Week 53: Martinique (28nm)

A quiet week aboard Serenity was punctuated by many turtle encounters and lots of time hanging out with our new friends on Arcturus.

Captain’s log

5th May: Laura went hiking with Daniel and Camille in the morning and returned exhausted due to some unexpected ‘mountains.’ We then made the short sail back to Fort-de-France (again in 25+ knots of wind) as we’d done a bad job of provisioning previously, but discovered that Sunday night is party night around the bay, so sleep was very patchy until they called it a night around 3am.

6th May: Ran our errands and then sailed over to Grande Anse after lunch. We are getting to know this bay pretty well now, and managed to chart a course that avoided all the fishing buoys. Much more name appropriate night aboard, for which we were both very grateful. 

7th May: Spent a quiet day together on Serenity bar a quick trip I made to get a baguette and some pastries. Surrounded by boats of all shapes and sizes, you can see why some people are happy to hang around here for a long time.

8th May: Rediscovered the challenging counter current that makes getting down around Diamond Rock (see more below) to St Anne such a challenge, and after a futile hour trying to sail into it we gave up and just motored there. Whilst looking for a good anchoring spot for WiFi, we picked up the network on Arcturus and so were able to spot their location amongst the vast number of other boats. The skipper then spent the rest of the day binge-watching Bosch on Amazon Prime, until Arcturus returned from shore and we had a fun time teaching them Kaboo (and thankfully Laura let Daniel win this time).

9th May: Spent the morning reorganising the storage on Serenity and managed to bring some order to our ‘just stuff it in there’ cabin, which greatly eases my soul. Introduced Arcturus to St Anne’s excellent ice cream after lunch, finished up the new season of Bosch and then had an enjoyable evening of music and conversation in the cockpit.

10th May: We decided to celebrate our final day with the S/V Arcturus crew for a while by renting a car again, and the first stop was an incredible bakery that Camille had previously discovered. We then went for a very hot hike through some of the mangroves on the windward side of the island, and finished with a mega shopping trip to the local discount supermarket. It took three runs in TJ to deliver all the groceries, and, too exhausted to cook, we finished by collecting some takeout pizzas and planning when we could next rendezvous with these guys.

11th May: A French penchant for unannounced holidays meant the usual customs option was no longer available in St. Anne, but thankfully we had been able to hold onto the rental car long enough to allow us to make an early morning run to Le Marin. Arcturus then headed off to Marigot with our tales of swimming pools and happy hours leading to much excitement, but we hoped to catch back up with them in the Grenadines. I started to investigate the odd noise that our outboard, BJ, had developed over the previous few days with limited success, so decided to wait to do anything else for both a more settled spot (and thereby avoid donating parts to Neptune – I’m learning!) and reinforcements as impending guest Eddie is believed to be known in certain parts of LA as ‘the engine doctor.’

Story of the week

This was a quiet week aboard Serenity, where we took our time to go slow and spend quality time with our new friends on Arcturus. This was in part because we knew we had a hectic few weeks coming up with guests, but also because it was our third visit to Martinique and we’d been lucky to have already had a good look around on both of our previous trips to the island. When we planned our Caribbean route, we didn’t set out to stop in Martinique so many times; it just worked out that way. But it was a happy accident, because it’s a lovely island! It is certainly among my favourites in the Antilles, for a number of reasons:

• Turtles: Martinique has huge quantities of turtles knocking around. And they are completely used to boats, so you can be in an anchorage with 100 other vessels and you’ll still see tons of them happily swimming around. Turtles are my favourite sea creature, and so any place that has so many is a winner 😊.

• Great cruiser anchorages: Plenty of the islands of the Caribbean have lovely, protected bays, but few can compete on sheer quantity and quality of anchorages. Martinique’s are huge–there is literally always space, some could hold +500 boats–and they are very well organised for cruisers, with large dinghy docks, high-speed wifi, good value grocery stores, and loads more.

• Hiking: The local government maintains many trails around the island, which are both well mapped and well marked. Hiking is one of my favourite things to do, so this a major bonus. Extra points because several of the trails are accessible directly from an anchorage!

• Culture: I love the extent to which French culture mixes with a chill Caribbean vibe in Martinique. Every town, no matter how small, has at least one exceptional bakery churning out baguettes (and many delightful pastries) 7 days a week. The locals are super relaxed, and in no way pushy or trying to take advantage of yachties, in stark contrast to some of the neighbouring islands. Its a perfect mix of the positive sides of both cultures.

Parting thoughts: HMS Diamond Rock

Just off the southwest corner of Martinique is a menacing rock island protruding from the sea, called Diamond Rock. You may be surprised to learn that, despite visually appearing very rock- and island-like, it is in fact a ship in service of Her Majesty. So strategically great is its position, and so deeply did (do?) the Brits dislike the French, that Commodore Hood commissioned the island as a sloop (more accurately, a “stone frigate”) at the start of the 1800s, and officially named it HMS Diamond Rock. It was supported by a more ship-shaped ship, except that that was apparently a fort (Fort Diamond). So, the rock was a ship and the ship was a fort. It is things like this that really make me love the British.