No.7 Magical Martinique

After our uneventful sail from Rodney Bay, St Lucia we anchored in Le Marin, Martinique where we met up with Linda and John – Blue Moon. They were anchored in St Anne’s. They had organised the hiring of a car for two days and wondered if we would like to join them. Of course, we did…… so on Monday 19 March we met up with them at the Le Marin Marina and off we went in. Monday was designated as a shopping day.

Linda and John have been sailing up and down the Caribbean for the past 4 years, since we met them in 2014, so they know Martinique well. John drove and took us to the HUGE hardware store where you could get practically anything you wanted. We then went to an amazing sports shop type warehouse, where once again you could find whatever you wanted.

Martinique, in most parts, is lush and green. The countryside is beautiful. I feel that the entire island and its people have a lovely calm and happy disposition about them. The roadways are well maintained for the most part. Lots of sugar cane and banana farms are found all over the island. Sugar – to support the rum distilleries found dotted all over the island.

We drove up the west coast and it was fascinating to see the island and the coast line from a different perspective. We stopped in Saint Pierre for lunch, before going to a beautiful rum distillery called Depaz, where Mel sampled the wares! The rum distillery is situated on the foothill of Mount Pelee overlooking the anchorage and town of St Pierre. The gardens and grounds are quite spectacular and beautifully maintained. The original plantation house is slowly being restored back to its former appearance. We were able to walk around the estate and distillery.

Saint Pierre was one of my favourite destinations when we were sailing in 2014. The anchorage is not the best as we found out again while sailing up north to Guadeloupe (Saturday 31 March 2018).

The town was once referred to as the Paris of the Caribbean back in the 1800’s when Gauguin spent time living and working on his creative and artist talent.  The volcano of Mount Pelee looms above St Pierre and in 1902 (8 May) it erupted killing over 30, 000 people. It is reported that only two people survived the eruption, a prisoner – Cyparis, who was in a stone prison cell, for murder AND Leon Leandre, a cobbler. There were thirteen ships in the bay at the time, with only one able to survive the vengeance and ferocity of Mount Pelee’s destruction. In the harbour, a few of the wrecks are used as dive sights.

St. Pierre

The town has an interesting and fascinating appeal to it as many of the ‘new’ buildings have been built with some reference to or part of the old buildings before the volcanic eruption. Many of the cobbled streets, are the original ones.

After the rum distillery, we drove north east to Morne Rouge. We had been here before in 2014 when we were keen and eager to climb to the top of Mount Pelee but unfortunately were not able to due to the cloud cover.

We were now driving along the east Atlantic side of Martinique, winding our way through the many picturesque towns like Marigot, St Marie, Trinite, Robert Francious and Vauclin – all the way back to Marin and St Anne.

After spending a few days anchored at Le Marin, which was becoming increasingly crowded, we moved to St Anne and enjoyed what this attractive and charming town has to offer – the bakeries are amazing.

While we were in St Anne’s, we took the public transport bus to Le Marin and spent some time once again enjoying the sights of Le Marin. We have noticed that quite a few new developments have taken place since 2014: New dinghy docks, the boat yard looks as if it’s had a whole new facelift – cement throughout the boatyard – no sand! At the boat yard is a second-hand shop which Mel was eager to revisit.

Martinique is the type of place where one can easily just choose to stay….. there were many days Mel and I would say, “We will be leaving to sail north on Sunday….. then Monday……”. We eventually lifted our anchor leaving Blue Moon once again and lovely St Anne’s for St Pierre on Saturday 1 April 2018.

We sailed passed Diamond Rock again….. Diamond Rock played a significant part between Napoleon and Nelson. We had a good sail up to St Pierre.

Diamond Rock

I was eager to stay in St Pierre as the last time we were anchored there in September 2014, the Gaugin museum was closed, and I was keen to see it, if possible. We arrived in St Pierre just before lunch – struggled to find a decent spot as it was full. There are a limited number of decent places to anchor despite it being a large bay, as the drop off is quite sudden, plus a large amount of the area is reserved for the ferries, the fishing boats and diving sites. You must go quite close to land to find a suitable depth which we eventually did. Very seldom do we drop anchor and leave the boat as we like to wait and check to see from the anchor watch (part of the AIS) how the anchor is fairing.  

We had a quick lunch, checked the details of the Gaugin museum and where we could ‘check out ‘from Martinique and then took the dinghy down to go on land.

Checking in and out of the French islands is so easy as it is all done via the computer. Certain outlets/restaurants/ internet cafes have a designated computer with the customs and immigrations ‘forms’ which all you have to do is fill in, submit/save and print – this varies in cost, depending on the outlet between 2 – 5 EU.

