14:27.74N 60:52.15W

Thursday 24^th and Friday 25^th March,

Having sort of admired the two elderly square riggers that arrived at dusk last night, we were rather less impressed to be woken by one of them ringing the watch with its ships bell at 0600 hrs.  Since we were now awake we decided that we might as well leave and so we headed off south from St Pierre with 12 knots or so of breeze.

As we passed Fort de France the wind picked up dramatically and we had the most wonderful sail all the way down to the south western corner of Martinique, where we paused to put in a couple of reefs before we rounded the headland and began a long beat to windward to reach Le Marin.

We was pretty much as we had expected and we stuck to the task of sailing close hauled into the wind and mounting seas for a couple of hours and then finally decided that we had had enough of this and motor sailed the final 5 or so miles directly into the teeth of the wind to reach the buoys marking the very interesting long approach to the town of Le Marin.

We edged our way again into the shallow and unmarked area of the main anchorage and found a spot to anchor, close to where we had been some 5 weeks ago when we came here heading north. It is an unusual place in that there is a huge expanse of protected water, but it is mostly too shallow for boats of our depth and there are no markings or buoys to help you. So although it looks like you can moor anywhere you like, you need to remember that a lot of the boats here are either much smaller or are catamarans which draw very little water. The other strange feature is that less than 10 percent of the boats here have anyone on board. Most are tied to mooring buoys and are clearly kept here long term and many are just anchored and also left looking rather forlorn – and there are hundreds of them.

We launched the dinghy in record time and sped into the town to catch the customs and immigration people since we had not been able to do this in St Pierre, but as I rushed up to the doors of the office at 1500 hrs I met two other French crews who like me were very surprised to find the doors locked shut and a sign telling us that their hours were 0700 to 1200 hrs.

We visited the internet cafe, picked up a few essentials and Sarah booked a haircut for the next morning before we made our way back to Serafina for a quiet night in.

On Friday morning Sarah was up with the lark and took herself ashore for her haircut at 0800 hrs, where outside she meet a massive caterpillar shambling along.   It was black and white striped with bright red ends, about 6”long and fat – whatever it grows into will be big! We then went ashore together later in the morning to do a bigger shop and spent a while in the afternoon in the internet cafe. In the evening we came back yet again to enjoy a superb meal in L’escale Marine which is wonderful little restaurant on the road round to the marina. This was to celebrate our 29^th wedding anniversary and so we pushed the boat out a bit, so to speak and Sarah is still marvelling over her outstanding lobster, which she has been promising herself since we crossed – but Barbados was not the occasion! It is a very typical French restaurant with the larger than life, jolly patron who commended my continued attempts to butcher their language. It would have been much easier to converse in English, but we like to make an effort...