After Christmas and New Year at home I was keen to get back to the Caribbean to start exploring the islands. We flew from Gatwick to Antigua as this was where we would fly back from which meant two islands hops via Barbados to St Lucia when we arrived with just two hours to make our connection. Things didn’t start well when a passenger with checking in baggage didn’t show and then a technical issue all this meant we left an hour and a half late. Fortunately we made up an hour on the scheduled arrival time to make the Barbados flight but had just 15 minutes to catch the connection to St Lucia so skipped customs and were marched across the runway to the small twin prop plane bound for St Lucia. In the end we arrived as planned at 7pm so perfect and enough time to enjoy a nice meal out in the marina to celebrate our arrival.

The following day I chased up the new boom which was due to arrive that day and it turned up about 10:30am so we spent the rest to the day working with Kenny to disassemble the parts of the old boom and swop then across to the new and by 4pm we had a new fully functional boom so once again we looked like a sailing boat.

I also chased up the Chinaman who had gone AWOL after fitting the repaired bow spit as he was meant to fit also a new eyelet on the bow so that we could add a new bob stay to further strengthen the fixing for the trade wind sail. He agreed to complete by 11am so we had to wait till he was finished, once complete I tried to reassemble the furlex system to find only that the studs that had replaced on the bow sprit were too long so snagged the furlex so I gave up and left this for another day.

A quick trip to customs to check our was fruitless as they closed at midday for an hour and a half which meant by the time we left the marina is was too last to make the crossing to Martinique so we anchored in the bay and awaited 4am the following day to make an early start.

In the dark we passed Pigeon Island only for the heavens to open and the Atlantic swell accompanied by gusts of up to 30 knots it was going to be a long day to make the 40 mile passage across as we had missed a day we decided to jump to our next scheduled stop.

As daylight broke things improved the rain stopped and we sailed across with just the full main in 20–25 knots of wind.

We were rewarded at 11:30am when we pulled into the picture postcard village of Saint Pierre on Martinique a truly beautiful unspoilt spot where we went ashore to fantastic lunch, a 22 euros menu lunch, and to complete entry formalities.