Friday the 13th came early

On Wednesday, Jan. 11th we left Montserrat for Guadeloupe, a butterfly shaped, French speaking country south of Antigua. We arrived in Deshaies, too late in the afternoon to check-in at the oddly located Customs computer in the back of a T-shirt shop, so we anchored off of the little town snug in the bay.

The next morning, we had our first truly French croissants & baguettes at the boulangerie across from the dinghy dock with our friends on Dream Weaver, who were leaving that day for Pigeon Island, another anchorage in Guadeloupe about 10 miles south. I was beginning to get strange messages from Verizon about being charged for $500 worth of data overages, which was odd because I had an international plan with unlimited 3G data. Since we had been to Deshaies before (in 2020) and we wanted to catch up with Mike & Mary (on Dream Weaver) and their buddy boat, Act III, we checked in at the T-shirt shop, did a little provisioning and headed back out for Pigeon Island ourselves. 

Here’s where I started feeling a little unlucky! We were about 2 miles out, just as Andrew was about to ask me to look out for… thump, thump, thump… Fishing POTS… we had snagged one. Andrew donned his snorkel gear to check it out and confirmed that it was wrapped around our prop. We didn’t want to cut it, knowing that it was someone’s livelihood, and it was a little rough for Andrew to try to unwrap it without scuba gear, so I made a pan pan call on the VHF. Someone (we later found out was the French Coast Guard) who thankfully spoke reasonably good English, responded and offered to put out an official pan pan call (in English and French) and try to contact a few dive shops to see if we could get assistance. Two sailboats, that were 50 minutes to 2 hrs out, respectively, responded to the pan pan call, so we decided to wait for a bit.

After drifting out to sea with a tail of fishing line behind us for about an hour, Andrew was ready to jump in with the knife. He was about to go under when I saw a dive boat roaring in our direction. They had heard the pan pan, were working in our area and came out to help, despite having paying customers that wanted to go diving. It took longer for the driver of the boat to get in his scuba gear than it did for him to clear the pot lines and give us a thumbs up to try the engine. I just wish I had the presence of mind to get a picture of our hero but the boat looked something like the one below. I did take the time to give him a healthy tip!

All systems going, we were on our way again when a message came thru from Verizon… I was being cut off until I paid the now $1,000 worth of data overages! Ugh, it’s not even Friday the 13th yet!! We continued on to the anchorage called Bouillante, off of Pigeon Island, where there is an excellent Jacques Cousteau Underwater Park, that we intended to snorkel. We anchored near our friends on Dream Weaver and Act III, and joined a Salty Dawg party on s/v Lucky that evening. Although I wasn’t feeling that lucky that day, the dancing and singing on board certainly took the edge off. Only the videos do it justice (and I can’t post those on my low budget blog) but here is some of the gang enjoying the evening.

On Friday the 13th, before we went snorkeling, I made my way to Act III to use their Starlink communications system to look into my Verizon problem. With the use of their onboard Wi-Fi and my friends phone, I was able to get a human being to talk to that eventually figured out that the messages I was getting were a “bug” in the system and would have to be re-programmed! I didn’t push my luck to ask what they would pay me for testing their system, but I thanked my lucky stars that my comms were back and we survived the day!!