January 24, 2007 - Roseau, Dominica

Last night while still in Pourtsmouth, Sten woke me up with calls of "Get up on deck!" As I grabbed something to throw on, I tried to figure out if (a) he was calling me to come see a meteor shower, (b) something was wrong with the boat, or (c) we were being boarded. I hit the decklights as I came up on deck figuring that if it was the latter, I'd throw some light on the situation. It turned out that a catamaran had dragged down on us and Sten was holding them off our bow with a fender. After that we decided we’d had enough of Portsmouth and headed down the coast.

We pulled into Mero, as a lunch anchorage, and went to see if we could dink up the Layou river. There was a sand bar blocking the entrance, so we pulled the dinghy over the narrowest bit of beach to the river mouth. We motored up the river a bit, but a quickly became too shallow, so we ended up paddling a ways. By “we” I mean Sten paddled and I rode on the bow looking for all the world like Cleopatra. The current was against us, so we only made it a little ways before turning the dinghy around and heading back to the river mouth. As we were approaching, some fishermen were running the sand bar. We paid attention to their path, and watched the sets to pick a good time to go for it. No worries. The dinghy dock at Mero is out of commission, so we moved on down to Roseau.

Roseau is a very steep anchorage, so we decided to pay for a mooring for the night. We tied up and went into town to try to arrange a rental car for the next day. We were followed for a ways by a very persistent beggar and several guys loitering in doorways offered to sell us pot. Roseau is the most run down town that we have been in so far and it started to feel quite creepy as the streets emptied out as twilight fell. After striking out on the rental car we came back to Mata’irea to find ourselves swinging into a boat that had been put on the mooring next to ours while we were gone. Luckily, the boat boy that manages these moorings monitors his radio, and we quickly moved to another mooring.