Martinique 3&4 Jan 2011
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Thu 6 Jan 2011 22:04
The city anchorage is right in front of Fort St Louis, a working naval base, and a promenade. On our first day we decided to explore the city of Fort de France. We had been to what is reputedly one of the best chandlers in the island in the morning and managed to get nothing on our list at all - typical, so we spent the rest of the day mooching round the city. There are some familiar high street shops, such as Mango, and also a small and actually rather disappointing branch of Galleries Lafayette, (a department store in Paris). There were also lots of other more local shops as well. The standard of clothing etc was much higher here in the shops as they are part of France and therefore are much wealthier than the other islands. The supermarkets are also French and we were able to make a quick stop to stock up on smelly French cheese & wine - yum! Now every time you open the fridge door the boat stinks of cheese - yuck!
One thing there seemed to be a shortage of was restaurants, odd for a French town, but we found one by chance for lunch where we had a fab local meal of fish, with rice and beans, breadfruit and fried banana, dessert was a lychee flan, and with wine it was a about £40.
The following morning we had to fix our mainsail - we'd had difficulty pulling it out the day before and had noticed that the sheave had become very worn and we needed a new one before using the sail again. John set off for the chandlers and they had none, but they sent us to Marin, at the other end of the island as they were bound to have the bits we needed. We had heard that Martinique was the place for all kinds of spare parts so we set off on the bus. Buses here are great in that they are cheap and regular, but they only leave when they are full and clearly 11.20am was not the time for people to go to Marin, we eventually left at nearly 12.15, having sat on the bus all that time waiting for other passengers. Marin is a huge purpose built marina in the south of the island, with loads of chandlery shops, bars, restaurants etc, a bit like Rodney Bay, but smaller. We were both glad we had avoided staying in Marin and had gone to Fort de France instead, despite some advice to the contrary. Needless to say, despite serving moules frites in the restaurant, we could not get the parts and set off home empty handed. Small problem - we had been so pleased to eventually get to Marin, that we had forgotten to ask where the buses went from, and what time they stopped. It turned out we had missed the last one and had to pay 83 euros to get home rather than 13 we had paid on the way out - a lesson learned!
Tomorrow we are heading back to Rodney Bay to get the electronics fixed after the New Year break and intend to head south to St Vincent and the Grenadines as soon as possible. We liked Martinique so much that we will be back for a proper visit on our way up to Antigua for race week in March/April.