We have had the privilege of cruising through Guadeloupe twice now, and it never fails to charm our socks off. (Not that any of us wear socks anymore.)

Our first time through was last summer as we made our way down to Grenada from St Martin. We were buddy boating at the time with our friends on Bobin, a British family with two girls roughly Ian and Rowan’s age.

The passage south from St Martin was one of our easier passages that season in terms of wind angle, and we were finally able to get in some significant sailing! Unfortunately it was very squally and a particularly bad one hit unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Neal was on watch while I was asleep down below, and I woke to the sound of one of the jib sheet shackles pounding back and forth on the deck. I’ve experienced this sound before and knew immediately what causes it…lack of tension due to the need to furl the sail in high winds and not having enough hands to both furl and keep enough tension on the sheet. I rushed upstairs to pouring rain, big waves, 30kt winds, and lighting strikes in the distance. Often squalls come with calmer seas so the waves were a surprise, and a bit scary due to their angle on our beam. Our friends on Bobin were a few miles ahead of us and right in the middle of the lightning strikes!

Overall it was one of our scarier passages, and Bobin recalls it as their scariest yet, but we emerged mostly unscathed. We did somehow lose one of our battens in the main sail, which made it inoperable all the way until Martinique where we could get a new one.

Once we arrived in Guadeloupe we parked ourselves in a little bay outside of the town of Deshaies. The anchoring was quite difficult here and it took us several tries to find a spot, but once we got settled we could’ve stayed forever. Deshaies is an adorable little town with an amazing French bakery right off the dinghy dock and a great beach where we spent many evenings hanging out with our friends while the kids chased crabs. There is a fun walk up the river right in town where we spent a wonderful day swimming and floating in tubes.

We rented a car for a day and went to the zoo, which has a neat canopy tour with rope bridges, a giant anteater, and some very friendly lemurs. We also explored a nearby waterfall and spent another day soaking in the stream. Deshaies has a fun botanical garden nearby with a free shuttle that we also had a great time at! The boys particularly enjoyed feeding the animals.

After mainland Guadeloupe, we hopped down to Les Saintes to meet up with our friends on Kaia and Alliance. We all grabbed mooring balls in a little bay and spent our days snorkeling off the boat, exploring the cute town, and hanging out on the beach in the evenings.

On our second trip through Guadeloupe we were making our way north instead of south, so we took advantage of the wind angle from Martinique and sailed to Marie Galante first. Marie Galante is a round, flat little island south of Guadeloupe and east of Les Saintes that we had wanted to visit before, but it was too much upwind sailing from where we were to comfortably get to.

We knew before we even finished our sail that we had made a good decision. The water was Bahamas blue, and the beaches were some of the prettiest we’ve seen, with powdery white sand and lots of big shade trees along the back. We came up alone, but within 24 hours 4 other kid boats that we had met previously descended on our little bay! We spent almost a week there with perfect weather, the kids playing daily on paddle boards and at the beach together. One day they decided to play “Pirates,” which involved all the kids getting on paddleboard and canoes and going around to the different boats anchored in the bay demanding snacks! Neal and I met them with our water cannons (and then cookies)…pirates have to earn their snacks on Zia!

Eventually we started running out of food and needed to continue on to mainland Guadeloupe. We visited a couple favorite spots from the last time there, including the hot river in Bouillant (which unfortunately wasn’t hot this time) and a few days in Deshaies. We also made several stops in places we didn’t have time for last time around, including an amazing French fort and some of the best snorkeling we’ve done so far off of Pigeon Island in the Reserve Costeau. Not only were there tons of fish, but we saw the biggest variety of coral we’ve seen, possibly even more than Culebra!

We spent nearly a month in Guadeloupe on our second time through, only leaving because of the need to be in Puerto Rico by the beginning of March. Guadeloupe remains one of our favorite islands, and I’m sure we’ll squeeze it in at least once more before we leave the Caribbean!