Dinner last night was soothingly delicious for our increasingly frayed nerves.  We went to the sushi restaurant where local girls clad in kimonos offer true West Indian hospitality, even teasing me when I knocked over my beer, doh, and delicious Japanese titbits.  Before we ventured out we carefully sprayed ourselves with the newly purchased can of Off to prevent attack my mosquitos and thereby reduce the new threat of the horrible joint disease Chickenganga (or something like that, can’t remember its real name) that has now reached the Caribbean.  It is marked on the tin as Sweat Resistant which generated some confusion in Bob’s mind as he had assumed it was antiperspirant that I was lavishly splurging about my person. 

We can’t tell you what a relief it is to be anchored below the looming volcano at St Pierre.  The cathedral bells are slogging out there hourly peal, there is the jolly sound of lots of loud local music, all mixed together by the time it gets to us and the pim pom of passing police cars.  The egrets have just busily skimmed by heading for their predetermined roosting trees, We can start to relax.

We began to relax as we headed out of Rodney Bay at 7:30am.  This is not my favourite time of the day but I was as eager as Bob to get out of the ARC infested waters.  We cast off, zipped out of the harbour deliberately breaking the speed limit, I bet they have something in the small print about that too, headed into the bay and promptly put down the anchor.  Don’t be silly, we weren’t staying there, just checking out the new windlass before we were too far away from Ulrich to do anything about it.  That done, we upped and left Rodney Bay without a backward glance, just an impassioned shout of “We’re not Celebrities but Get us Out of Heeerreeee ....”.

The sail from St Lucia to Martinique is usually a corker and this was no exception.  We started with a middle of the road 12 knot wind, on a beam reach, giving us time to find our sea legs after a period of inactivity.  The wind picked up a bit to classic Caribbean 18 knots and Windy upped the pace to a steady 7 and a half knots over a steady sea.  It was bliss.  We spent a good hour or two just grinning into the sun and letting the tension release in big soughs.  Entertainment then took the form of being buzzed by a helicopter who came so close that we could see that the guy waving from the window was married.  Why they were buzzing us?  Who knows!  We were then buzzed by a pair of seabirds (also married we presumed) that dived around the boat for their breakfast as we tucked into ours.  They stayed with us until a gusty cloud whipped up the wind and dumped rain on our heads.

Our gradually relaxing mood was turned up a ratchet parking at St Pierre.  It is a deep bay with a shelf around it that suddenly swoops to under 2 metres.  We draw 2 metres so finding a spot where we can reach the bottom to anchor amongst the numerous other boats without risking going aground is a bit nerve wracking particularly when we are out of practice.  We have since improved the levels of calm by opening the rose kindly given by the German couple.  We have discovered why they were so eager to give it away.