Grand Anse D'Arlet, Martinique

Thursday morning we motored three miles from Le Marin to Sainte Anne, which is one of the biggest anchorages we've seen: a huge stretch of beach, and water about 25 feet deep for about a mile outwards of the beach, all good sandy holding. What was great was you could probably have fit a thousand boats in there easily, but on the day we arrived there were only a hundred or so and everyone was well spread-out. Except of course for the one boat that came up a couple hours after we anchored and decided to anchor within 200 feet of us, then proceeded to have a loud shouting match with the husband yelling obscenities in French at his wife. Why we always attract the wackos, I'll never know. We did go ashore and hiked up the hill to get a good view of the anchorage. The town of Sainte Anne was quaint, like a weekend tourist town with lots of little souvenir places and restaurants.

The next day, despite the forecast of 20-plus knots gusting to 30, we decided to head to another anchorage. Our friends on Jacumba are southbound and we wanted to meet up with them before they crossed to St. Lucia. Because the wind was howling we decided not to raise the sails even though we'd be going downwind. As we left the Sainte Anne anchorage, the wind was literallly screaming at us. Specifically, it was screaming "Stay where you are, you idiots, can't you see the whitecaps?!" But we didn't listen, and we could literally feel the wind and waves propelling us (even without sails) at speeds upwards of 8 knots. We were surprised to be pretty much the only boat going downwind, which even in thirty knots is relatively comfortable compared to the fifteen or so boats we saw bashing to windward. We finally arrived at Grand Anse D'Arlet and had just dropped the anchor when a huge gust of wind pushed the boat back so fast that we yanked hard on the chain. We both heard a loud "PINGGG!" and watched in horror as a piece of our bow roller (which centers and guides the anchor chain) went flying through the air and landed in the water. We were able to get the boat situated and amazingly I found the piece sitting shinily on the bottom near some coral. One of the ends had sheared completely. Whoops. Guess we'll be looking for a machine shop while we're here, better get out the French dictionary.

But we did get to spend the evening catching up with our friends Mike and Renee on Jacumba, who are also from Phoenix, and are friends with Kevin's brother. We have emailed them but never met them in person, so it was nice to finally meet them face to face over drinks and appetizers.

Where we are:
Location=Grand Anse D'Arlet, Martinique
Lat=14 30.281
Lon=61 05.383