St Pierre, Martinique

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Sun 22 Dec 2013 02:13

14:44.3N 61:10.6W

 

Thurs, Fri & Sat – 19th, 20th & 21st Dec

 

Well Sarah has a theory that either you like jazz or you don’t, but there is no ‘getting to like it’.  But we will come to that later.

 

Thursday morning was spent ashore taking advantage of the small café with a half decent wifi service in St Anne.  It is frightening in so many ways how critical this whole wifi business has become to cruisers, who only a few years ago would have simply pottered along blissfully unaware of where their friends were or what might be happening in the outside world. Now we get this free service that allows us to stay in touch with friends and family worldwide and all for free – well mostly.

 

On Friday we headed back into Marin having brought our plans for sailing to Dominica forward by a day in the light of the weather forecast.  We sorted out our clearance papers so we could leave the island and then went to say hello to the crew of Selkie who we had been told were in the marina.  Justin, Trish and their two children Cian and Ellen are from Kerry, in Ireland and they have only recently arrived after a very long slow trans-Atlantic crossing.  They are looking to sail up to the USA this summer and so we spent some time with them giving some advice and suggestions as well as a pile of the guide and pilot books that we no longer need ourselves. Justin spent 9 years building their boat and they have just two years to do what they can before the children have to be back in school.

 

We also popped over to the two big supermarkets and topped up on the Christmas food shopping before returning to Serafina, anchored out in the busy anchorage.

 

On Saturday morning we headed off north and had a fast sail up the west coast of Martinique in some fairly brisk wind and squalls topping out at just under 30 knots.  We did try a spot of fishing but we have never been too successful when we are sailing at 9 knots!

 

The trip was enlivened by the Island’s coastguard service who were trying to track down a catamaran that had activated its satellite emergency rescue beacon (EPIRB).  They helpfully kept broadcasting this search in both their native French and in broken English and it was of concern to us as we were right where the missing boat was supposed to be. Well I say that, but after any number of re-broadcasts of the basic information, they did eventually issue the Lat and Long (co-ordinates) of this signal and we could not help but notice when we plotted this, that it was about half a mile inland and up the side of a very large hill!  This did not seem to faze the coastguard, but we do rather suspect that this device was sitting in someone’s garage or the boot of their car perhaps.

 

But the wind died away as we approached St Pierre and so we motored the final 5 miles and made our way as close to the beach as we dared, to drop our anchor.  This is a windy anchorage usually and very deep and so the trick is generally to creep in as close to the beach as possible and drop anchor as the wind can be relied upon to howl out of the north east most days and nights, year in, year out, blowing you offshore.  So of course, this being an ‘unusual year’ (how many times have we heard that over the past 6 years I wonder) the wind collapsed and went round in circles before pretty much dying altogether in the evening. So here we are very much closer to the shore than we would ever want to be and wouldn’t you know it, but there is a live jazz band playing in the bar just across the beach, although it sounds like they are in our cockpit right now!  Now there is jazz and there is plain old personal indulgence and tonight we have got steel drums, an organ and various sundry artists and their instruments breezing along at random, systematically destroying any number of good songs and few carols for good measure.  Could be a long night.