Simpson Bay & the Lagoon Sint Maarten

We departed English Harbour at 2155 on Boxing Day for the 90nm passage to Gustavia, St Barthelemy (St Barths). Our original plan, before we had spent so long in Antigua, had been to spend a couple of weeks visiting some or all of Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, Sint Eustatius (Statia) and Saba before heading to Sint Maarten/St Martin.  However, the forecast of strong winds and northerly swells meant that most of the anchorages in those islands would be uncomfortable verging on untenable and, with time marching on, our plans to be in Cuba in February and Nassau in late March meant that we wanted to be making progress west and north.  So we thought that we’d try St Barths, which we also hadn’t visited in early 2018.  Clearly, though, we’ll just have to come back again in order to ‘do’ Montserrat et al.

St Barths ahead highlighted by one of many rainbows we saw that morning

We had a good overnight sail to the northwest.  The wind was from the east or east-southeast starting at about 12kts and rising to around 20kts by morning.  As daylight arrived so did the showers and squalls and we arrived off St Barths reefed down and wet but quite enjoying the succession of rainbows which added a touch of colour to a very blue and grey scene.

Approaching the anchorage off Gustavia, St Barths

But we were uncomfortable with the anchorage off Gustavia in the conditions in which we arrived and which were only forecast to get brisker.  The anchorage was very busy, with the most sheltered spaces already taken by anchored yachts or moorings or too shallow for us.

The busy anchorage off Gustavia, St Barths.  Though the pictures don’t make the sea state look unreasonable, it was surprisingly choppy and rolly.  Getting the engine onto the dinghy would have been a challenge, and living and sleeping in the roll would have been uncomfortable

We had a look at Anse du Colombier at the northwest end of the island too, conscious that if we anchored there we would need to dinghy the 2 miles back to Gustavia to check in – apparently there is no overland route.  There was space enough but it was already very windy with the wind being funnelled through a gap in the hills and the wind was only due to rise.  All things considered, we decided to head to Simpson Bay in Sint Maarten.  We thought that the bay would be better sheltered than the anchorage off Gustavia and, if it wasn’t, we could always go into the Lagoon.  Or we could try Marigot Bay on the French side.

So that’s what we did, arriving at 1520hrs on Thursday 27 December.  The anchorage in Simpson Bay was also rather full but we sneaked right up into the eastern end of the bay, almost exactly where we had anchored with Charlotte back in April, and found a BV-sized space just outside the moorings.

Low cloud, heavy rain and a building swell

Friday 28 December brought low cloud and heavy rain.  We stayed on board for the morning doing chores which, for me, meant starting on wiring in the new and improved regulator that had come with the replacement DuoGen.  As ever, it was a pig of a job involving emptying all of the machinery space and then, inevitably, needing to get to spares hidden under the bunks I had stacked everything on.  It took the best part of 2 days to get the job complete.  In the afternoon Nicky took the dinghy ashore to try to find a Digicel shop.  The Digicel sim card that we had bought in Antigua, and which we had been told would work across the islands, was not working.  She discovered that there is no Digicel shop on the Dutch side, though there is on the French side.  However, the afternoon was wearing on and she reckoned that the shop would be closed by the time she found it, so she scoped out the buses and returned to BV.  By the time she got back, the swell in Simpson Bay had built quite considerably.  There was a bridge lift at 1600hrs for vessels inbound to the (flat but windy) lagoon so we took the opportunity and moved inside.

Anchored inside the lagoon (Dutch side)…..eventually!

It was an eventful move into the lagoon. We decided to join the spread out group of anchored and moored yachts on the Dutch side, turned left out of the channel and promptly went firmly aground on a mudbank.  It took a verylong time to get off.  In the end, we launched the dinghy and I used it as a tug to push the bow whilst Nicky used nearly full power in reverse to try to drag BV off the mud. And once we got off that bank, almost immediately we ended up on another, despite being almost exactly on our chartplotter’s ‘snail trail’ at a point where we had been afloat!  It was all rather embarrassing.  Eventually, we got off and into clear water, found another route into the anchorage that was deep enough for us, dropped anchor and retreated below.

The Causeway Bridge open for boat movements from the
Dutch side of the lagoon to the French side (or vice versa)

It wasn’t a pretty debrief.  One of the sketch maps in Doyle’s Guide shows that the lagoon is very shallow at the point that we went aground and, when we put our Navionics chart plotter into ‘fish ‘n’ chips’ mode (where it shows very detailed depth contours from crowd-sourced echo-sounder/sonar returns) we could also see the bank.  Unfortunately, the chartplotter’s normal view did not indicate any particular shallows…… Lesson learned (or just identified?)

The following day (Saturday 29 December) Nicky headed into Marigot whilst I continued the nearly unequal struggle with the wiring and the regulator.  Meanwhile, Nicky wasn’t faring much better.  She discovered that Digicel in Marigot (part of Digicel.Fr) couldn’t help with our non-functioning Digicel Antigua sim card.  We subsequently discovered that the card we had could not operate outside Antigua and Barbuda and that in order to ‘roam’ we needed a second card, which we should have bought in Antigua, clearly at great expense.  So, Nicky bought us a Digicel.Fr sim card which, she was assured by 3 different Digicel assistants in 2 separate Digicel shops, would operate in any of the Lesser Antilles as well as in Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos, AND which included calls to Europe (as well as to any of the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos) at no additional cost. Fabulous!!  [Ed: but The Tale of the Digicel Faff continues later…….]

New Year’s Eve decorations

We spent New Year’s Eve day, looking at dive kit.  We really enjoy snorkelling but want to spend more time at depth than we can manage on a breath-hold plus doing lots of 4-6m descents and ascents in a snorkelling session of an hour or more plays havoc with balance organs and sinuses.  We’ve loved the diving that we have done and would like to do a lot more, preferably from BV if possible, though in some places, such as Anguilla, this is not an option as you are only allowed to dive with local guides.  So, we had decided to buy the equipment to do this and, being a duty free location, Sint Maarten seemed as good a place as any to look at doing so.

New Year’s Eve fireworks from all around

Superyacht departing the Lagoon – heading off for a better party?

Having mentally spent all our Christmas present allowance and some more, we decided that it would be best to see in the New Year on board BV.  We went the whole hog with decorations [Ed: not exactly – I dangled some lights around in the cockpit!], opened a bottleof wine (vice drinking the usual boxed wine) and ate a lovely meal in the cockpit.  At about 2000hrs one of the superyachts turned its nose up at events in the Lagoon and left on a bespoke opening of the lifting bridge (cost approx US$1000 – someone wanted a good New Year’s party!) but at midnight we enjoyed the multiple fireworks displays that went on all around us.  It was a lovely, low-key evening.

On Tuesday, of course, everything was closed for the Bank Holiday but the next day we were able to confirm our order for dive equipment and collect it a little later that same day.  Better still, the lady who runs the shop gave us a copy of their guide to diving in the Sint Maarten/St Martin and St Barths area. This concentrates on dives that can be achieved from a cruising boat, rather than on those dives to which a dive centre might take customers.  We’d already done some research and had noted the location of most of the sites in the guide but the website information looked quite dated so it was useful to have up-to-date confirmation of which sites were worth visiting.  And with our permit for anchoring in Simpson Bay/the Dutch side of the Lagoon needing renewing on Thursday 3 January, it seemed an ideal opportunity to head around to French St Martin and to try out our new dive kit on some of the dives on that side of the island.

Simpson Bay & the Lagoon, Sint Maarten