Weeks 35-36: St. Lucia to Martinique (58nm)

We took our figurative foot off the gas for a week in Rodney Bay to relax after a busy few months. But, soon the sea was calling again and we headed back north to explore more of Martinique, including the capital and a bit of the interior.

Note: Alec left his last post on a bit of cliffhanger. What are our plans for the future? We’re busily working on a ‘2018 in Review + What’s Next’ post where we’ll go into detail about our plans for Serenity First. Look out for that soon!

P.p.s. We’ve updated our photo plugin! Hover over an image to see its caption, and you can now click photos to enlarge them and view the gallery as a slide show.

We spent most of a week at anchor in Rodney Bay and, I’ll be honest, we didn’t do a ton. It was time to decompress from the holidays, the Atlantic crossing, and more than two months of guests aboard. We relished taking the days at a nice, slow pace. But, by the end of the week, we’d regathered our energy and so dingied over to nearby Pigeon Island to explore the fort and hike up the hill. We went early, eager to get there before it got hot, and arrived before the area was technically open. But, no one was around to send us away, so we parked up and headed off. It meant we had the place to ourselves, which was ideal. It’s not a huge site, but the old fort is well preserved and the view from the top is more than worthwhile! That evening, Liv and Elliott sent us to the restaurant Buzz as a very kind gift from their visit, where we gorged on seafood and some particularly delicious banana bread and butter pudding – highly recommended!

St. Lucia had been good to us, but we were ready to start moving again and so upped anchor. We sailed back up to Martinique to the lovely southern anchorage at St. Anne that we’d enjoyed with Ballin and Katherine. This time, the order of the day was insurance. Very exciting, I know. But boat life isn’t all swimming with turtles (much as I might like it be)! I took the bus from there to Le Marin, which had to the final place I wanted to get a quote from before settling the boat insurance for the year. Unfortunately, because of the last couple of years of bad hurricanes, insurance in the Caribbean isn’t cheap, but we wouldn’t be without it. Next year, this is something we’ll start looking into much earlier given how tricky it is to get a good quote – my advice to anyone else coming this way would be: don’t wait till the last minute on this!

After a couple of nice days at the anchorage, which gave us a chance to revisit the excellent ice cream place in town, we were off again to make new tracks. We were keen to check out the capital city of Fort-de-France. You can technically anchor right off the city’s waterfront, but the small anchorage there is right next to the ferry and cruise ship docks – which we surmised might make it uncomfortable and noisy. That didn’t sound fun, so we anchored across the bay in Anse Mitan, where we could still catch a little boat easily over to Fort-de-France. This proved a great shout; because, as our ferry came into the dock, we watched the poor sailing boats at anchor nearby rock violently in the wake. So, we were very happy with our decision to park elsewhere!

Fort-de-France was a charming mix of European and Caribbean styles, with a pretty downtown and a few unusual architectural additions. Our favourite was the Schoelcher library. Designed by Pierre-Henri Picq (a student of the Eiffel tower’s architect), it was originally built in Paris for the 1889 World’s Fair. After the fair, it was dismantled, moved and then rebuilt piece by piece in Fort-de-France. It is beautifully ornate and is especially lovely because it is still a working library. We loved exploring its many artful details. Mr. Picq also designed the cathedral in Fort-de-France, which shares the eccentric styling of the library.

We managed to find the local fruit and vegetable market while we were in Fort-de-France, and, though our haggling attempts were rebuffed, managed to stock up on tons of local produce at good prices. One thing we love about the Caribbean is that they have a local variety of avocado – one of our favourite foods! Caribbean ones are enormous, which is an extra bonus. In addition to our other usual buys (tomatoes, plantains / green bananas, onions, garlic), we purchased our first christophine at the market, which is a local type of squash. We’ve managed to use it with success in the same way you’d use a courgette / zucchini, though it is a little bit waterier. We’d like to continue developing our skills with local foods – I’m eyeing up breadfruit as perhaps my next experiment!

We had one small mishap at anchor in Anse Mitan while trying to re-rig the new fishing rod, which meant one of our most successful lures ended up on the bottom. We were in 7m of water and visibility was poor at best, but I was not about to let a lure that has attracted so many tuna go down that easy. I donned my gear and was soon in the water surveying the seabed. After about 30 minutes, I was about ready to give up when something caught my eye. I dove down only to discover that what I’d seen was actually a sea cucumber… but from the bottom I spotted our lure in the sand a couple of meters away. What luck! I haven’t started practising freediving in earnest, so I didn’t have quite enough air to get it on that dive. I had to resurface and was very nervous I wouldn’t be able to find it again on my second go. Luckily, my sea cucumber was fairly easy to spot, so from there I could retrace the route to our lure – and this time success! James Lang (as this lure has been dubbed, after Harlequins young centre) was back in action!

We’d enjoyed exploring the various bays of Martinique’s leeward side but were also keen to see the interior. We were particularly drawn to the large, rainforested volcano, Montagne Pelée in the northern part of the island, which was meant to have some amazing hiking trails around it. So, we pootled north to the small harbour of St. Pierre, the closest place to the mountain where we could leave the boat and rent a car.

