We went out on a limb this year and decided to try and find our new cruising friends for New Years Eve. We were lucky enough to have AIS (Automatic Identification System) on our boat as did a couple of our friends. There is an online service at www.marinetraffic.com that allows you to see recent location of AIS enabled boats. It only works sometimes and only when the boat has the equipment on near an AIS base station. We took the chance that our friends were going to stay put for New Years Eve in their current location and set out on the 6 hour journey to the small islands to the east of Guadeloupe. On the map the islands didn’t look very exciting and rather exposed for mooring however there had to be a reason our friends had chosen this place a couple of days earlier. Our risk payed off.

Terre de Bas and Terre de Haut were quite spectacular islands. The mooring required the mandatory use of the provided mooring balls (tie your boat to fixed buoys anchored to the ground) with only a small number of spots available. Anchoring independently was strictly forbidden. There happened to be one open buoy left for us right beside our friends on SV Blue 😉

We got there on New Years Eve about an hour before sunset and just before the festivities were about to begin. Timing is everything! We tied up the dragon and got to work on the New Years festivities. New Year’s Eve on a warm, HUGE sandy beach with palm trees, island breeze with a camp fire under a full moon with friends! How can you go wrong with that? All that was missing were the good friends from back home L

We brought in the new year with a potluck Cruiser style with plenty of rum and sparkly.

Not sure but I think we might have had an out of world check in to the festivities….

The kids ran around the deserted island all evening on New Year’s Eve but on New Year’s Day we had some day travellers from the mainland that we shared the beach with.

On New Year’s Day we got a chance to check out our new Christmas present. A new DJI Mavic Pro Drone. This is a very nice piece of machinery for taking pictures and video from vantage points that are otherwise impossible.

Here is the beach on which we spent New Year’s Eve/Day – Plage De Petite Terre as seen from the drone a few meters up. Our boat is the small one in the back with the blue sail cover. The island beach is right out of a pirate movie! Sand, palm trees and coconuts with a huge and very active reef in front of it providing protection from the surf and lots of sea life to investigate.

We swam all day with the Lemon sharks, Reef sharks, Stingrays and all sorts of other sea life (Yes we swam with the sharks…..). While the sharks were small (between 1 and 2 meters long), the stingrays were large!

Puffer Fish

We had an awesome start to the new year!