{"id":894,"date":"2020-01-25T13:52:59","date_gmt":"2020-01-25T19:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/?p=894"},"modified":"2020-08-16T16:20:02","modified_gmt":"2020-08-16T21:20:02","slug":"martinique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/?p=894","title":{"rendered":"Martinique"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a great stay at the Rodney Bay Marina, on January 12, we finally cast off their dock and motored out to the anchorage in the bay itself. Rodney Bay is a nice and well protected anchorage, very popular with both super yachts and cruisers like us.  We dropped an anchor and settled there while waiting for a berth opening at Marina du Marin in Martinique. <\/p>\n

During our stay at anchor, the Bay was visited by some impressive sailing vessels. The first one was ‘Royal Clipper’<\/a>, the five-masted tall ship used as a cruise ship around Caribbean. <\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n

It turned out we had to wait for two days to get a berth opening at Le Marin. So on January 14, we picked up the anchor and sailed away North, to Martinique. it is a short passage, around 25\/30 NM. We had a decent wind. However once we’d cleared the northern tip of St. Lucia, we were greeted with a rough sea caused by high swells coming from Atlantic. The swells stayed with us for the whole 5-1\/2 hour until we entered the Cul-de-Sac du Marin in Martinique.<\/p>\n

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On approach to Cul-de-Sac-du-Marin.<\/p><\/div>\n

This long fjord-like bay is a huge boating center in this part of Caribbean. Its big area is dedicated to anchoring and mooring, both free and those run by the local marina. And most importantly at its end is Le Port de Plaisance du Marin with its 600 berths and a number of boat services and ship chandlers.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, one of three after-sale service centers of the boat builder Amel is located at that marina. There I was able to unload all superfluous parts I’d gotten from Amel for my main’s outhaul gear and motor replacement while we were fixing it at the boatyard in Lisbon. Furthermore, I was expecting to replace my broken genoa ballooner hook, which you may remember cracked under the load during our recent Atlantic crossing. I was not thinking much of it as it looks like just a chunk of machined plastic, until I leaned that this part is in fact quite pricey at 317\u20ac a piece. It turned out I was lucky while I was purchasing it as a spare when I was still at Port Napoleon. By mistake I was priced for an older revision of it at 78\u20ac but got a new design instead. But no such luck this time!<\/p>\n

ngg_shortcode_1_placeholderBesides this important and some other minor boat fixes, I was able to get a replacement for my original boat dishwasher, an Arthur-martin\/Electrolux unit that served me well but refused to work while we were staying at the Marina Rubicon in Lanzarote. I got myself this nice Moulinex machine at the local Martinique Darty (French electric and electronic appliance store chain) that was delivered right to my boat! Though a little bit smaller than an original one, it does its job and I expect it to work while the boat is heeling or rolling while the old unit refused to work under those conditions.<\/p>\n

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Marina du Marin is a very accommodating place for cruisers.. Their pontoons are large and easy to moor. Guys will come out to take your lines when you’re docking. At their office, you can do customs and immigration check-in and check-out. Besides all the boat service and repair shops, there’s also a number of bars and restaurants on site, and a great bakery and supermarket just outside across the road. We both enjoyed more Western type of foods at the Marina’s l’Annexe restaurant as some Creole dishes served on a Saturday grill night at a nearby place called Marin Mouillage<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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ngg_shortcode_2_placeholderOnce our boat was seaworthy and fully provisioned again, we cast off the friendly Marina du Marin on Sunday, January 19 and sailed a short passage to the anchorage L’Anse \u00e0 l’\u00c2ne, across from Fort-de-France, the capital city of Martinique.<\/p>\n

ngg_shortcode_3_placeholderL’Anse \u00e0 l’\u00c2ne is most likely the nicest place to put down your hook around Martinique and is usually not very crowded, even in the high season of December through April. It offers a nice coast view, pretty good wind, swell protection from prevailing weather directions, and very good holding in sand. We’d spent there two days…<\/p>\n

ngg_shortcode_4_placeholder…one more day than we’d initially planned. we were stopped by some rain that would not stop for 24 hours.<\/p>\n

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Rain or drizzle for a whole day!<\/p><\/div>\n

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At that anchorage we were spotted by Piotrek\/Pierre\/Peter who was already there, a fellow sailor we met for the first time at Port Napoleon. He heard us speaking in Polish so he struck a conversation with me as he was Polish, too. He had been living in France for number of years serving at la L\u00e9gion \u00c9trang\u00e8re<\/em>. Now enjoying his early military retirement, he is in the process of moving his household to a French territory in the Pacific. He does it by sailing while his belongings follow him and his girlfriend in containers on ships. He’s an avid angler and talker and enjoy a nice shot of rum like the next guy!<\/span><\/p>\n

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Piotrek and Aniece 39′ boat S\/V ‘Cisampo'(in the middle) at l’Anse a l’Ane.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Once the rain was gone, we pulled up our anchor the next morning and continued our Caribbean adventure sailing North, to the Saint Pierre anchorage on the leeward Northern coast of Martinique The town of Saint Pierre used to be the main urban center at Martinique until an eruption of Mont Pel\u00e9e in 1902 which killed about 30,000 inhabitants and wrecked multiple ships in the adjacent bay.<\/p>\n

ngg_shortcode_5_placeholderAfter just a night there, we sailed on to Dominic!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a great stay at the Rodney Bay Marina, on January 12, we finally cast off their dock and motored out to the anchorage in the bay itself. Rodney Bay is a nice and well protected anchorage, very popular with… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,43,10,24,5,44,16,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boat","category-caribbean","category-destination","category-food","category-maintenance","category-martinique","category-places","category-sailing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5ffuJ-eq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=894"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018,"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894\/revisions\/1018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jemmofthesea.thelaskowskis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}