Last anchorage in Guadeloupe

At our last anchorage in Guadeloupe. I expected the smoke from the volcano in Montserrat to give us a nice sunset later.

Here's a 360 degree view of the anchorage:

  

and here's the sunset, with Montserrat on the right and Scrumpy on the left (a bit hard to see).

Unfortunately, as idyllic as this anchorage looks, it wasn't as great as we'd hoped. Amongst miles of coral reefs in a marine park, we expected the best snorkelling. There were coral heads still standing tall, but they were mostly dead and covered in algae. The sea floor was littered with broken dead coral branches. There were some beautiful fish still, but against the backdrop of the almost uniformly brown coral, it was difficult to extract much pleasure from amongst the devastation. The lack of any new growth anywhere suggests that the damage wasn't caused by some local phenomenon from which the reef is recovering. I guess the warming of the water or the increase in acidity is likely to be the cause.

A few snaps - leaving Martinique

As I'm doing a terrible job of keeping this blog alive with updates of recent voyages, I thought I'd at least post some pics. We are currently in the north of Guadeloupe, having sailed St Lucia, Martinique and Dominica.

Here are some snaps a friend took, as we left Martinique.