Foresail repair and a change of scene…  22/03/2022

Went into Le Marin for the replacement of the foresail roller-furler last Wednesday morning. My friend Rob came with me to help getting in because it was clear that it would be a bit tricky. We simply towed his dinghy so he could go back to St Anne later. 

Coming in was a complicated business: the dock is small, in very shallow water and there’s not much room to manoeuvre. The first problem was a large catamaran hovering in the main channel around the entrance to the dock, making it impossible to pass. I shouted to Rob, who was up at the bow, “swear at them in French and tell them to get the hell out of the way!” I think he was a bit more polite than I would have been, but they moved. Then we couldn’t come onto the jetty because somebody had tied a large dinghy in the middle of it, so we had to hover around while that was moved. Because of the current coming through, we agreed that we should just drop the anchor – I was worried because at one point we only had 10 centimetres of water under the keel. That worked, but then when we raised the anchor somehow the windlass slipped and it went back in the water followed by all the chain. Rob shouted help! So I took over and got that all back up while he manned the wheel. Then I brought the boat in without any further trouble.

All a bit stressful, although it would have been worse if I’d been alone. I was assured that the work would be finished by the end of the day, even though they were short-staffed, one due to injury and another thanks to Covid. 

This is the Caribbean, so no surprise when things were clearly nowhere near finished in mid-afternoon. I was perfectly happy to stay the night. Le Marin is the main yachting centre in Martinique and there’s a huge marina, as well as a couple of hundred boats anchored just outside the town, so there are plenty of shops, large supermarkets and restaurants.

On Thursday morning there was a commotion outside at about 08:30. A fairly large yacht was coming in very close – like 50 centimetres away. A large bearded guy said “Bonjour – do you speak English?” I replied “Yes, I am English!”. Turns out they were Brazilians, and they wanted to tie up to my boat. I said no problem, and helped connect lines to Manuka, having inserted a very large fender between us to complement their smaller ones. They were very grateful and kept calling me “Captain, Sir”. So I’m going up in the world, having got used to being merely Captain. Delightful people, the Brazilians!

Happily, my men came later in the morning and just after lunchtime the job was done. I must say that they seemed to be professional and picked up on a couple of small things and volunteered to fix them. I could then have left, but was happy to spend another night, so instead of disrupting the work now being done for the Brazilians, I volunteered to stay again overnight. 

As usual, a good mix of nationalities. There was a young German on a very small yacht in front of me, completely boxed in, and an older German couple on a large yacht on the other side of the jetty. The technical guys were a mix of locals and Europeans. The locals usually speak Creole to one another, and that’s an impenetrable language, a mix of French and west African languages, with a bit of English and Dutch thrown in for good measure. The French guy who had started the work joked that the problem with the furler was so bad that I had to get a new boat. I said “It’s your problem, because she’s a French boat”, to which he replied “It’s not my problem, I’m Belgian!” Haha.

A lot of people here speak a few words in English, then start ratting off in French. Fortunately I usually seem to be able to understand, largely from the context. So no great problem, and generally everybody’s really nice. Of course some things just can’t be translated into French: at the bar/restaurant on Wednesday night, having already got a large beer, I ordered “Le Famous Bacon Burger” – obviously something which the Academie Francaise, the guardians of the French language, have not yet succeeded in coming up with a French alternative for! One really nice aspect of Martinique is that you get great quality ice cream – funny, you always think of the Italians as the masters of ice cream, but the French seem to be just as good. 

I returned to St Anne on Friday and anchored close to Rob’s boat. He’s going to Canada in early April to sort some stuff out, so has rented a mooring ball nearby to leave his boat on (being wary of just leaving it on the anchor). However, he wanted to check the integrity of the mooring ball, so I helped him with that, holding onto the ball to keep his dinghy in place while he dived down to check it. He discovered a thick chain down on the seabed, connected to a large concrete block, while it was pretty obvious that the rope connecting this to the ball had seriously deteriorated. Important discovery: it means he has to connect a good rope directly down to the chain. Many people would come and simply loop a rope around the base of the mooring ball and think that they were secure. No surprise that boats regularly break free from mooring balls, rather defeating the object of tying up to them in the first place. It’s a question of maintenance, and very often the maintenance is not done. I’ve suggested that he drop his anchor close to the concrete block as well so that his boat is doubly secured.

Yesterday he lent me one of his diving tanks so that I could finish cleaning the deepest parts of my hull. Very handy – the work is fast when you don’t have to keep going up to the surface for air. So there’s a good mutual support operation going on here. Sometimes it works in less obvious ways. A couple of weeks ago, Rob was coming back from Guadeloupe, where he’d gone with a visiting friend. Things had not worked out too well and the friend had stayed on in Guadeloupe, so Rob was sailing alone – the first time he’d done so on his large catamaran. He says he thought “If Hans can sail alone across the Atlantic, I can sail this 120 nautical miles alone!” He discovered that it wasn’t a problem – and, if anything, it’s better to be alone than to have a troublesome crew member. It’s easier to be fully focused and self-reliant, than to be distracted by someone you can’t trust because he’s permanently drunk. That’s a discovery that will be useful to him in the years ahead. 

I was considering leaving here tomorrow for St Pierre up on the north coast, but now there’s a suggestion that I wait till Sunday and sail in a small flotilla with Rob and a German couple I met last night. That will be fun, so I think I will wait. Caribbean time… nothing is urgent here.