Commodore
May 5, 2020

Hitting the capital city Fort-de-France

We left pretty early for us, and were heading out to sea by 7:30, catching the morning light and passing Grande Anse where we walked to a couple of days ago.

Leaving Anse d’Arlet

Passing Grande Anse where we walked to

As we rounded the corner into the huge bay of Fort-de-France we saw a huge pod of dolphins swimming past, hundreds of them, a very small variety. It was so nice to see, on our whole trip we have only seen them on a couple of occasions and then just one or two at a time.

We arrived mid morning at the city anchoring, right underneath the Fort. Looks quite an old fort and is still in use, it is the base for all the naval boats we have been seeing out and about. We spotted Greg and Jan’s boat which was in the middle of about 10 boats, we are much more cautious and kept to the edge.

Greg and Jan’s dark hulled boat in front of church steeple

We got all our dirty laundry into bags which wasn’t too much as we had managed to get our washing machine working yesterday. A mystery to us why it was overloading the electrics the other day, the only thing we can think of is that is doesn’t like operating when on the move and bouncing about, maybe it causes a problem with the drum trying to spin. But we still had plenty of laundry including our bedding to do at the laundromat.

We went to the dingy dock with Jan and Greg, who showed us around. Jan and I took ages at the laundromat and the men bought the provisions, Jan was slightly worried as she says Greg wouldn’t stick 100% to the list and they were having us around for dinner tonight. It appears as if the lockdown is lifting here as quite a few shops other than essentials are open. The streets had a very European feel to them, dark narrow streets with the odd old building but otherwise mainly tatty modern shop frontages. Sadly the men were very disappointed with the Carrefour supermarket, but at least Rowan managed to replenish the gin and get lots of good looking cheese.

Got back to the boat and hung the wet laundry out, it was pretty windy and I wondered whether we would lose anything overboard. After about 20 mins it started raining and I was amazed to find all the washing was bone dry in that short time.

We went to over totheir very sleek monohulll at 6:30pm. The boat has a blue hull, is nearly 20 years old, made in Spain with loads of lovely wood work and does looks very elegant in the water. We sat inside as they don’t have much space outside, it was like sitting in a wooden panelled old pub. We had a delicious bouillabaisse washed down with three bottles of Rose! She had also made an impressive almond/mandarin cake. Such a treat. They then taught us how to play a dice game called Farkle, which I know Phoebe had wanted to teach us. It was great fun, even though poor Rowan had the worst luck with his dice! We now have another game to add to our repertoire!