A sadness to report.  Roxanne has unfortunately died.  Even brand new batteries were not enough to get her to spark into life.  She is no more.  However, we placed the naff Christmas tree in the pram as our beacon and pottered over to our favourite St Pierre restaurant last night and were flattered to be greeted like long lost friends with a French kiss, i.e both cheeks, not the other.  The menu was much the same as ever so we had our “usuals”, the scallops and moules for starters and entrecote steak and fish in vanilla sauce for mains washed down by a chilled Muscadet.  We were too full for pud and the tarte tatin was “off” and to be honest, the food wasn’t up to usual standards, so instead we were offered a complementary  local evil spirit which we presumed was rum but it was hard to tell and tasted more of rocket fuel than anything else.  We tottered back to WIndy and settled down for a good nights rest.

Being of a certain age, we tend to get up in the night.  A blurry eyed Bob, no glasses on, rose at  3am, peeped out of the window and observed that it seemed to be getting rolly.  An equally blurry eyed Elizabeth, no glasses on, rose at 4am woken by the rolliness, staggered to the loo, peering blearily out of the window and alighted.  It came to me that when I had looked out of the window the lights seemed to be rather far away and we were very rolly indeed for St Pierre.  The necessities completed, I pottered up on deck for a good look round and observed that the lights, any other boats and indeed the shore were a long long way away.  I pottered down, grabbed my glasses and woke Bob with a “We are quite safe but....”.  He was up like a shot and came on deck to have a look, with his glasses on.  After consultation, and deeming there was no need to panic, we decided that the first thing to do was to put some pyjamas on, as well as our glasses, which we duly did.  Bob then calmly asked a classic question, “Where are we Elizabeth?”  How the heck was I meant to know!  Instruments were switched on, and looking on the chart plotter it appeared that we were 3 miles from St Pierre and heading serenely in a northerly direction, extremely fortunately into wide open sea.  We decided that this curious incident in the night time must have been because of in dropping the anchor, reversing as I do to lay the chain, I must have backed off the self and therefore we were anchored in deep water with a very short chain.  We puttered very slowly, towing the dinghy with the outboard still attached, various items not stowed for a proper passage, and followed the path that the sun made as it rose stunningly over the volcano back into St Pierre.  We were much more careful how we anchored.

Being awake so early we were raring to go and had checked in, (that darned AZERTY keyboard making Bob into Chqrles), picked up brochures from the Tourist Info office, managed to buy Ibuprofen and Paracetamol from the Pharmacie in French (fortunately the same thing!), visited Huit de Huit (which actually opens from 9am etcetera) to buy yummy things and a baguette for lunch and were back on the boat for elevensies.  Unfortunately Bob had a new job to do because the dinghy had slid under the pier and ripped off a rollock.  Ouch! I assisted the glueing process by trying to translate the instructions accompanying the glue that were in French.  Fingers crossed my interpretation was correct.

We have chilled and relaxed and attempted recovery from the alarurms and excursions this afternoon and planned a tour of Martinique when we move to Fort de France tomorrow.  In any case there is nothing quite like baguette and canard terrine avec cornichons to cheer us up or watching the enormous sun going down (no green flash but signal to open the Muscadet that is chilling nicely) or observing a very loud American catamaran attempting to anchor which was “simply a disaster darling”.  It isn’t just us then.