Commodore
May 11, 2020

Anse Noire

We woke up in the early hours to rain and Rowan had to get everything closed down. I find the port widows so hard to close, it really is a job for him!

Rain!

We left promptly after breakfast leaving behind a very wet and drab St Pierre. We thought we would go to one of the villages further south as we are heading to Le Marin a big Marina where our Nautitech dealer is meeting us Wednesday morning to look at our work list.

The villages didn’t appeal to us and Rowan had got the sail up, so we sailed past the huge bay of Fort de France thinking we would go back to Anse d’Arlet for the night. But then he spotted Anse Noire only had one boat in it, so we decided to have a look. It is a tiny bay with only one house on it, it is a difficult anchorage and can only fit 5 boats comfortably. It turned out there were 3 boats so we decided to give it a go. Our first attempt was not very good, so we picked the anchor up and moved further out. This time we felt we were a better distance from the other boats and holding, the only problem was the wind was gusting in all directions and because we are so light we were spinning around like crazy. Rowan went in with a snorkel and checked on the anchor which seemed to be well dug in. So all a success especially as we were welcomed in by an enormous turtle. It really is a quaint anchorage with steep slopes coming in on all 3 sides, no road down, just a staircase, the house is private and we suspect it has a road to it round the back of the gorge, but there is certainly no access to it.

Only house in the bay of Anse Noire

Once Rowan had his afternoon siesta we went in Jeldi Jeldi to the dock with our snorkelling gear. We decided to go for a walk first and then cool off when we got back with a snorkel. A lovely view from the top which has a road and a few houses that lead into the village in the next bay called Anse Dufour. It really was incredibly close and took us about 20 mins to walk up and over. The most incredible thing is that it has a white beach and Anse Noire has a very black volcanic beach. A very sweet unspoilt village with one or two restaurants which would have been wonderful to have experienced. Everything still looked pretty closed up despite the lock down easing.

We came back to our black beach and snorkelled from the beach to a big cave. It was lovely and clear and full of thousands of fish. No wonder the Pellies are having such a feast. There were huge schools of thousands of fish in each of varying size, each school going in the same direction, all darting about making incredible formations, sometimes coming right for us. A few would catch the light at a specific angle and they flashed an incredibly shiny silver, it really was a spectacle. The coral wasn’t too bad either with huge tubular pots that were rather interesting. We went into the cave, thankfully there was no current, just a lot of weed and not much to see and when we turned round to leave we discovered a huge turtle had followed us in. It was quite narrow so we just kept still while the turtle swum around and then headed out again, quite magical being that close, I could have touched it. The only sad thing was swimming over an enormous fish trap that must have had about 10 fish in it, poor things all frantic to get out. We saw two very big pipe fish who were swimming together all the time, obviously a very devoted couple! As we headed out the bay the water became full of debris and suddenly we could see loads of tiny jellyfish that had already stung us a little, so we hot footed it back to the beach. Such a wonderful way to end the day.

Sparkly black volcanic beach sand

The cave we swum into

It was such fun spending the afternoon watching the Pelicans dive bombing into the sea to catch fish, there were a loads of them perched in trees along the steep sides. I wonder if they are like woodpeckers and have especially adapted heads, to take the impact of the water. They seem such ungainly birds, but are actually very skilful, diving from incredible heights and other times just skimming the water.