Le Marin, Martinique

We hope everyone had a happy Christmas and a great New Year.

I wish my fizz glass really was as large as my head!

We haven’t updated our blog since we left St Anne, but we eventually found a mooring in Le Marin (so close to the marina it was that we could have swum there) and enjoyed Christmas and New Year with good French food and plenty of very decent beer, wine and fizz. Vive la France in that regard.

SG looking festive

Not wishing to be boring, but we have quite a few life admin jobs to do as well and so, to be very honest, there hasn’t been much to report. Other than, for once, the weather has been superb, yes, I said superb. We can’t actually believe it but this recent period has been the Caribbean everyone imagines! We did manage a very nice walk on New Year’s Day (to blow the cobwebs away!) and found a lovely (palm) tree lined avenue leading to a rum distillery – which was closed as it was New Year’s Day.

It goes without saying that boat jobs never seem to go away and so we have had more than a few of those as well, but generally life has been ‘steady as you go’…

The mate has been enjoying so much fizz and cheese that she has vowed to eat less forevermore; the jury’s out on that one for me.

So, here, in Le Marin right now (11/01/26) what do we find?  Total confusion is what I say! The marina seems to have been taken under the control of the Mayor with inevitable results, i.e no one has a clue what’s going on. Luckily, we have found moorings belonging to other companies who can deal with French confusion issues and we’ll rent our mooring from them, removing the need to be involved with aforesaid total confusion - phew…

We’ve received some sad news that the father of a lifelong friend died recently. He and his wife saw us off from Falmouth not that long ago (or so it seems) – we have endearing memories of that time and we are lucky to have them.

So, back to life on Stargazer. We’ve been talking, thinking of various plans, looking at worldly developments (by which we mainly mean the situation in Venezuela) and discussing our options. Spoiler alert: we will reveal some of our plans (as far as you can have them at sea) in the coming blogs.

For now, we have to do some local sailing. Spinnakers up downwind, inner forestays rigged and the number four jib hoisted otherwise and do some good old fashioned decent sailing to hone our somewhat dormant skills of late.

We’ll report in soon(ish) with how it all goes.

I will sign off on that. Needless to say the mate may want to add some pictures and say her piece…

One of my Christmas highlights was the discovery of a new culinary tradition – the galette des rois. I had spotted these cakes around Christmas time last year, they looked like a flaky puff pastry case that you needed to fill with fruit and cream or something before serving. I thought that would be a bit faffy so decided not to investigate further. However, this year they seemed to be in all the supermarkets and on the day before Twelfth Night we seemed to be the only people in the supermarket queue not to be buying one (one lady actually had five in her basket). Feeling somewhat left out I did some research – it turns out that these cakes celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings in Bethlehem. They are filled with frangipani and traditionally had a fève such as a figurine representing Baby Jesus hidden inside. After the cake is cut whoever finds the fève in their slice gets to wear the crown! I decided this was something we needed to get involved with so went out to purchase a galette and we started enjoying slices of the rather tasty cake, unsure of who was going to find what inside. We didn’t have to wait long, on the second day of the cake Skip noticed a small, porcelain thing on the edge of his slice. In a rather modern take on the Christmas story Baby Jesus was in fact Zazu (a cartoon hornbill from The Lion King)! Skip enjoyed wearing his crown and we both continued to enjoy eating the cake for several more days :)

Le galette des rois – with the crown for the winner

Zazu emerges from the cake