Martinique Our first anchorage was in the south of the island off the small town of St Anne. I've never seen such a huge anchorage with at least a thousand boats anchored all the way from St Anne into Le Marin. Martinique is a large island still owned by the French. As soon as we stepped onto land it immediately looked and felt like we were in France itself. We were so excited to find the Boulangerie to buy a proper baguette and to sample the delicate little tartes, eclairs and my favourite a Mille Feuille. We also made a beeline for the local supermarket to buy some proper French cheeses. We've been denied these gastronomic delights since leaving mainland France last June. As Martinique is also part of the EU it is very evident that it's benefited financially having good roads (you could be driving in Europe), shopping malls, familiar housing, excellent health care and social benefits. Martinique has a beautiful sandy coastline and is a very popular winter destination for the French. The immigration and customs checking in/out is very easy, a do it yourself computer system, we just needed to find the cafe in St Anne that held the computer. We found the cafe only to discover it was closed on a Wednesday-aargh now what do we do? The closest checking in point was in Le Marin Marina 8km away. We had always intended to hire a car in Martinique so decided to walk to the nearest car hire place and just get a car. Now with car keys in hand we drove into Le Marin and checked in at the marina. It wasn't a wasted journey as we needed the chandlers (we needed three screws for the genoa drum, only in Martinique can we pick up metric) and it so happened friends Julian and Patricia (A Capella) were staying in the marina so managed to meet up with them for an hour. The next 4 days we spent exploring lovely Martinique - please look at the photo gallery for more detail. We then had two further anchorages moving north to Grande Anse d'Arlet and then St Pierre. St Pierre sits at the base of Mt Pelée and at the beginning of the 20thcentury was the capital of Martinique, very chic and known as the Paris of the Caribbean.
On the 8th May 1902, Mt Pelée exploded and it was so violent, after only 3 minutes the town was reduced to rubble and the population of nearly 30,000 were killed. The town today has many historic sites reminding people of the disaster and a museum where we watched a interesting film of the events leading up to the volcanic eruption. Have a look at the photo gallery for further info.