7-Day Guadeloupe Sailing Itinerary: Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, the Cousteau Reserve & Deshaies

A Butterfly With No Waist

Look at any Guadeloupe chart and the temptation is obvious: leave Pointe-à-Pitre, sail the south coast and Les Saintes, come up the west side of Basse-Terre to Deshaies, round the north and slip home through the Rivière Salée, the mangrove river between the two wings, at dawn when the bridges open. That loop is in old pilot books, in cruising forums and in our own data until this week. It has not been possible for a masted yacht since January 2013, when the Pont de la Gabarre and the Pont de l'Alliance stopped lifting; their fixed clearance is about 4 m, the north entrance has silted, and the only boats that pass now are dismasted or small motor craft. The roadworks on the Gabarre in January 2026 were repairs to the road, not a return of the openings.

So Guadeloupe is an out-and-back, and once you accept that the week designs itself. The islands off the south — Marie-Galante and Les Saintes — are a reach away in the trade wind and the best two nights of the cruise. The west coast of Basse-Terre is the wind shadowof the mountains: the water is flat, the sailing is fitful and the anchorages at Malendure and Deshaies are the reward. You go up it and you come back down it, and the second passage is different from the first because the calms and the gusts move with the day. The Grande-Terre south coast, behind its reef, is the beginning and the end. What you do not do is anything ambitious on the Atlantic side of either wing, where the reefs are real and the shelter is not.

Before You Slip the Lines

Season. December to May, with the strongest trades from mid-December to late January and the flattest water from February to April. The charter fleets at Marina Bas-du-Fort run from November; hurricane season is June to November.

Clearing in. Guadeloupe is a French département, and clearance for yachts is done online through the demarches-simplifiees.fr “déclaration clearance Antilles” form — before you arrive, if you like. If you cannot, the six ports of entry (Pointe-à-Pitre, Deshaies, Les Saintes, Marie-Galante, Basse-Terre, Saint-François) have clearance computers in approved shops and cafés for a €3–5 admin fee; there are no customs or immigration charges. Starting from the marina, a charter boat is already in. Two things to know: the French islands require you to clear out of one before sailing to another (Dominica and Antigua are foreign countries, with their own fees), and Guadeloupe is EU but not Schengen, so non-EU crew count their days here separately.

The buoy state. More than anywhere else in this series, Guadeloupe is a place where you tie up rather than anchor: Les Saintes is an organised mooring field with anchoring prohibited in the zones; Deshaies has a buoy field and a no-anchor zone; the Cousteau Reserve and Petite-Terre are buoys-only; the Grand Cul-de-Sac Marin lagoon is National Park buoys only. The fees are modest — €10 to €25 a night — and the buoys are mostly well kept, but a buoy is not a reason to switch the alarm off. It is a reason to set it to 40 m, centred where the buoy is, so that the one night in a hundred when a strop parts or a sinker walks you are told. Carry a strong bridle with chafe gear: the Saintes channel has swell in it.

Every Stop on One Screen

Three of the seven nights are on a buoy, which is the Guadeloupe pattern. Read the “open to” column for the other four and notice that every one of them is open to the west: these are lee-shore anchorages in the literal sense, tucked under the island with the trade wind blowing off the land and nothing between you and Mexico the other way. They are flat until the wind goes round, which in the winter it rarely does — and when a northerly swell arrives from a distant Atlantic low, Deshaies and Malendure become untenable in an hour and Les Saintes is where you want to be.

Day 1 — Pointe-à-Pitre to Marie-Galante (20 nm)

Out through the Passe à Colas and straight across: twenty miles south-east on a close reach in open water, the first and sportiest passage of the week, with the trade wind on the bow and Marie-Galante's flat round profile — the island is a limestone pancake ringed by sugar cane and three rum distilleries — rising slowly ahead. Aim for Saint-Louis on the north-west coast, the island's cruising anchorage: a long curve of beach, 4–8 m of sand with good holding, sheltered from north round to south-east and open to the west, a quiet fishing town with a ferry pier and a couple of bars. There are free moorings off the beach that nobody maintains; anchor. Hire a scooter or a car in the morning if you want the distilleries — Bielle, Poisson (Père Labat) and Bellevue — and the windward cliffs at Gueule Grand Gouffre. Grand-Bourg, the main town to the south, has the port of entry and a rolly anchorage; Saint-Louis is the better night.

