New Year, New Islands, Now 60!

In the couple of weeks since my last post, we have Christmas’d in Bequia, New Year’d in

Marin, Martinique, one of us has turned 60…. and we are now in Dominica!

Christmas dinner was at Jack’s Beach Bar in Bequia - alarmingly, turkey was available (!) but we dined creole and drank rum punch as the sun went down.

Boxing Day required some exertion to work it all off, so we decided to climb Peggy’s Peak, overlooking the bay. We were a little slow off the mark in the morning and instead of climbing in the relative early morning cool, ended-up doing the hard yards in the mid-day sun (with an adopted stray dog who found us on the beach at the start)! Discretion dictated a tactical retreat before the summit, a taxi and beer on the same beach we started from, but the view from where we got to was fab.

The next day we set-off back to Rodney Bay, St Lucia to pick-up our new autopilot hydraulic pump (the retail excitements of boat ownership!). We left Bequia at around 0900 and were soon sailing along the west coast of St Vincent - which looked magnificent in the sunshine. Somewhere around this time I realised we hadn’t yet cleared-out of St Vincent & the Grenadines! (Clearing out means going to customs and immigration, filling in a lot of forms, getting passports stamped, etc. Not clearing out means going to prison). So we had to modify our course, anchor off and wake-up a sleepy customs guy in the backwater of the grandly named sleepy village of Chateaubelair. Order restored, we resumed our course for St Lucia, spending the night off Soufriere near our old friends the Pitons.

First thing the next day, we slipped our mooring and headed for Rodney Bay, anchoring there at lunchtime. After picking up the new pump, and a late lunch/dinner at a lovely restaurant on Pigeon Island, the next day we headed north again, this time for Martinique.

Martinique, like the other french islands in the West Indies, is not actually in the West Indies, but in France - of course. Cars have EU number plates, the currency is the €, the supermarkets sell nice French cheese and wine, there is recycling and the roads are flat and smooth. This is all very lovely, but in the South of the island around the capital it did feel distinctly ‘un Caribbean’ (except for the palm trees and rum). On the plus side we did manage to buy a replacement drone - the last one had ditched at sea, nothing to do with the pilot, obviously. As we picked our way north along the west coast we stopped for a night or two off a gorgeous near-deserted beach with a couple of outstanding beach bar/restaurants. This was the best of the French Caribbean - great view, food and wine - and the place Sue had spied for the Skipper’s 60th! (It was perfect - Blue Pepper is in the background)

Our last stop in Martinique was St Pierre in the north west - wiped-out by a volcanic eruption in 1902, now re-established and fascinating.

Which brings us to yesterday - Sunday Jan 7th. We weighed anchor at St Pierre early-ish with just a coffee to start us off and sailed the 35 miles to Dominica (in a 17-20 knot beam reach for the sailors reading this, who will recognise a blast in the sunshine!) Which means we have left the Windward Islands astern and our now at the southern end of the Leeward Islands.

We still keep pinching ourselves at how beautiful the scenery, perfect the climate, warm and clear the sea and generally how lucky we are to be here..