Sorry, we’ve just realised we’ve now been in St Lucia for nearly a week and not let you know!  We had another great sail from St Anne on Martinique – the forecast was very light winds and we were expecting to motor, but we had a perfect force 4 on the beam in pretty flat seas and romped along at about 7 knots under full sail – wonderful.  We got here early enough to get the boat ready for visitors, but decided the anchorage was so nice we stayed out of the marina for as long as possible.  Unfortunately after 4 nights in the relative cool we are now in the über-sophisticated but very hot Rodney Bay Marina which, being in a lagoon, doesn’t get the full breezes and is all the hotter for not being clean enough to swim in.  This is our first normal marina with finger pontoons etc since leaving Europe and we entered with some trepidation (as we have a bit of history bashing Goldcrest about against pontoons!).  However we got in easily and only damaged the bow when stowing the anchor this time (oops).

At anchor, we had a great walk around the nearby headland “Pigeon Island” which was only connected to the mainland a few decades ago.  It’s had an interesting history as a military base and seen plenty of skirmishes between the Brits and French.  Confusingly for an ex-Bristish colony most of the place names in St Lucia are French!  We managed to get a rare snap of the two of us together at the top:

… and saw a pair of kestrels (we think) “making love” on a branch (modesty forbade us from snapping them in the act – here they are recuperating:

This is about the most sophisticated place we’ve been to in the Caribbean so far.  The marina is full of very popular bars/restaurants and the local shopping consists mostly of expensive malls full of shops which seem to be empty of customers.  We were initially mesmerised by the foodstuffs available in the two local supermarkets, but once we saw the prices we realised that we would not be stocking up too much here!  Today we took the bus into the capital Castries for the huge Saturday produce market; once again we didn’t recognise half the stuff there and what we did buy was pretty expensive, but we enjoyed the experience.  What are all those roots and bit of tree trunk that are on sale?  We have found out the names of some of them, honest!

And in case you get confused about what to do in a market, here are your instructions…

So we now need to get the boat cleaned up and tidy for Patsy & Roger who join us for the next three weeks or so and a passage through some of the best bits of the Caribbean, en-route for Trinidad.