets good reports from other cruisers who have used it.
We also had the bowsprit foot platform reworked by Graham in the boatyard, who did a wonderful job of removing the rotten pieces, replacing with teak, and finishing it all with epoxy. We then reinstalled it after taking all the rust off the stainless frame for it. All of the screws that had been holding it in were gone (!), so we replaced all of them.
Lindsey in the boatyard took apart our gear shifter, replaced some worn parts, relubricated it, and put it back together. We were probably going to have a failure on that, as it was getting hard to shift from neutral to forward and reverse. That could have been a real problem underway. He also installed our new transducers for depth and distance in the hull.
We also sanded down our waterline stripe of red, which has been a problem for some time. We primed and just put bottom paint up the side, which now looks much better.
We're back in the water now, anchored in the Lagoon, and waiting for the display unit for our new instrument transducers to come in (only a month and a half late!) so we can install that and be on our way south.

We are in the boatyard now, at Bobby's Boatyard in St. Martin. It's an adjustment to "life on the stilts". Here we are in the well, waiting for the TraveLift to take the Debonair out of the water.
The dogs are everywhere; here they're waiting with the workers to get ready for the lift.






"Easy does it" - up and out of the water.
















Pressure wash to get most of the marine growth off the bottom.














Moving through the boatyard to her new home. The TraveLift is quite a machine, and it's an amazing thing to watch the boat being wheeled around on land.




Settling the Debonair into place, putting stilts and ladder around the boat.












Larry in full sanding gear, working on the hull and hamming it up.

We took the bus over to the Dutch side capital city of Philipsburg, which is all cruise-ship oriented. The whole waterfront is full of jewelry stores, beach ware, perfume, cigars, all duty-free shopping. We had a good time just being at the beach and walking around. This map of the island was set into the sidewalk.
Back in Marigot, we saw this great place - the Fantastic Guest House and Auto Supplies - and had to take a picture of it.

We spent three weeks in Marigot Bay on the French side of St. Martin, exploring the island by bus and enjoying the very French town of Marigot. Here is a view of the bay from the high point of Fort Louis, overlooking the harbor and Anguilla to the north. Our boat is one of the many boats seen at anchor here.
The fort is only a ruin, but looks good from this viewpoint. If it's any indication of French forts, we're convinced that the French could learn a bit about fort-building from the Spanish. Now, the fort at San Juan was built to last!