We caught a taxi to the Gaugin museum, as I was concerned that we would not arrive before 4.30pm when the last entries are allowed admission into the museum.

It’s a small museum but still very interesting about Gaugin’s life and time spent in Panama,

Martinique and later in Tahiti, where he died.  The explanations were in French and English. They

explained his various paintings and where he painted them, often with significant features like Mount Pelee in the background and the beach at Carbet, where he lived and where the museum is situated. I was extremely happy to have had this opportunity to eventually visit the museum (4 years later after trying the first time!).

http://www.paulgauguinmartinique.fr/

http://caribya.com/martinique/musee.gauguin/

After the museum we found the place where we could check out of Martinique, had supper at the restaurant Mel took me for my Birthday celebration back in 2014 and went back to the boat to get ready for our sail to Guadeloupe – Ilse des Saintes, via Portsmouth, Dominica in the morning - Easter Sunday.

Martinique is a destination that one could easily return to, time and time again as it is a welcoming place and there are many different aspects to it that would appeal to lots of different tastes. I was very happy to have had the opportunity to visit Martinique once again and quite sad to see her shore disappearing off into the distance as we headed for Dominica.

Until next time when I’ll write from Guadalupe about the routine I have observed in anchorages.

Bye for now. Keep well and safe.

Mel and Caryn

sv Passages

If you want to see where we are – go to:

www.marinetraffic.com

top right corner – search for Passages with the Australian flag – that’s us!

Depaz - the Rum distillery

 

Leaving St Pierre,Martinique - Mel taking down the French flag

 Mount Pelee is in the background.

No. 6 “Always be prepared”

In today’s world, one becomes extremely dependant on electronics and computers to help you to ‘navigate’ (excuse the pun), your way through life. We are forever checking our emails, downloading information related to whatever topic we are interested in. It is the same when sailing – yes, we have found it more of a challenge this time around to get free Wi-Fi as there seems to be more and more ‘free’ mobile phone bundles available for the Caribbean, particularly catering for the US sailors/market. When sailing, one aspect you must always have in the back of your mind is to be as prepared as possible for every eventuality, for example when your electronics on the boat stop working.

When we left beautiful Bequia on Friday 16 March, we noticed that the auto pilot was low on power, so we hand steered for a while until the sun was shining on the solar panels and charging the batteries.

I need to go back a bit…… taking Passages out of storage, Mel realised that we would need to buy a whole new bank of batteries. He would love to get some lithium iron phosphate batteries; however, they are quite expensive. Since we are having to put Passages back into storage and on the hard again in a few months’ time, he thought we would just get some “ordinary” batteries for this sailing season, which we purchased in Trinidad. After a few weeks of sailing, we noticed that one of the five new batteries was not charging to its full capacity, but we were confident that this would eventually rectify itself.

Back to our sail…. Everything was going well, we had planned to “yellow flag” in Rodney Bay, St Lucia for the Friday night and then continue to sail the rest of the way to Le Marin, Martinique on the Saturday morning. We were sailing along, reminiscing about the time we had spent in St Lucia with Fata Morgana (Ivo, Mira and Maya) in 2014. As we were passing the Pitons – this was about 3.30pm, Mel was downstairs when the auto pilot went off and the boat was now going the wrong way. I was up on deck and took the wheel, but we saw that the plot charter, depth, AIS, radio and wind indictor were all off. We tried starting the engine to see if that would help – no engine!

Mel went to the main switch board to see what was happening, while I hand steered. We tried the engine again…. Thankfully it started. I continued to hand steer while Mel went downstairs to check what was causing the lack of power and the electronics to work.

We still had approximately 16 nmiles/ 3 hours of sailing to go until we would be outside of Rodney Bay. The one consolation was we knew Rodney Bay well, after spending over two weeks anchored there in 2014, PLUS it’s over 1 nmiles wide and other than the ‘Barrel of Beef’ at the south entrance to the harbour, there wasn’t much to concern ourselves. However, the light was fading fast and without any navigation instruments and lights, we couldn’t see or be seen.

Thankfully we had paper charts, torches and the dinghy starboard and port lights to indicate to other boats in which direction we were heading.

Our main radio was not working either – we had literally disappeared from the face of the earth. Luckily, we had our hand held/mobile radio, so when we were at the entrance to Rodney Bay harbour, Mel put out a radio call to anyone in Rodney Bay to come back to us. This was about 7.30pm now and one aspect that is quite amazing and terrifying is how one dimensional everything looks at night. Here we were in the middle of the entrance to Rodney harbour, we could see lots of lights from the land/beach/ harbour area, plus the anchor lights of boats but it was tricky to judge the distances.