Day 2 — Marie-Galante to Les Saintes (17 nm)

West-south-west with the wind on the quarter, the easy sail of the week, into the Saintes channel from the east with the Pain de Sucre and the fort on the skyline. Les Saintes are eight islands, two inhabited, settled by Breton and Norman fishermen in the seventeenth century and still recognisably theirs; Terre-de-Haut and its village, the Bourg, is the loveliest small town in the French Antilles and knows it. Call it a mooring, not an anchorage: since 2011 the whole bay has been an organised field of about 82 buoys in three zones — off the Bourg, at Îlet à Cabrit and at Pain de Sucre — and anchoring inside the zones is prohibited. Pick up a buoy off the village in 4–12 m, fill in the request form, and pay per night to the Les Saintes Multiservices boat that comes round morning and evening; the rate goes by length (roughly €10–16 for a typical charter yacht), falls after seven days and the maximum stay is seven. Anchoring is tolerated only outside the zones when the buoys are full. Walk up to Fort Napoléon before the heat, eat a tourment d'amour from the women at the ferry dock, and expect ferry wash and a little channel swell in the night.

Day 3 — Around the Saintes (3–6 nm)

A day you sail almost nowhere and would not trade. Îlet à Cabrit across the bay has buoys, the ruins of Fort Joséphine and a beach to yourself before the day boats; Terre-de-Bas, the other inhabited island across the channel, has Grande Anse and a village that sees a fraction of the visitors. Then round to Pain de Sucre for the night: the buoys lie under the 160 m sugarloaf in 5–12 m over sand, sheltered from north round to south-east, the snorkelling is the best in the archipelago, and the sunset off the headland is the photograph that sells Guadeloupe charters. Anchoring here means outside the yellow buoys in 15–20 m, and only when the field is full; take a buoy. Les Saintes is a port of entry, so if this is the week you carry on to Dominica, twenty miles south, this is where you clear out.

Day 4 — Les Saintes to Malendure (25 nm)

North-west out of the channel, round the tip of Basse-Terre at Vieux-Fort with the capital and the Soufrière above it, and into the lee. The next 25 miles set the tone for the west coast: the trade wind that blew 20 knots in the Saintes channel dies to nothing under the mountains, returns as a bullet down a valley, dies again, and you motor or ghost past a coast that drops straight into 200 m of blue water — the steep-to shore where the honest advice is to stay a quarter of a mile off. Malendure is a black-sand beach lined with dive shops opposite the two Pigeon Islets, which Cousteau put on the map in 1959 and which are now the marine core of the National Park, the Réserve Cousteau. The rules are specific: in the core anchoring is banned under the 2021 park order, you may tie only to the park buoys, one boat per buoy, vessels up to 8 m, by day, with no overnight stay; the fuchsia buoys belong to the dive operators. A 40-foot charter yacht therefore anchors on sand at Malendure just outside the core in 5–12 m — the boundary is marked, and the park boat will tell you if you are wrong — and goes in by dinghy or with a dive boat. The reef has had a hard decade of warm water and run-off and the park is capping visits; go early, before the tour boats, and touch nothing.

Day 5 — Malendure to Deshaies (10 nm)

Ten miles up the lee to the north-west corner of Basse-Terre, past Pointe-Noire, to Deshaies: a deep bay between forested headlands with a fishing village at its head, the only really sheltered stop on this coast, a port of entry, and the place every boat bound for Antigua or Montserrat spends its last French night. The bay has changed. Inside the two entrance buoys anchoring is prohibited; there are 32 mooring buoys (four for professionals) at €20–25 a night by length, with the capitainerie planning around 50, and a marked anchoring zone in the northern part of the bay outside the channel for those who prefer 5–15 m of excellent sand. Water and fuel are on the quay. The thing Deshaies is known for among sailors is its gusts: the wind comes over the ridge behind the village and falls into the bay in violent, shifting squalls that can reach 30–40 knots on an otherwise settled night, which is why a bay that is idyllic in the afternoon has a reputation for boats dragging at two in the morning. Set for it.

