Birthday in St Anne, Martinique 19/02/2022

With my 59th birthday today, I have now entered my 60th year… No complaints. I am probably fitter than I’ve ever been, swimming every day and hauling the dinghy out of the water every night.  I still walk a lot, despite the heat. Plenty of exercise means that I sleep heavily at night. 

It’s funny looking back… This time last year I was still in Southampton, preparing to set out. What I’d taken on loomed very large at the time: I had no idea whether I was going to be successful crossing the Atlantic alone. Or of what life would be like once I arrived in the Caribbean.  I have learned a lot in the past year. In many ways, I don’t feel like the same person who sailed down the Solent almost 12 months ago.

We moved down here to St Anne, on the southeastern corner of the island, on Thursday from Fort de France. A 22 nautical mile journey, done in 4 hours with the help of the engine (the last half of it was heading east along the south coast, directly into the prevailing wind). St Anne is gorgeous. The bay is large and reasonably sheltered from easterly and northeasterly winds. There is a large mooring area demarcated by buoys – it’s probably 2,000 metres long by 500 metres wide. There are lots of yachts, at a rough estimate perhaps 125. Although that’s a lot, there’s plenty of space. If I look at the area around me, taking half of the distance to boats on each side, I have at least 700 square metres (a sixth of an acre) to myself. And I’m in a prime spot, just inside the mooring area and therefore closest to the shore and the main dinghy dock, which is about 250 metres away. The water is shallow here: 3.5 metres deep, which means that I have just 1.4 metres under the keel. 

I caught up with my Canadian friend Rob. Had dinner and drinks on his catamaran on Thursday night, and then we met up yesterday afternoon to help each other clean the undersides of our boats. He has a couple of small scuba tanks that give about 25 minutes air (and a compressor to refill them), so we first dived under his boat, doing a quick clean with scrubbing brushes. Then we moved to my boat, a bit more challenging given its deeper draught. I had cleaned the area just below the waterline earlier, so it was really just doing the propellor, the keel, the bottom of the rudder and the middle section of the hull. Only took us 10 or 12 minutes. A lot easier than doing it without an air tank: it gets exhausting taking a deep breath, diving down seven feet, scrubbing until your lungs are bursting and then shooting to the surface to gasp for air! 

If you clean the hull regularly, say every two weeks, it means that all you have is a slimy sort of weed that comes off very easily with a swipe of a scrubbing brush. If it’s left for a couple of months, barnacles have started to grow, and they need real scraping to get off. You really want to avoid the barnacles because they slow the boat down when sailing and a barnacle-encrusted propellor places extra strain on the engine. All-in-all I was in the water for over 90 minutes yesterday and apart from the scrubbing against the resistance of the water, constant kicking of your flippers to stay in one place against the current makes you feel that you’ve had a good workout afterwards! You then have the pleasure of picking sea lice off your body – they love hanging on to hair and they bite! Doesn’t do any harm. They clearly like living in the weed that attaches to the boat, and in these warm waters grows so rapidly. The sea temperature here is somewhere between 26 and 27 centigrade in February (in September it’s 29!).

Rob and I went to a little local Creole restaurant for dinner. I had the local Creole Salad, which was not really a salad at all since it included a grilled chicken breast, two small blood sausages and a couple of little accras, which are fritters filled with cod. Rob insisted on a rum afterwards at a little makeshift shop/bar, where we sat on the very edge of the bay. It was a local style drink: a double shot of white rum with two large spoonfuls of brown sugar in it. Strange, but tasted fine! 

The village of St Anne is cute. There are several restaurants, a pharmacy, an old church, a fish market, two small groceries, a bank and several clothing/souvenir shops. A few hundred metres to the north is a long sandy beach fringed by palm and other trees. The water is shallow and clear. This beach is relatively busy because it fronts a Club Med resort (which, to be fair, is well-built: it’s low rise and hidden in trees). There’s a second, much smaller and quieter beach just to the south of the village. Altogether a great place, with a charming Gallic atmosphere – but much more laidback than France.

Not sure how long we will be here. Perhaps another week. There are many alternatives. On the way here I passed a few lovely little bays with sandy beaches and small villages. I will just see how things go…