14:44.44N 61:10.69W

Sat 19^th Feb

Very little wind this morning, but we only had around 16 miles to sail, so we lifted the anchor and raised the sails and made steady progress away from Fort de France and headed north to St Pierre.

The wind got up for a brief spell but finally died away altogether which is an absolute first since we arrived here. So very uncharacteristically we had to put on the engine and motor the final 3 miles into the wide bay where you can moor with some difficulty, close to the beach. The catch here is that it is very deep right up until very close to the shoreline when it shelves suddenly to provide a small plateau about 5 metres deep for you to anchor on. But the holding is varied which is why our first attempt failed as the anchor never got dug in. Our second go was fine and we ended up just south of the little pier that makes it easy to take a dinghy ashore.

St Pierre is a very pretty little place and was the cultural and social centre of Martinique (known as the Paris of the Caribbean) until the volcano, Mt Pelee behind erupted in 1902 and burnt nearly 30,000 people to death. There were only two recorded survivors, one a cobbler who was working in his cellar and the other an infamous murderer languishing in prison!

However the real tale of the day concerns the out of date information we had gleaned from the pilot book. We understood the Customs point (We need to clear out of the island and France before heading to the next island which is Dominica.) was a computer terminal in the beach front cafe that remained open all day, which indeed it was until a year or so ago. Nowadays it is in the tourist Information office at the other end of the town so realising that there would be a timing issue, we rushed over there and arrived breathless at 2pm to find that as this was Saturday, it had closed at midday until Monday morning. What price good information?

So we have to stay in this delightful spot until Monday morning when we will hope to clear out first thing and head for the north of Dominica which is around 55 miles.

In the evening we went ashore and had a wonderful meal in a delightful little restaurant that had been recommended by various people along the way ‘Le Tamaya’ (+596 596 78 29 09, yes the number looks odd but it is correct!)