Two Days in Deshaies (pronounced DAY AY)

ILENE, upper left, second day

Yesterday we did not leave the boat but blogged, cleaned the boat, read and dined aboard, all three meals, the first on baguette and croissant delivered to the boat by an enterprising young man in a dinghy. The reason for not leaving the boat: Wind. We are on the west coast of the island and the winds are from the east, so we are protected, right? But there is a valley that sweeps down from the hills to this open bay; it acts like a wind funnel, concentrating the winds. They blew at 30 knots with gusts to 35. It's just uncomfortable with the boat heeling a bit on each course it steers first on one side and then the other, (veering) trying to break free from the anchor. This causes anxiety about whether the anchor will hold, and whether, on such a veer, we will hit a nearby boat or it will hit us.

Roger accidentally attached the metal hook of our snubber line backward and the force bent back the prongs of the hook, causing the hook to release the chain. A snubber is a piece of rope that is attached to the anchor chain and bears the strain of the anchor. It is stretchier than chain, which better absorbs shock loads and avoids the loud clanging (like being hit with a sledgehammer) when the chain under load rolls a quarter turn in its roller. When the snubber detached, the chain, nearer the boat than the attachment point, which had lain slack, took the load. Roger tied the snubber back with some hitches (knots)and it held.

Today was a different story, except for breakfast. We took a hike along a mountain brook called the Deshaies River, which, after a while involved jumping from rock to rock in the stream, some of them slippery. With an average age of 64, our team decided to call it quits early. So we walked up hill on a curvy road about a kilometer to the Deshaies Botanical Garden. They charge almost $20 per adult for admission but it was worth it. They had gathered trees and plants that could grow in a tropical climate from all over the world and planted them here along a well marked paved path that took a visitor past each of them. The Bronx version is great but they do it by means of a greenhouse; this was all outdoors. there was a large 70 by 20 yard Koi pond

Ilene with Koi; man is feeding them.

stuffed with carp (orange, white and black -- the same color scheme as our cats), a Lorikeet cage (the only cage)(they sit on your hand for food)



a spot where large parrots sat and played.


There were broad vistas of the sea. The only fault of the garden, and it is one that we frequently see at home in the US too, is that the signage, describing each plant, was monolingual: all in French. In Paris almost everyone speaks English but we suppose Guadeloupe is more like the French farmland where bilingualism is not as prevalent.

Parlez vou Francaise?

We also continued our adventures in eating local. For lunch, Roger had curried goat.
W
For dinner, we cooked the yam, which looks black and has a hairy coarse outside (like the outside of a brown coconut without the husk), not smooth like a potato skin. But it is white and is supposed to be like a rather more fibrous potato on the inside. We had thought to make a potato salad but it got a bit overcooked so we made them into mashed potatoes. We also cooked the Christophane. It looks like a slightly flattened, pale green pear on the outside, but when cut in half lengthwise reveals a large flattened pit but not so round or so large proportionately to the whole as the pit of an avocado. Boiling for a half hour and scooping out the flesh, except for a quarter inch adjacent to the skin, the scooped out stuff is chopped, squeezed dry, and mixed with chopped onion, carrot, scallion, garlic. After this is sauteed, breadcrumbs and cheese are added to the mix and on top and then the things are baked for 20 minutes. Another new experience.

Tomorrow we plan to sail to Iles des Saints, a collection of small islands that is part of, though about ten miles south from, Guadeloupe.