Grande Anse D’Arlet was a beautiful bay, yet extremely crowded. It’s interesting watching other yacht people begin posturing when we are entering into a crowded bay. Folks get a bit territorial. As we approached, heads began to pop up from companionways & cockpits and a few actually stretched into a rigid sitting position snapping their heads our way. One guy even stood to full height, walking around his boat sort of puffing his chest out to us. It was really funny because we realized we probably act the same way when the “boat shoe” is on the other foot. This is the “Alpha Cruiser” marking his territory so he is not anchored upon. I was up on the bow as Frank was driving us around to find a clear spot to drop the hook and others are yelling to me (not the one driving, mind you), where not to put our anchor, and warning us not to kill any turtles with our anchor. DUH! In anchorages with a lot of grass we are always extra cautious because we know that there will be turtles about and we don’t want to cause harm to any feeding at the bottom. We avoid grassy areas anyway because the holding is not good – Duh, again. We eventually found a tiny sandy spot of good ground, and I aimed for it like a bull’s-eye. Bingo! We held fast. No harm, no foul. There was quite a swell coming into the bay making it pretty uncomfortable. The rain was continuing to assault us in microbursts so we decided to have dinner on board whilst Destiny got her free rainshower. Just after we got to sleep, a disco on the nearby shore pumped up the volume and the strobe lights! Ha! We didn’t sleep very well.
After a psychedelic night of sleep under disco strobes until 3:00 AM, we couldn’t wait to get moving, so we made haste toward Fort de France. Following recommendations in our newest latest and greatest Doyle cruising guide, we decided to anchor at Trois Ilets across the bay from the main port, where paradise awaited in the form of a “Photographic town” flanked by a lovely calm bay in which to anchor, a golf course, daily local market, beautiful historic homes, great French Creole restaurants, a butcher shop, a French bakery and ferry access to Fort de France. Upon entering, we found several yachts but very few with people aboard and certainly no overcrowding. It was tranquil. The water was dark and murky, and yet the quiet was a welcome change. We anchored just off the golf course making Frank anxious to go exploring in the dinghy. As he took off to do just that I stayed aboard to catch up on sleep.
Frank returned a while later to report that this place is a ghost town…and but for two others, all those yachts we see anchored nearby are abandoned, derelict and probably crawling with who-knows-what. He had difficulty finding a spot to land the dinghy, and when he did he found the town completely run down and closed up. He did not find a bakery, a market or a restaurant nearby. Apparently Elvis had left the building and we didn’t get the memo! We ate aboard, enjoyed a quiet night and then set off for Fort St. Louis Bay in Fort de France on Tuesday morning. This was a “business trip” for us, meaning we were here to hit the mega stores (Carrefour, Decathlon, Hyper U), and then move on up the way. The dinghy dock is large and secure, right on the town’s waterfront, and adjacent to the cruise ship dock, the ferry wharf, the town park & the local bus station. Crowded and busy but convenient so we were OK to put up with feeling we were at sea (while at anchor) for a couple of days. Mega shopping done, we took off for St. Pierre at the top of the island.
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| arriving at Fort de France |
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| in the anchorage beside Fort St. Louis |
St. Pierre is significant because of its proximity to the Mount Pelee volcano; it literally sits at the base. Historically this is where the European settlers annihilated the last of the island’s Carib Indians in 1658, but not before those Indians uttered horrible curses upon the settlers, invoking the mountain to exact revenge on the great white invaders. Eventually, on Ascension Day a couple of 100 years later after St. Pierre had been well developed into the Paris of the Caribbean and one of the wealthiest and most affluent cities of the island chains, it did just that in the form of a series of massive volcanic eruptions that not only wiped out this entire region of plantations, estates and the waterfront city, it buried over a dozen merchant ships in the bay. Today, visitors can take a self-guided walk through the burned out ruins of the once grandiose waterfront town. Buoys in the bay mark the graveyard of the ships that are buried beneath. St. Pierre never returned to its former glory, and in fact it is now a quaint and very humble seaside town with a soft sand beach. The bay is exposed to a lot of swell but is a nice place for small private yachts. Fate sent us two wonderful new friends on our first morning ashore. I was standing in the local fresh market talking to Frank when a lady turned to me and said, “It sure is nice to hear a southern accent! You must be American!” That’s how we met Gayle and Darrell Smith who are sailing the Caribbean on their yacht, “Gone Bambu”. We formed an instant bond and spent most of our time, stuck like glue to them over the next couple of days. They are heading over to Bonaire about a month ahead of us and then transit the Panama Canal to sail across the Pacific. We had a lot to share with them, and in turn they gave us some good insight for our Caribbean sailing. It was hard to bid adieu to them but we did with a promise to never say goodbye. And we never did get even one picture of those guys. We were having too much fun!
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| Frank in the St. Pierre market |
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| St. Pierre sunset |
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| Mount Pelee |
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| ruins of the Opera House |
Fate has been real good to us since arriving in the Caribbean. We are meeting some amazing people and forming wonderful bonds here and it just keeps getting better.
At 8:30 on the morning of February 5th, we moved on from Martinique and onward to the top of Dominica.
