St Barth

The amazing part about St.It was really crysta Barth was the water quality. It was really crystal clear, even at the anchorage right in front of Gustavia harbour.

When i cleared in i immediately realized that i am in France. The keyboard layout is so strange and you can save your data, you have to always type it in from scratch. Even on the same PC when checking out. I really wonder if they store it at all or if the only use the printouts, since they even make a photocopy of it!!!
For 2 nights at the anchorage using no mooring but our anchor they also charged 30 EUR. Right, that is 15 EUR per night. The good part is that the surrounding of the harbour is pretty nice. You have good dinghy docks and a place to properly throw away your garbage, etc.
The stores around are fancy and expensive and so is the food. You caneasily pay 15 EUR for a pizza or 16EUR for a salad of tomato and mozzarella.
The bakery behind the post office makes great bread, not only baguette but also wood oven baked bread, bread with cheese and other things. Very good and they open 5.30. YEAH :-)

You can easily walk to shell beach and on the evenings (at least on sundays) people meet in the brazil bar directly at the beach. This beach really has no normal sand but mostly small shell particles mixed with complete shells.

There is a yellow "Stay out" zone, which is not marked on most maps but it only protects and undersea cable from anchoring. So you can still anchor there and then walk to Gustavia (10minutes) from the beach.

The anchorage in Gustavia can get very rolly and so does the water in the port. We had this in the second night and it was very unpleasant.
Watch the water around you, we saw many turtles swimming around us.

When i checked the anchor the visibilty was more than 20m under water.

There is a shop called American Gourmet where we shopped a few things and then had a nice surprise with the price. A glass of pickles costed 13 EUR and a chocolate 6 EUR. The problem is that not everything is tagged there with a price tag, so be careful.

The other supermarket at the dock is nice, well sorted and well priced but they do not have any shopping bags, so do not forget to bring your own.

About Wifi: Even the french should have wifi coverage soon in this marina. At least it is advertised since more than a year now. In some spots you can use open hotspots from shops or homes but then this is only "half legal". I even heard that many people crack those hotspots that are only WEP encrypted.

I found it amazing that on more "caribbean" islands, like St Lucia you could even find an open and free Wifi spot in the smallest bay, the french islands do not even have it in the big anchorages or harbours.

People were very friendly and helpful and so St Barth is a good stop on the way along the islands.