A yacht called “Why Not” responded to our call and gave us some advice on where to aim for or anchor. They could see us approaching and directed us. Mel went onto the bow with our powerful torch and directed me on where I should be steering the boat. We didn’t know the depth of where we were as our depth sounder wasn’t working either, but from the paper charts we knew the approximate depths of Rodney Bay. When we thought we were at a reasonable depth and place to anchor and away from other boats, Mel had to manually let the anchor out. It was such a relief to hear the clank, clank of the anchor chain being let out. Phew!

We didn’t have our AIS with our anchor watch on, so Mel let out a tremendous amount of chain. Thankfully the wind was down and there were no boats behind us so IF, in the unlikely event of us dragging, we would be dragged out to the wide, open ocean.

This was now after 8.00pm – we were grateful to be safe and sound anchored in Rodney Bay AND I could eventually put the kettle on to have a much-needed cup of tea (an electrical solenoid controls the gas, so no power, no gas), although it was tempting to have something stronger, we knew we still had to have our wits about us as everything was not as secure as we would have liked to have been. Mel went to work trying to find out what was going on with our power source.

By 9.30pm, we had power back on as Mel had solved the problem or, so we thought.

We slept reasonably well after an eventful day/evening – Mel checked the power – all good, so we contacted ‘Why Not’ to say a HUGE ‘Thank you’ for assisting us and off we sailed to Le Marin, Martinique, where we had a great sail averaging about 5 – 6 knots. There were lots of boats heading south, while we were heading north.

At the entrance to the Le Marin channel, with St Anne to our starboard, we tried to contact ‘Blue Moon’. I could see them on our AIS but unfortunately, I didn’t notice that they were anchored in St Anne, as I was fascinated by this HUGE yellow tanker type looking boat called ‘Big Lift’. On board were all yachts/boats for delivery to Europe!

Apparently this is what some people do. They put their yacht on board a HUGE tanker/boat like ‘Big Lift’ and Big Lift transports the yacht back to the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic and the crew/owner picks it up in which ever port and then continues sailing around the Med.  The reverse happens as well – Big Lift transports the yachts to the Caribbean, ready for the sailing season (November to May) here.

Back to Le Marin….. the anchorage was quite full, but we found a great spot on the north side of the anchorage, in a similar position to where we were the last time. We contacted Blue Moon, who according to their last WhatsApp message, were heading for Le Marin, however after driving around the Le Marin anchorage they decided to head back to St Anne.

In Le Marin, we were relieved to be anchored close to where we had access to lots of marine services that could possibly help us with our power issue.

Fast forward 2 weeks – we are now in St Anne after spending 5 days in Le Marin. It was becoming far too crowded, so we headed for St Anne where we met up with Blue Moon again.  St Anne is another HUGE anchorage, a bit more exposed as we have had a few rollie nights since we have been here. The holding is reasonable as there are sandy spots (as well as rocky and grass spots), plus the depths are great! With an average depth of 5m for quite a distance out, so many boats can anchor quite safely there and not feel on top of each other like in Le Marin.

While we have been here, we have enjoyed going for walks in and around the town – there is a climb to the top of the hill where there are the 14 stations of the cross. We have caught the bus back to Le Marin, enjoyed doing some shopping and some lunch there. We have done some never ending maintenance and cleaning of the stainless steel, plus Mel has also been monitoring the power.

The power problem revolved around the ‘cheap’ batteries having wingnuts for connecting the cables and one of the nuts had worked itself slightly loose, probably through vibration. This resulted the cables heating up (high resistance with large current supplied) instead of charging the batteries. Although the other four battery connections were good, the single poor connection starved all the batteries of energy.

Now that the power issue has been resolved we will be sailing up north to St Pierre on Easter Saturday. We shall miss St Anne as it is a lovely quaint town, with great patisseries and boulangeries – the bakeries are so good! Life is easy here as there are grocery shops and the morning fruit and veggie markets. We also found good Wi-Fi, always an added bonus! However, we need to get going if we intend doing all that we hope to achieve before heading back to our home base.

I have put some photos below of some of the interesting sights we have seen while sitting in our cockpit, enjoying the anchorage.

Until our next update – all about our lovely island drive around Martinique - keep well and safe.

Mel and Caryn

sv Passages

If you want to see where we are – go to:

www.marinetraffic.com

top right corner – search for Passages with the Australian flag – that’s us!

 

Diamond Rock at sunset.

A fisherman casting his net close to our boat.

Windsurfers having a great time.