We sailed for 4 hours from Rodney Bay and arrived in France!! Sainte Anne (south Martinique) is a pretty little town – quite French with patisseries etc. The wine is French and quite cheap, around Euro 5 or 6 for a reasonable bottle. Immigration and customs was done in a café called Boubou on a computer that then printed out our arrival papers. Very easy. Most of the Caribbean islands now are a party to an online system where you have saved forms in your computer with the ship/crew details and you log your movements on there for arrivals and departures. At the moment Martinique is not part of it.
We motored just further into the bay to Marin. There is a huge marina here – 750 boats and a massive anchorage. On the way in we passed about 20 catamarans (flagged from all over the world) all heading out covered in theme decorations, sparkly balloons and semi naked people, one boat had about a dozen blow up dolls on the bows! Then one of the last boats came out (no pun intended) with the gay rainbow flag flying! We spent one day indoors with the first wet day that we can remember, tidying up paperwork and playing backgammon. The next day we spent going around 4 very good chandleries getting bits and pieces for the boat and spares. One of them was at the end of a mangrovey little dinghy passage that seemed to be going nowhere and turned into a big shopping area. Lucky we read about it in our book as you’d never know it was there. We’ve been running the generator each day to get it read for it’s first 50 hour service next week. All good so far!
