Windward Islands – Martinique

            What a great sail to get here!  We are starting to be able to “ease our sheets”!!!!  That means that we are no longer sailing upwind.  This equates to easier, more comfortable and faster speeds – lovely!  We arrived at St. Pierre after about 14 hours – about 1½ hours after sunset.  Anchoring in the dark can be tricky but we handled it fine.  Today is Friday 13 – unlucky – NOT!  Tomorrow is Bastille Day in the French Islands – will be interesting. 

            St. Pierre was a great town!  We would have stayed but there is a tropical wave coming and the anchorage was very unprotected.  The town was wiped out by Mt. Pelée  in 1902 – a volcano.  Some pictures to show you.  An interesting site that I haven’t seen before was coffins in a store front on a main street – next door was handmade furniture (same carpenter???).  We sampled French pastries for breakfast while we were checking in with customs.  There was a bicycle race going on on Martinique – seemed like a very big deal. 

            Then we sained to Anse Mitan.  Beautiful anchorage near the capitol of Fort de France.  The onshore characters made us feel like we were in the middle of a large US city – “seedy” is a nice way of putting it.  So we crossed the bay to jointhe other boats at the city anchorage just under Ft. Saint Louis – better.  And close to many conven iences – that were closed for Bastille Day!!  Couple of days here then a weather window opened.

            Next stop………Grenada.  For those of you following us on a map, yes there are several islands that we have been skipping.  The regulations to  import  a pet can be quite unmanageable.

Guadeluope - Iles de Saintes

St. Pierre - view of volcano destruction

More volcano destruction