Alright, a few islands ago in Dominica we hit my favorite spot so far. Saint Barthélemy was my least favorite spot so far. The vast majority of tourists here are American, which is slightly strange given that the island is French. It was very crowded, and the anchorage was non-stop wakes from inbound and outbound power boats of all shapes and sizes. That said, there were some things that we enjoyed and since I generally try to be positive, I’ll focus on that.
Customs clearance was super easy and friendly, even if it was a bit more expensive than most other places we’ve been.
After sunset, very few boats blew past and rocked us around.
The sunsets were quite pretty since we were anchored right next to this huge rocky islet.
One night after sunset Fira and I were reading in the cool breeze topside and Fira spotted what she/we thought was a comet. We yelled to Grete and Dublin to come up to see. Then, the ‘comet’ split into two pieces and one fell down and burned up. The other piece kept going up then got dimmer and dimmer, as well as faster and faster. Turns out, SpaceX was putting 23 new Starlink satellites into orbit and we saw the booster separation of the Falcon 9. It was really really cool, and it’s strange that the two coolest night sky events we’ve seen since we started sailing were this, and when a Starlink satellite burned up when it failed to reach orbit and burned out so bright and green we didn’t know what to think.
One day we walked up to the saddle point in the hills that run the length of the island to watch the planes roll in. It’s a crazy steep runway approach and the planes often have their wheels hit the grassy hill that leads down. We watched a half dozen or so planes and a helicopter that freaked Fira out.
Right in the saddle point there was a cool statue of a guy blowing the conch (watch it perverts), which in the cruising world signifies sunset and the start of good evening liming.
We walked over to the big grocery store on the island to stock up and they had ridiculous little shopping carts for very young kids, but Fira being Fira, she really wanted to push one around. Why not?!
Our last stop in town was a short walk up to the Gustavia lighthouse and its surrounding gardens. Decent views of the harbor, and the lighthouse up there.
We moved around to the nature preserve at Colombier Baie for our final two nights in St Bart. We ended up on the closest mooring ball to shore so we swam to shore both days we were there. On our second day, we met a new family and hung out on their boat for a while. Dublin being Dublin was showing off with his fearlessness jumping off of stuff.
We swam around trying to look at the corals but it was very swelly and rolly while we were there so the sand was very churned up. The bay itself was beautiful though, so I sprinkled a few of my dad’s ashes.
We left the island and headed on over to Saint Martin where we will have some work done on the boat and a visit from Muddah Goose. We scheduled our haul out a couple of months ago and have managed to get through the stops we wanted with nearly a week to spare.