Guadeloupe – a really conveniently-placed island
In the case of the Artemis crew, it’s a convenient place to take on stores when you’ve sailed out of the Bahamas ass-backwards, with insufficient supplies of water, fuel, and food.
What most people don’t know about Guadeloupe is that it is legally part of France; one of their overseas territories, or as the French refer to it, a département outre-mer. Given that, the fact that it speaks French with a liberal spattering of Creole is probably less of a surprise. It’s the southernmost of the Leeward Island chain, which stretches from St. Maarten (by Anguilla) in the North to Marie-Galante, a dependency of Guadeloupe, in the South.
Guadeloupe, before it got summarily re-named by Columbus, was known as Karukera, or the island of beautiful waters. As you can see from the header image, that’s not an inaccurate name for the place.
If you look at the curve of the island chain, then you’ll see that when sailing in from the North and seaward, Guadeloupe is a pretty logical spot to pick as a stopping point. In addition, the marina is large, and there’s various sections of anchorage, marina, and tourist beach speckled around, with a fair amount of traffic. Just the spot for a team of vampire hunters on the run to make a pit stop.
My only visit to Guadeloupe was in 1992; we began to head for Europe, sailing out of Martinique, and managed to blow out the leading edge of our jib. Since starting a four- to five-week sail with one of your primary sails frayed is considered contra-indicated at best and bloody stupid at worst, we made a left into Guadeloupe and spent a week there sorting it out. I can therefore personally attest to the fact that the marina’s a maze. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much more of the island than the marina (sails, supplies, water, go, is probably the executive summary of the visit).
I do still have a trio of hand-carved wooden monkeys that I picked up there, which hung over my bunk all the way to Gibraltar and are hanging from the curtain tie-back by my desk as I write. Because, if all goes well, there really isn’t a hell of a lot to do on a sailing yacht crossing the Atlantic, I spent a number of hours watching them swing back and forth as the boat rolled. These days, they only move when one of my cats goes on the rampage and uses my windowsill as a trampoline.
