That’s right, we have only had half a holiday season in an English speaking country since we left home, (Year 1 – Baiona – Spain/ Cascais - Portugal, Year 2 – Canary Islands – Spain, Year 3 – Puerto Rico, Year 4 – Dominica (English with a twist) / Guadaloupe, Year 5 – French West Indies), but everyone still enjoys it much the same way with fireworks on New Year’s Eve and lots of partying.

One downside to cruising is cruiser’s midnight which falls at 2100hours when most cruisers fall asleep. This does tend to preclude at least some from truly celebrating NYE properly, and again I was alone on deck to watch the fireworks in the Saintes harbour. We had planned to be well north of here for NYE but we decided to hide from a largish NNE swell here on the new mooring bouys (€60 a week for us) but did not dodge the swells at all! This resulted in a rather bumpy week where a lot of reading and not much else was achieved.

The Saintes is a pretty little group of islands south of Guadaloupe with a character all of its own. Definitely French, with baguettes and accras de morue for lunch and the harbour neighbourhood starts to get dotted with small cruise ships many of them sail powered and some square rigged.




Staadt Amsterdam

They did make me appreciate just how easy it was to sail our boat – certainly couldn’t do what this lady did!





So we had a restful week, dining out, and relaxing and as a challenge I baked a banana loaf using Dinah’s (Evergreen) recipe and boy was it good!



On the sixth day we could take the rolly anchorage no longer and dropped the mooring lines and headed for Deshaies. As usual the winds were fluky coming up the lee of Guadaloupe, motoring, motor-sailing and sailing at various time. But of course the wind shot up to 30knots as we rounded up into the bay and after a quick and nervous once round the anchorage we anchored out the back in about 10m of water. Our new Rocna grabbing quickly, thank god!

We decided to wait for a nice weather window to go straight to Sint Maarten as it looked like the swell and predominant winds was going to rule out the planned visit to Monserrat again – so we sat back and relaxed, taking advantage of our familiarity with Deshaies to do very little. The most adventurous we got was to dress up in our new Christmas presents and head to Grand Anse for lunch and a day on the beach. The swells were large and breaking on the beach, so a swim was crossed off the agenda and a longer lunch was the order of the day! And we deserved it as the walk to the beach took about an hour each way (and there were hills in both directions!)



On the way to the beach we did stop in the local supermarket for a bottle of water (yes I do drink water as well) and were surprised to find a familiar advert – kinda makes you homesick doesn’t it...



 Anyway, it looks like tonight is the night we bid farewell to the Guadaloupe for the last time (probably, maybe, who knows...) and head off to St Maarten.