December 25, 2006, Ile Fourche

We spent Christmas day reading and swimming. Sten hiked to the peak to check out the windward side. His descriptions of the view and the birds soaring below him made me wish that I had torn my head out of my book long enough to go with him. As he described the number of boats anchored around Gustavia Harbor I had trouble fathoming it, and I wondered where we would find room to anchor.

In the afternoon I snorkeled along the submerged walls of the crater. The beauty here is stark. The reward for your explorations isn’t pretty colorful corals and fish, rather it is a vision of the powerful and unforgiving seismic forces that created this little island.


For dinner we grilled up fish steaks and served them with a mango and black bean salad. There was meant to be avocado in the salad, but we didn’t have any that were ripe.

We both love to cook. The catch 22 of our situation is that we have all the time in the world to read cookbooks (we have more than a dozen with us) and a reasonably functional galley (despite the challenges of the easy bake oven), but we are usually either no where near a grocery when we realize that we don’t have all the ingredients necessary to make the recipe that seems most tempting to us, or if we do have a grocery near by, it doesn’t have the ingredient that we’re looking for (be it something as exotic as lemongrass or mundane as half ‘n half or red onions) in stock. So we’re forced to be creative.

We spent the evening watching the moon rise and talking - a fantastic wide ranging dialogue about the heavens and man’s relationship with them through the ages.