The Saints to the Grenadines, Part 5
On February 23, with lesser winds, Francesca moved further south to St. Pierre on the French Island of Martinique. This island had received glowing testimonials from several of our cruising friends, but with time becoming short and good cruising weather we stopped there only for the night (with the quarantine flag up). Again, this island was spectacularly mountainous with homes attractively clustered in buildable areas. It was a curious blend of the Alps and the tropics. The island has many good yacht anchorages worthy of exploring. Martinique may well have been the highlight of the Eastern Caribbean. Perhaps on day we will take time to visit there.
The next morning we continued on to the island of St. Lucia. There, at Rodney Bay, we found a combination of the good, bad and ugly. After a brief tour through the inner harbor, we exited to the outer harbor, dropped the hook and checked into the country. St. Lucia is an English speaking country. The island is very pretty, but covered up with tourist, charter boats, high prices and noise. The inner harbor, not having good circulation, is polluted and the outer harbor is bedeviled with jet skis and high speed boats. Although we remained there a couple of days and took on water, we were happy to leave Rodney Bay and go a few miles south to Marigot Bay. Again, the bay and surrounding mountains were perfectly gorgeous, but was worse than Rodney Bay for noise and activity. The locals had festooned the usable bay with moorings that made anchoring nearly impossible. Entering the bay we were offered moorings at a price. We almost always reject moorings because there are no guarantees as to their safety. They are willy-nilly placed by anyone with the hope of making a buck and there are no regulations or standards. They are also often in water too deep or dirty to be inspected by snorkeling. If a mooring were to break and your vessel hit another boat or ground, it would be because you gave the responsibility for the vessel’s safety over to someone who was totally unaccountable. Most of the chartered boats were on moorings and although we did manage to get the hook down, the boat traffic made our spot wholly inadequate. It took only an hour or two in that context before we decided to leave and find somewhere else to settle for the night.
Just a few miles north is the port of Castries. This port is very well protected and is the only St Lucia port capable of handling large cargo and cruise ships. There were only two other yachts in the harbor and plenty of room to safely anchor. Around the docks there is a market with many small open-air shops. There is also a supermarket, KFC and numerous restaurants. The bay, however, (trying to be delicate), stinks. We were there two days during which 5 cruise ships and three cargo ships came and went. After checking out and although St. Vincent is the next large island to the south, our next planned stop was to be the island of Bequia in the Grenadines. It was perhaps a mistake to bypass St. Vincents. As we passed the island, we found its
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