We have a French Plan!

We didn’t have the best night’s sleep, so we were a little late getting going on our walk today. We went up to the little hill behind us, you have to go a long way round to get up there, and we were rewarded with a stunning view. The highlight was seeing the Osprey again, with a fish on the exact same Electricity Pole. It is obviously a good vantage point over the water. I would love to see him actually catch the fish, I wonder if he fishes the same way as the Fish Eagle.

Rowan had found out yesterday that Martinique, a French territory is open to boats from the EU and we squeak in because Brexit hasn’t happened!! Rowan sent them an email and they said he had to fill in a form, which of course was only in French. He tried translating it with some of the neighbours who claimed they could speak French, but in the end it was Google Translate that saved the day. Within a couple of hours they had given us permission to enter, we will have to go into quarantine there for two weeks, but at least it is 800 miles in the right direction. The BVI has closed to outsiders until September, so very sadly we wont be seeing Lovat my nephew on this crossing but hope we may see him in June somewhere that has decided to open up. As we will not be able to enter Dominicon Republic, Peurto Rico or the Virgin Islands, it means a huge hop and we will have to do 5 days non stop sailing to our first point where we are allowed to anchor. We also unbelievably (as they get less frequent this time of year) have a weather window starting this Sunday. So suddenly we are galvanised into action. Of course it has risks but we have so few options open to us we have decided we must go for it while we can. Most of the yachts here have been to Martinique and say it is very nice, good facilities and healthcare should we come across the C Virus, plus they have a Nautitech dealer (the make of our boat) so hopefully we can get repairs and a few issues resolved there. Rowan has contacted the guy we get a weather forecast from, for a fee he looks at the weather and advises the route to take. I feel a little nervous as we will be on 2/3 hourly shifts for five solid days and knowing how knackered we were after two days of that I wonder how we will manage. Then I pull myself together and think of all the boats heading back to Europe – they have at least 6 weeks non stop sailing!

It was my turn to do the shop today and now we know we are leaving I had to make sure we had plenty of supplies as we have no idea when we will next get to a shop. I gave a lift to the new Cat captain, Hugh from Aberdeen. His 2 crew are young, the lad has been with him since they left England in August, they met the Norwegian crew girl in Cape Verde, and she joined them in the Caribbean, rather cute the two are now an item. They cycled (they have 2 fold up bikes on board) to the supermarket early and were able to keep us a place in the queue which I was very grateful for in this heat. It still took us an hour before getting in, but at least it meant shopping with very empty aisles so we could keep our distance from other shoppers. They are all keen divers, with dive bottles and compressors on board. Hugh does a lot of diving in Scotland, his son free dives up there, he reckons Turks & Caicos is the best place in the Caribbean to dive. Lucky them, they have seen hundreds of whales, that migrate past here in March. We most probably saw the last one breeching on our rush back from the Dominican Republic.

We had our usual social swim, Dennis the American didn’t make it out on his purple woggle today, which is a bit of a relief as we think he is very taken with Rowan, mainly because nobody really speaks to them……. maybe because of their Trump flag!!! The gossip today was that the Polish lady next door reported our swimming to the police, she took photos and posted it on facebook!

Today’s pool guests!

We had Bob around for dinner, to thank him for looking after us so well here at the marina. He is certainly a character , telling us all about his lovely young Dominican Republic girlfriends. Before lockdown he would go there once a month, that is about as much as he can handle!

We went to bed buzzing with lists of what we have to do on our last day tomorrow!