Still Le Marin but Progress!

As I write this 0900 on 16^th February the sun is shining, which is a welcome change from yesterday but the wind is still blowing like a good ‘un. The mate and I receive a professional weather report each day and over the last couple of months this report has been advising us to rough conditions etc etc. Usually it’ll say wind gusts and squalls in the region of 35knots and seas around 3.5+ metres between islands. Agreed 3.5m wouldn’t be too bad given a decent period, but the period forecast is usually about 8 seconds. One of the forecasts was almost unbelievable – I’ll quote it here: ‘Winds and seas warn against travel in all directions for the foreseeable future.’ Wow, ever seen a forecast like that before? Nor me!

Anyway, back to life onboard Stargazer. We have some good news, the mate’s contact lenses have arrived and all she has to do is to go and get them from Genipa, which, given that this is the mate’s favourite shopping centre isn’t too much of a problem. We have more good news! Despite being told that our new engine battery wouldn’t be delivered by air, the local agent here told us the following day that it had arrived. Well, if it couldn’t come by air that must be the fastest ship in the world… Needless to say there were extra costs involved. Quite why you pay VAT in France and then import duty into Martinique is beyond me but at least we have a battery despite is costing 80% more, yes 80% more than we thought it would.

The mate and I decided to improve on the old battery installation by making a plywood shelf for the new battery to sit on (the previous one had just sat on top of one of the large domestic batteries, naughty I know, but we inherited this state of affairs and stuck with it to save hassle until now). The mate had a lot of ‘fun’ with epoxy fillets making the new shelf as she has taken it upon herself to take charge of epoxy mixing and some epoxy application. There are only one or two people I know who may be interested in our new battery installation so I won’t bore everyone else to tears here, but suffice to say that it all works and we are back in business. The mate (who does the blog pictures) might decide to include a few photos, we’ll have to see…

So, what are we going to do next, after being in Le Marin for so long. We know people who’ve been sat in Antigua and St Martin suffering the same weather system as we have but it does look like there will be a let up in it on the weekend of the 22^nd February. So we have decided to sail around to Forte de France, we might stop at one of the Anse’s en route but our destination will be an anchorage outside Fort Louis directly off Forte de France. Forte de France (FdF) is the capital of Martinique and one of the largest cities in the Caribbean. Almost three quarters of Martinique’s population lives there so that must put it around 250,000 people as a rough guess. It is called the Paris of the islands. Apparently you can wander around quaint French streets with corner cafes and the shopping is reputed to be the best outside mainland France. We are looking forward to seeing it and we’ll let you know all about it when we have. Luckily the mate’s French is pretty OK as mine is challenged. I thought I was getting the hang of a bit of it, but I was blindsided in a shop the other day – I’d put some bottles of Panache (shandy) on the counter and the till person said something to me, of which I had no idea at all. I desperately looked around for one of the assistants who I know hails from Dominica and therefore speaks excellent English, but she was nowhere to be seen. By now, the till person’s voice was becoming louder and more desperate – all I could do was ask the queue which had built up behind me ‘parlez vous Anglais’? luckily someone did and apparently all I had to do was go and get the box for the shandy as the bottles didn’t have bar codes on them.

What else has been happening here in Le Marin? We had to move buoys, we were told we couldn’t stay on the one we were on as there was a ‘rally’ coming in over the next few days. This was before we had the new battery installed. I told the mooring master that we couldn’t move as we couldn’t start the engine so he insisted on towing us. The boat on the buoy we were heading for had been told to come to our buoy and as we were being towed over the other boat aimed directly for us, this meant a change of manoeuvre for our tower and thus us, which may not sound much, but being dragged around a very busy anchorage in a 40’ boat with another one coming at you did get the nerves a little frayed. Anyway, we made it to the new buoy and as I write the other boat is still on our old buoy, so I’m not certain what the change-over was for, but I do not mean to offend the mooring master as he is actually a very nice chap indeed a local Martinician with excellent English.

The mate had been having a bit of fun with her booking portal (Marina du Marin is changing over to be portal operated online of course; you can imagine the issues there!). In the end we went into the office. The girls who work there are all nice, it looks like they come from mainland France but they are getting stressed as this ‘portal’ is introduced. I resorted to British male tactics; ‘how are you today? You are looking very nice! Love your earrings ’etc. I’d like to say that it got me somewhere, but it didn’t…

The ‘rally’ by the way is the Transquadre which is a race encompassing solo and double handed sailors sailing from Madeira to Martinique. The mate seems to have got into this by looking at the website, which is all in French so it leaves me a little in the dark. We had a French teach at school (Monsieur Crompton) Monsieur Crompton – I didn’t mean it when I said I’d never need French as most of Europe spoke English – please come back and teach me something J

ps We are a bit behind with photos at the moment, but we’ll sort this out soon…