Dalton W. Williams
Isle De Saints is a small group islands just south of Guadeloupe and though no check-is or check-out is possible, arriving from another country does not seam to cause a problem if you fly the Q flag and then check-in later in Guadeloupe.
Isle De Saints is a quiet place to relax for a few days and sample the wonderful food from the Bask region of France in the local restaurants. For me it is also a place to do some catching up writing before sailing on to Antigua for race week.
Gretchen and I wanted a quiet evening to unwind and having remembered the discussion at Alex's birthday party about Monty Python, I took the dinghy and borrowed a Monty Python movie from Gallant. I had never seen a Monty Python movie and wanted to find out what all of the discussion was about... The movie was ... well, British... A parity about the life of Christ which I though was in pretty poor taste. So I guess I am not a fan of Monty Python. Oh well...
Gretchen and I
ventured into town the next day. The small village here is very picturesque and
quite clean compared to many places in the Caribbean. We enjoyed sitting in the small park for an hour
people watching before going to a restaurant for lunch. It was the best French
food I have had. The French population here is largely from the Bask region of
France. As the island was never involved in the slave trade, there are only a
few blacks on the island.
With
the heritage here of fishermen living on the north
coast of France, you can just imagine how wonderful my lunch of Wahoo (fish) in a cream sauce with saffron rice
was. Excellent! Gretchen had Gaspatio and a Greek Salad and we shared a bottle
of rosé wine with ice cream for dissert. The ice cream was three small scoops
of your choice of flavors. 
I picked Vanilla, Banana, and Citron (lemon).
With excellent food there had to be a wonderful view and there was, out across
the bay framed by a large tree. And being on Isle Des Saints, a tree must
have it's iguana sitting on a branch. This tree had several sleeping and
paying absolutely no attention to the guest.
Later in the afternoon, Gretchen rescued Brenda from Willow while I helped John work on his generator engine. We finally got it running. I enjoy every opportunity to learn more about the systems on boats and to learn about diesel engines. This afternoon was the first time I had actually bled air out of an injector system. There is no doubt that I will some day have to do it again on Quietly, so learning it today was great. But tomorrow morning will be the real test if we solved the problem. If the engine starts after sitting all night, it will be a good sign.
For dinner tonight after that wonderful lunch, I baked two potatoes for supper. The potatoes were from Montserrat and the butter was from New Zealand... Talk about dinner coming from opposite corners of the world! {laughing} After the big lunch, just the baked potato for supper was great.
We
spent another two days here, just relaxing with friends, another wonderful lunch
in town at another restaurant where there were only five tables, and a day on
which we made a day sail for several hours. I highly recommend a visit to
Isle Des Saints.
We had planned to sail north about mid morning but there was a huge thunderstorm between Isle de Saints and Guadeloupe so I started reading a new book waiting for the rain to stop. A little after noon the rain stopped and we picked up the anchor and headed north.