Move to Iles Des Saintes

After a frustrating 3 days trying to get Internet in Basse Terre (the capitol of Guadeloupe), we decided to move Tahina to the beautiful tropical islands of Iles des Saintes just about 12 miles south of us. These hilly islands are a popular tourist destination with many ferries coming from the main island every day. Iles des Saintes is home to Fort Napoleon – located on the top of Terre de Haut, the main island of population here. This is where the main anchorage is located and was our destination of the day.

We got up and prepared to depart our anchorage at Basse Terre. We’ve been through this route before, so we knew that the winds can accelerate around the southern tip of Guadeloupe. We raised the sails with two reefs. A good thing because we almost immediately got over 30 knots of wind as we started sailing (just a gust). The passage to the islands is normally a tight reach to the southeast. Our trip was normal in this respect.

Here’s the map showing our GPS track with some highlights, read below for some exciting details on the trip:

View Basse Terre to Iles Des Saintes, Guadeloupe in a larger map | or load the map in Google Earth
We had strong apparent wind in the upper 20 knot range with gusts into the lower 30s. As we approached the island, it was apparent we wouldn’t make the entry between the islands we wanted without tacking further east. Not only that, but there were two squalls headed our way. So, we tacked a bit early hoping to go between the two squalls. Our maneuver worked almost perfectly. We caught the northern tip of the southern squall for a few seconds. You could see the wall of water approaching us and we were hammered with rain for those few seconds. We had 45 knot gusts briefly, but I turned us into the winds to take the pressure off the sails. Thank goodness we were double-reefed! Then it suddenly was over – we were in bright sunshine with a clear view again of Les Saintes, and the winds quickly dropped back to normal.

We soon tacked back towards the islands and had an enjoyable, uneventful, sail into our chosen entry, dropped our sails and motored to the anchorage. Another great sail and we were left pleased with our seamanship. As a reward, we quickly discovered we had WIFI Internet available in the anchorage and were soon gobbling up a much needed fix on the Internet and making posts left and right.