Rock and Roll Statia

St Eustatius, Leeward Islands

Statia, the short name for St. Eustatius, is a small volcano island between Saba and St. Kitts. We sailed over from St. Barth’s, keen to do some diving and hiking.

Statia was once the trade capital of the West Indies where 100 plus sailing ships would lie at anchor exchanging goods. While the European powers where fighting each other, and the Americans, the Dutch islands stayed neutral and Statia became the largest trading port in the Caribbean. Only ruins of the trading port remain today, Statia is now the fuel distribution center for the Caribbean. Large tankers offload massive amounts of fuel, which is then loaded onto smaller tankers and taken to the islands.

There are no natural harbors or bays on Statia, it is a small round island exposed to the seas in all directions. They have built a small breakwater for the commercial boats, but it provides little protection for the anchorage.

We checked into the marine park for three nights, but it was so rolly that we left after just one. It was impossible to sleep, even when lying sideways on the bed. Large swells would hit us on the side rolling the boat from side to side, it was rougher than most of our offshore passages. We should have been clued into the anchorage conditions when the marine park officer told us we should come in for a refund if we decided to leave early.

While the island looked inviting and the diving was good, we left rock and roll Statia behind and headed for Guadeloupe.

Back to the Saintes, again

We stopped in Iles Les Saintes, a small group of Islands south of Guadeloupe. Terre D’en Haut is one of our favorite islands. It is small French fishing village and day vacation spot for visitors from Guadeloupe.

We hiked back up to Fort Napoleon and this time it was open, last year we went up twice and it was closed both times. It has a beautiful view over the harbor and has been well restored. While most of the displays were captioned in French, it was nice to wonder through the museum and see the displays about the epic sea battle between the French and English that took place around the Saintes.

Once again we were challenged by our limited French language skills. Our French is limited to good day, good afternoon, good bye, thank you and do you speak English? After that it is all pantomiming. So ordering food can be exciting and reading captions at the museum was impossible.

From Iles Les Saintes, we set off for St. Pierre Martinique. As we were sailing down the coast of Dominica we heard one of the boats that we knew from the 2007 Caribbean 1500 (Tevia) on the VHF radio. After a brief conversation we turned around and headed into Portsmouth, Dominica. We had last seen Tevia in Portsmouth about a year ago, so it was good to catch up and get some pointers on Grenada.

We also needed to check in somewhere, as we had been off the map for a while. When cruising in the Caribbean, we are required to check into and out of every country. Because the government workers in Guadeloupe were on strike, we could not clear customs in Les Saints, so our last clearance papers where from Statia and were more than a week old, which is a long time in these islands. So while in Dominica we checked in and out in the same day, getting updated clearance papers which was important because our next port was Bequia and they are difficult if your papers aren’t perfect.

Also, while in Dominica we ran across Amante’, the Hylas 70 that was built and commissioned along side Berkeley East. We spent the morning visiting with Neal and Vanessa, Amante’s owners, and commiserating about the problems that our boat builder is having delivering his warranty commitments.

With our visiting done, we took off for Bequia. We had decided to skip Martinique, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, as we had visited these islands last year and we were a little behind schedule. The sail to Bequia started out difficult. We were covered by squalls all along the coast of Dominica, but then as evening approached everything cleared up. We reached in 15 – 20 knots of wind under a full moon making great time.