Day 6 — Deshaies to Basse-Terre (23 nm)

The turn. Back down the coast you came up, and it is not the same coast: the calms are in different places, the bullets come off different valleys, and the anchorages you passed — Pointe-Noire, Vieux-Habitants, Anse à la Barque — are worth a swim stop on the way. The night is off the capital, Basse-Terre, an open roadstead in 4–10 m of mud and sand under the Soufrière, with the small Marina de Rivière Sens a mile south at Gourbeyre if you want a berth, a port of entry, and a town that most charter crews never see. It is the least beautiful anchorage of the week and the most interesting afternoon ashore. If the roadstead is rolling — it is open to the whole western arc — carry on round to Les Saintes, eight miles further, and take a buoy for a third night.

Day 7 — Basse-Terre to Îlet du Gosier (26 nm)

Round Vieux-Fort into the trade wind again, and the last real passage: 26 miles east and north along the south coast of Basse-Terre, past Trois-Rivières and the Capesterre banana country, across the mouth of the Petit Cul-de-Sac Marin and along the resort coast of Grande-Terre to Îlet du Gosier, a lighthouse islet a mile off Le Gosier with a fringing reef and a sandy channel between it and the shore in 4–8 m — three miles from the marina, which is the point. A swim, a last rum, and the boat back at Bas-du-Fort by nine the next morning without a dawn start.

Why an Anchor Alarm Matters on This Route

Last week's Grenadines itinerary made the case that a boat in a steady trade wind lives on the rim of its circle and needs a tighter alarm than instinct suggests. Guadeloupe's west coast is the opposite case, and the two together are the whole lesson. Here the wind is not steady. In the lee of the Soufrière it is calm for an hour, then a bullet arrives down a valley from the north-east, then the sea breeze fills in from the west in the afternoon, then at night the land breeze and the katabatic gusts come off the ridge — Deshaies at its worst is 40 knots from the east-south-east at 02:00 on a night the forecast called 12. A boat anchored in that does not sit on the rim; it wanders the whole circle, lying to the chain in the calm, drifting over its anchor, sailing round on the sea breeze, and then snatching up to the full length of the rode when the gust hits from a direction the anchor was not set for. That snatch is what breaks anchors out, and it is why Deshaies has its reputation.

The practical difference from the Grenadines is where the danger lies. There, the threat on the circle's edge was the boat behind you. Here it is that the anchor was set by a 12-knot afternoon breeze from the west, and is loaded at 02:00 by 35 knots from the east — a 180-degree reversal at four times the force. Set it properly in the afternoon (back down hard, on more scope than the flat water seems to need), and read the alarm's track before you sleep: a boat that has already been round the circle once in the evening's shifts has shown you the anchor holds from several directions, which is the reassurance a steady-wind anchorage never gives. If the track is a fan on one side only and the forecast has any north in it, that is the night to be on a buoy in Les Saintes. The method is in our guide to why anchors drag, and the scope calculator turns depth and chain into the radius.

Variations: Petite-Terre, 5 Days, or on to Dominica

• Petite-Terre: two uninhabited islets and a turquoise lagoon 10 nm east of Saint-François, a nature reserve with iguanas, lemon sharks and rays. Buoys only — nine white for boats to 10 tonnes and one for 30 tonnes — booked online before you arrive at €20 per boat per day plus €2.50 per person, with 9am–4pm, 4pm–4pm, 4pm–9am or 9am–9am slots; anchoring in the lagoon is forbidden and charters with a professional skipper are not admitted. Swap it for Marie-Galante on day 1 (a 26 nm beat from the marina) or add it as day 8 from a night at Saint-François.
• Five days: Saint-Louis, two nights in Les Saintes, Malendure, Îlet du Gosier — you lose Deshaies and the second pass down the lee and keep the two best nights.
• On to Dominica: clear out at Les Saintes (online or the Bourg computer) and it is 20 nm south to Portsmouth, a different country with its own fees, boat boys and the Indian River. Antigua from Deshaies is 40 nm north — the reason Deshaies is the last French night for so many.

The Bottom Line

A hundred and twenty-four miles, seven nights, two islands you will want to come back to and a coast you sail twice. Guadeloupe is the Caribbean with French plumbing: clearance online for the price of a coffee, buoys where the seabed matters, boulangeries at the dinghy dock, and a rum shop in every anchorage. Forget the Rivière Salée, take the buoys where they exist, anchor well outside the Cousteau core, and give Deshaies the respect its gusts have earned.

And on the nights you are on your own hook under the mountains, set the circle for the whole swing, centre it on the anchor, and let it draw the track while the wind makes up its mind. Every stop on this route is in our Guadeloupe anchorage guide.