We had just left Codrington and paid a taxi driver to bring us back to Cocoa Point on a very bumpy dirt road and Customs and Immigration was scheduled to close before I could get their. When I called the taxi driver he assured me that he could arrange Custom and Immigration to stay open longer which he subsequently did. I returned in time to watch our last sunset with Ed and Cheryl and prepare for the trip the next day. The passage to Gustavia on St. Barth was 5 hours in with a 5 ft. following wind and sea. Although our chart plotter had saved our "trail" in we waited until 0900 hours to have good visibility to make our way back through the reefs and coral heads.
The most expensive real estate in the Caribbean is on St. Barthelemy, and the most magnificent town with the best example of Caribbean Architecture is Gustavia. Like Terre de Haut in Les Saintes St. Barth has poor soil and as a result there were never any plantations. A French colony firmly established a foot hold on the Island in 1659 when 100 French Protestants, who had fled Normandy and Brittany in France because of persecution by French Catholics, resettled on St. Barth. The natural port known today as Gustavia, has always been the Islands principal asset.
Soon after the colony was established it was attracting pirates to have their ships restocked and repaired. In 1784 King Louis XVI of France gave St. Barth to his friend King Gustav III of Sweden. The Swedish had no other possession in the New World and St. Barth is the only Caribbean Island with a Swedish heritage. The Swedes took their responsibility for St. Barthelemy (named after Christopher Columbus' younger brother) seriously. They renamed the port in honor of their King, Port Gustavia, and turned it into a free port. They built roads and constructed three forts for defense. In 1878 France bought the Island back from the Swedish and it has remained under French control ever since.
Everyone that we had talked with about taking our boat to Gustavia all had the same observation, "the anchorage is crowded and rolling". We heard advise that if we anchored in this spot or in that spot we would get less roll. After looking at this spot and that spot I think "the anchorage is crowed and rolling". With only deeper water left it took us three tries to get a rolling spot where we would not swing into the shore or someone else. We had east wind and sea conditions. The problem was not the swell it was the constant pleasure, work boat, and ferry traffic from St. Martins only 6 nm away. We left our rolling boat to visit Gustavia.
This most charismatic French Caribbean Town's charm is enhanced by by the beautiful super yachts that were stern tied to its quay wall. The price of this dockage assures that only the most expensive tie up here. The south end of the harbor was reserved for smaller day boats. Here it felt more like a high end fishing village. Where the boutiques in Le Bourg were fashionable, those in Gustavia were at the cutting edge of style. Most of the restaurants viewed parts of the charismatic and charming Gustavia scene but in other ways were more like the cutting edge restaurants in Beverly Hills, which cater to the same international upscale audience. Although there were lots cars in Gustavia, many upscaled european cars, there were also the motor scooters we had seen in Le Bourg, here mostly driven by the young. The atmosphere was alive, vibrant, international, fashionable, and expensive. It was not hard to understand why this was the place to be and to be seen.
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