Guadeloupe, Riviere Salee
Guadeloupe is a territory of France, with a population of 360,000, mostly black. The currency is the Euro and Guadeloupe is part of the EU. The economy is good and the prices of anything shipped in, or of professional services are at least as much as in France. Local items are at better prices.
Guadeloupe is shaped like a butterfly, and is made up of two virtually separate islands joined by a couple of bridges. A saltwater channel (La Rivière Salée) runs the short distance through the mangroves in between the two parts of the island. It is possible to navigate this channel in a yacht.
We wanted to go to Pointe-a-Pitre, which is just south of the saltwater channel, so we decided to attempt the channel. There is a large bay to the north of the channel, full of reefs. A winding route has been dredged between the reefs marked by red and green buoys, and between our paper charts, our pilot book, our CMap chart software, judicious use of waypoints in the GPS, and a lot of concentration, we found our way as far as the channel in the mangroves. The next part was clearer, just following the channel in the mangroves and a few buoys. Then we tied to a mooring before the first bridge, just before the airport, to wait until the early morning opening of the bridge. About an hour before dark, the mosquitoes and no-see-ums arrived in force. There was absolutely no wind and we had to spray with insect repellent to stop being bitten all over, this helped a lot. For the first time since our arrival in the Caribbean, I got out the mosquito nets.
Nigel went for a drink with a French charter catamaran, and came back seven hours later completely plastered. I couldn’t sleep for the heat and mosquitoes. Consequently both we and the catamaran missed the first opening of the bridge at 04:30, and passed through on the second opening at 05:20. This meant we had missed the opening of the second bridge only a mile away, which is at 05:00, and we would have to wait another day and mosquito-infested night to get through to Point-a-Pitre. However we did use some of the time to explore the mangrove channels by dinghy.
The second night we set three separate alarms all over the boat to be sure of waking up for the second bridge opening. I also woke Dan as we had agreed so he could see the bridge lifting. Then on the other side we anchored so we could wait for daylight.
A couple of hours later we approached Point-a-Pitre (finally!) and decided to anchor right outside the town square.