Salt River's
The place to
Have a good time...
(For those readers who aren't from Arizona: there's a Salt River near Phoenix, and every spring and summer thousands of Arizonans put on old bathing suits and ratty shoes and jump in an inner tube to spend four hours floating down the mucky river and roasting in the sun. It's a lot of fun. Really. Especially if you have a custom inner-tube-shaped cooler full of beer. For those readers who ARE from Arizona: I apologize for putting the annoying "Salt River Recreation" jingle in your head. I'm sure you'll be singing it all day long. Sorry.)
So the Riviere Salee divides the island in half and there are two bascule bridges that you have to go through, one at the south end and one at the north. Unfortunately, they only open once per day at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. So we were up and on our way to the first bridge by 4:15. It was still dark but luckily there were no container or cruise ships in the Pointe-a-Pitre port this morning so we were able to maneuver through the channel without having to worry about them. The big shipping channel narrows and shallows up before you get to the first bridge. We were the first ones there but there were three other boats behind us. It was so dark I couldn't see enough to clearly make out the bridge but it looked really narrow. Like, REALLY narrow. We are 21 feet across, and we couldn't find the width of the bridge on any of our charts. One of the guidebooks said it was 7 meters 60, which is about 25 feet, so Kevin had already rigged up some fenders just in case it was too close for comfort. When the bridge opened, I tried shouting slowly in French "How many meters wide is the bridge?" to the bridgetender who replied too rapidly for me to understand. But I did catch the words "You" and "okay" so we proceeded through anyway. I guess the guidebook was wrong because it ended up we had about five feet of clearance on either side. Still tricky, and I'm glad there wasn't any current pushing us around, but at least we didn't scrape up the sides of the boat.
Once through the south bridge, it was about a mile or so to the north one. The short passage reminded us of the Intracoastal Waterway in the US: watch the markers, stay in the narrow channel, or risk running aground. Luckily the channel was plenty deep for us and we were glad to finally approach the second bridge. It opens exactly a half-hour after the first one, so we timed our speed to make it with ten minutes to spare. But the last boat behind us was pretty slow, and sure enough when the bridge opened only three of us came through before he closed it. So we're not quite sure what happened to the last guy. It's possible he ran aground (parts of the channel can get pretty shallow for monohulls).
North of the river, the water opens up into a huge bay called the Grand Cul-de-Sac de Marin. Once we got further away from the river and the mangroves, the water got very clear and there were all kinds of little islands and reefs. The two boats behind us continued on to Antigua or other northern islands. Technically we have already cleared out of the country and should be on our way, but we decided to stay one more night anchored near an island called Ilet Fajou (Can't seem to stop breaking the rules! We must like living dangerously.) Not too many boats choose this route to go through Guadeloupe and we have the anchorage all to ourselves, which is a rare thing in the Caribbean. We're basically out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by water so clear you can see the starfish, conch, and sea cucumbers resting on the bottom. It would be awesome if not for the bugs. The supposedly uninhabited island of Ilet Fajou has a population of about 100,000 tiny flies. And they've all come to visit our boat. Thank god for screens.
Where we are:
Location=Ilet Fajou, Guadeloupe
Lat=16 15.016
Lon=61 31.807
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