St. Pierre is an interesting place in its own right. It was formerly the capital of Martinique and was known as “Little Paris” in its heyday. But, Montagne Pelée is an active volcano, and it turns out building your capital at the foot of it was not the best idea. At the turn of the 20^th century, the volcano erupted and St. Pierre was completely levelled. A few charred ruins are all that remain of the elaborate theatre and decadent buildings of the town. The ships that were anchored in the bay that day were not spared, and the wrecks can be explored by scuba or very accomplished freedivers in 30m or so of water. We aren’t that good, so had to settle for a bit of snorkelling in the sparkling clear around the boat (where we had the biggest starfish I have ever seen – these things were at least a foot across!).

After a day aboard, we picked up our rental car–an adorable sea green Fiat 500–and set off to see the mountain. There was initially some concern that the little Fiat would not be able to make it up the hill, but, if I stayed in 1^st gear, we could just about manage to hold speed as we worked our way up the steep roads. Our chosen hike was a walk to the Gorges de la Falaise, where one of the mountain’s rivers has dug a deep canyon that boasts several big waterfalls. Nature was not to be our friend today though. It seems the tall mountains on the islands in this part of the world gather weather, and as we ascended it got wetter and wetter and wetter. By the time we reached the parking area for the hike, it was pouring with rain. Neither of us had brought raincoats, but even if we had I doubt they would have helped that much. We sat in the car for 10 minutes, not quite sure what to do, and eventually decided we’d instead go for a little driving tour around the windward coast and maybe try the hike again if the weather cleared later in the day.

The windward coast of Martinique is wilder, and a place we hope to also be able to explore by boat when we come back down this way later in the season (in settled weather, it’s possible to access the coral-ringed windward bays). The towns are tiny hamlets and driving the windy roads between them was certainly interesting! We found a couple of small lookouts to enjoy along the way and carried on until the road ended in a place called Grand’ Rivière. The weather broke long enough for us to have a little wander along the harbour (where one yacht had bravely nosed his way in among the fishing boats!). As we headed back, the weather only seemed to get worse. The windshield wipers on the poor little Fiat were no match for all that water – at one point I had to pull over and wait for the rain to calm enough for me to actually see!

With all this rain, the hike was clearly not meant to be, so we headed back towards St. Pierre. On the hill just above the town is a rum distillery, which sounded like a place we could enjoy no matter the weather. In face, the rain was confined to the mountain, so as we got further down towards the coast the sun came back out. It was nice to have relief from the rain and meant we could fully explore the distillery!

A small sign is all there is to suggest the turn off for Depaz, after which a small road takes you across a river, through a bit of forest and up a hill before the land opens out before you to reveal the huge sugar cane plantation that surrounds the distillery. It’s a bit like stepping back in time – it is all laid out exactly as the original plantation was, and they’ve saved the vast majority of the original buildings (including the owner’s beautiful house) and machinery. Actually, they still seem to use some of the latter! The copper stills in use looked pretty much exactly the same as the originals displayed in their museum, and they still use the old hydroelectric setup (which takes advantage of the fast-running mountain river we crossed on the way in) for power as well as a strange and enormous contraption for mashing the sugar cane. It was particularly cool that visitors could walk pretty much anywhere, including through the production house. Nothing was off limits (to the point of dodging workmen taking apart broken machines). We had a great time! At the end, they have a little tasting room where you can try any of their varieties. They also sell, we were excited to discover, rum by the box (much like you can buy wine by the box in the Med), with the associated volume discount. We expect our 3l box will see us through the rest of the season!

Our day in shore wasn’t quite what we’d expected, but it was a great to see the interior of the island (even if mostly through the car windows!) and good fun to explore the little towns of the east coast, as well as to see a rum distillery in action!

While in St. Pierre, we spotted an American couple on a neighbouring catamaran and gave them a wave. They later popped by to say hello and we got to know Damon and Marcie (and their lovely Lab, Daisy!). Like us, their boat is registered to a “port” not even remotely close to the ocean (in their case, Denver), and we had a good laugh about this idiosyncrasy of the American boat registry. And, also like us, they’d got their boat in the Med and sailed it over to the Caribbean this season. Though, they’d done their refit in Marmaris, Turkey (a cruiser’s heaven that has good prices, good expertise, and every part known to man), which we were a tad envious of! We spent a lovely afternoon with them swapping sailing stories over a beer and reliving our favourite parts of the Med. They were heading swiftly north to St. Martin to pick up some new batteries, so were off the next day, but we hope to run into them again later in the season!

Before they left, Damon kindly gifted us a packet of this new stuff from America called “FiberFix” – which is purported to be as strong a steel once cured. It comes in a roll, a bit like athletic tape. You get it wet, wrap it around whatever is broken, and then it should set into a solid repair. “What could you need that for?” I hear you ask – well, unexpectedly, the gear shift on our dinghy outboard engine had broken clean off a few days prior. Yeah, that was weird. The thought was we might be able to reattach it with FibreFix. Long story short, it was too narrow an area to wrap the FiberFix around, and anyway we later dropped the broken piece of the gear shift into the sea. BUT, we have managed to fix it by shaping some wooden dowel to fit the broken end, and attaching it with a whole mess of epoxy. So far, so good!

It was time to start thinking about our next hop north. The plan was to skip Dominica this time (bar a night at anchor in the northern bay to sleep and break up the passage) and head straight to Guadeloupe, which will be the subject of our next post.