We have been on St. Barths, a cool, little French Island with steep, dry hills and beautiful, white sand beaches. French pirates used St.Barths as an outpost to raid ships filled with treasure. Now the “hip” place to be in the Caribbean, St.Barth’s main town is Gustavia, and is very French in character, with great boulangeries, cafes, coffee, bread and pastries. The crowd runs from the jet-set Hermes shoppers to young ones eating rice and beans on their black, yellow and green Rasta Boat.

One big event was finding two barracuda under our boat while Nick, India and Peter were swimming!!  The big-jawed fish set up housekeeping under our cat for the rest of the week. Catamarans can form a sort of temporary reef that attract a lot of fish.

We spent every afternoon swimming around the reefs off Shell Beach. I would walk up the hills of town in the afternoon. The afternoon sunlight turned the white houses with their red roofs orange and the ocean a purple blue.

We moved fairly quickly toward Antigua and stopped at Nevis for three days, touring old sugar plantations now in ruins. One plantation, Golden Rock, had wild monkeys running around the trails. They came from Africa 200 years ago. India was absorbed by the stone ruins of the slave quarters, said to be haunted at night by the ghosts of the slaves. They lived and worked in horrible conditions……a reason to haunt.

Now we are in Antigua- lots of boat work, school work and food.

~ Hadley

PS - On the way down, we passed Montserrat ---- still throwing up dense ash after the lava flow in 1997.

On to February

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