St Lucia, Jan. 3rd

Today we'll have another crew change. Monique is flying in from Amsterdam. Knowing she'd come and join us again made her depart at Lagos much easier :-) The same goes for Marc and Clare by the way. They'll gonna return in February with the kids. Actually Marc had a meeting at the office yesterday and had lunch with Monique so it's more like a hand over and change places :-)

We might even have a fourth crew member. When I came back to the boat yesterday, Rutger was having a chat with a French girl and it turned out she had to leave the boat which she's on. She's hitchhiking around the world. So we had dinner together last night and discussed our plans. She does want to join us but she's on a very low budget and offered to work for the trip. I can understand that and I know a lot of young people are trying to get around that way, but there's no real work to do and I don't want her to do all the cooking and cleaning for us. So. she might just sail with us to Martinique to find a temporary job and move on from there. That's just a short trip from St Lucia and that's more like giving her a lift. Well we'll see what will happen. Anyway, Monique sounded very exited to come over when I called her last night and she's definitely gonna stay for the next 3 weeks :-)

Monique arrived spot on and we all went out for dinner. She was glad to be back again and so were we :-) Next day we chilled on the beach, picked up the sails from the sailmaker and then we went over to the anchorage where we had a nice barbeque. Heidi, the French girl joined us the day after and we had a great sail to Martinique.

Martinique is different. It is a Caribbean Island but has nothing to do with the Caribbean so it seems. No Walters to help you with a mooring buoy, no ice man, no lobster man no nothing. Ashore no 'ya mann', but bonsoir monsieur.... no music except for the hotel trio...

Checking in was on a computer at the marina. That sounds very sophisticated, however, the form I had to fill in was in French.... also the keyboard was French, not the normal qwerty keyboard.
It's so not welcoming for all the yachts that come in. It feels more that you're being allowed to anchor as long as you comply with all the French crap.

So, instead of staying another day, we left next morning after breakfast. Breakfast was the only good thing about Martinique. The fresh croissants that were indeed the best we had so far. Only Rutger and Heidi nearly got arrested for trespassing. It turned out that the dinghy dock was private and the had to climb the fence to get out. On their way back security at first had no clue on what a dinghy was :-o and then told them to walk all the way round the bay and over the beach. Which they didn't of course....

After breakfast we sailed to Dominica. Another great day of sailing. Underway we explained a bit on celestial navigation to Monique and Heidi and took a sight. Rutger almost caught a fish but when it saw Rutger's face, it took off again...

We made it just after sunset and found a mooring buoy at Roseau bay and I cooked my tuna pasta with no fresh tuna unfortunately...