A long, hot summer in Martinique.

Regardez Madame Jo, du yacht Anglais. Elle file à toute allure dans la baie maintenant qu'elle a un nouveau moteur hors-bord pour son annexe.

This is what I heard from some passing French people. I’ll leave it to you to decipher it (assuming you don’t speak French).

However, the gist is that we have exchanged our outboard engine for our dinghy. The old 3.5hp four stroke, being no match for the speed of the new (to us) 5hp two stroke. The mate gets up on the plane and off she goes with a huge smile on her face. She recently returned from a supermarket 0.8NM away and it took her 6 minutes; this equates to an average of 8 knots – and that’s fast. The old outboard would have taken 20 minutes to get back. However, it’s not all about speed, it’s about the ability to travel greater distances and have a drier ride. We can now use some of the anchorages which are quite far out from their ports and when the power goes on, the bow lifts and no one gets wet; the latter was a regular feature of life with the old outboard.

All I can hear people say now is: Peut-être que Madame Jo devrait ralentir. Il y a une limitation de vitesse dans la zone portuaire.

To which, I agree. I used to be able to see her coming and had time for a quick rum. Sadly, she’s now back before I can get the bottle out.

More seriously, we have been very lucky to be able to extend our stay in Le Marin. It’s a difficult time of year (being hurricane season) to go anywhere and we love it here. As I think we’ve said, it’s not picturesque as you’d imagine a Caribbean Island anchorage to be, but it’s not bad either and we have access to anything we need at sensible prices. We’re being sensible though, we spend an hour or so first thing every morning poring over the weather information, which is usually excellent I may add. At this time of year Tropical Waves leave the African coast and head west towards the Caribbean. It’s these waves that have the potential to turn into Tropical Storms, which then have the potential to turn into Hurricanes. There are plenty of waves coming (maybe one every three days) but thus far the season had been fairly benign. A wave can give winds of 30knots or more with associated squalls and heavy showers afterwards. Sometimes, if the waves are close together you can’t really tell the difference between them as showers lead to squalls as the second wave passes. There has been an incredible amount of Saharan sand in the atmosphere too. This helps stop the formation of waves into something more horrible, which is good, but it doesn’t half make a mess of your decks!

We are very mindful though and we have Stargazer set up so that we can be ready to leave if we have to within 2-3 hours or so.

So with the morning taken with weather research and general cleaning/tidying we have a short afternoon to do anything else before the mate heads off to the showers in the marina (I have mine on deck). Life and normal living takes time on a boat when you are set up in mooring/anchor/marina mode.

Highlights over the past few weeks have been the round Martinique Yole race (a very serious and spectacular annual event here) and our anniversary; we tried to go to the beach but the bus company had closed down (they have since discovered some more funding from somewhere and are up and running again – Mate), then we tried to go to our favourite café, but it was closed (he reopened the following day! – Mate). Our friend Paul has also been here, he has a large yacht and is anchored about half a mile away so he calls by most days – as much as we like Martinique, it’s nice to have a native English speaker to talk to…

Wow, it was two weeks ago since we wrote the first part of this blog, fully intending to post it at the time. So what has happened? Invest 92 and Invest 94 is the answer. No, we didn’t know what an Invest was either until we came to the tropics. Here’s a brief summary: we mentioned waves earlier, well, when a wave starts to look more serious it’s given a number which is called Invest#. An Invest can rapidly turn into a Tropical Low and Tropical Revolving Storm (TRS) – neither of which are pleasant. In fact I recall my studying of ocean meteorology for my RYA Ocean YM exam; this is what was said about a TRS: ‘make sure you make any VHF emergency calls before the arrival of a TRS, because afterwards never mind have no antenna left, you won’t have a mast left’. Enough said!

We found ourselves in an unlucky situation with a strong wave coming over us a day or so before the expected arrival of Invest 92. Conditions were too rough to head south so we stayed put. As luck would have it, masses of Saharan sand was around the Antilles at the time and Invest 92 was unable to continue developing. In the end, we tied more lines to our mooring, including a shackled strop to the chain riser underneath our buoy, strapped everything down, dropped all sunshades etc. As the remnants of Invest 92 went over (it’s always at night isn’t it!) we experienced maybe low 40knots in heavy squalls; not pleasant, not sleep inducing, but not life threatening either.

On another note, it’s often quite difficult to secure a mooring buoy in Le Marin. We have been very lucky this time as not only is our mooring in a perfect location, we’ve just been granted it on a rolling monthly basis - nice one! We love Martinique.

OK we’ll get this slightly boring blog up, as we’re a bit late with it. We have no pictures for this one, but promise to do better next time – see you then…