14:44.50N 61:10.68W

Wednesday 23^rd March

The wind died away completely in the night and we awoke to a hot, sunny and very still morning.

I must mention the boat boys in Prince Rupert Bay, Dominica, they work very hard and deserve to do well providing all sorts of services. As it happened  I was awake around 0200 hrs and witnessed one of their late night searchlight boat patrols which they do for free every night to deter and/or detect the bad guys.  This is amongst all the other things they offer:  rubbish collection (for which we believe they have to pay to dispose of it), trips up the Indian river, journeys to and fro the well hidden customs office, maintenance of the buoys etc etc.   Yes you have to pay, but they have already paid for training in the summer through their tourist authority and then paid again to belong to the official group of boat boys there.

With no wind at all, we motored pretty much the whole way down the 20 odd miles of Dominica’s western coastline passing a Humpback whale near the southern end which was being rather hounded by two tourist whale spotting boats which caused it to dive.

As soon as we cleared the southern end of the island we were hit by 20 knots of easterly wind and were immediately back sailing properly at 7 to 8 knots for the whole of the 25 mile stretch of open Atlantic ocean down to Martinique. The sea was remarkably flat which helped us fly along rather too quickly for the fishing lures which kept skipping out of the sea behind us and posed more of a threat to flying fish than anything conventional!

Swept into the bay with St Pierre at the head and found the anchorage very empty. We dropped the hook and quickly launched the dinghy in order to do our customs clearance before the office closed. I arrived hot foot at the door to find that it had just closed at 1500 hrs and met an irate Norwegian who was trying to explain to the lady who had just locked up that having opening hours of 0900 to 1500 was pretty daft as most yachts normally don’t arrive until 1600 hrs.

The anchorage quickly filled up around 1700 hrs and we were actually very surprised to see so many boats here.