Martinique O'o Lala

What a delightful island Martinique is. Martinique is the most northerly and largest of the Windward Islands and has been French since it was colonized. It is a part of France and feels it. It has excellent roads and government docks and appears to have a thriving economy. Unfortunately our sail from St. Lucia did not have favourable winds and we ended up motoring (Ron calls this his anti-mutiny mode) all of the 24 miles. The winds were around 25-30 gusting up to 45 and the seas were 2-3 meters with the occasional 5 meter swell, so it was an interesting ride. We had a number of crew that suffered from sea sickness, but I don’t want to name who. I will say that Fred is my hero as he would smile before feeding the fish and surprise us all by coming up smiling after.

We have had lots of fun trying to speak, understand and read French. Alex figures this would be a great place to come and live and do French Immersion. We have very much enjoyed the food; French bread, baguettes, chocolate croissants and chocolate bread, though it is feeling like too much good food.

Ron has spent a couple of days doing maintenance on the boat and we have spent some time on a wonderful white sand beach and exploring ashore shopping. Martinique has a lot of history with Mount Pelee at the northern tip. Mount Pelee erupted in 1902 killing almost 30,000 people. Jenessa has decided this would make a great social studies/science research project. So we hope to go explore the town of St. Pierre where there is still a lot of evidence of the explosion. Also Martinique was the birth place of Empress Josephine (Napoleon’s beloved) and there are tours of her family’s estate.

We will be sad to see Fred, Kendra, Justine & Dylan leave. We have had a lot of fun together and their visit was much, much too short. One of the things that we had a lot of fun with is riding the cross beam at the front of the boat while sailing in medium sized swells. It has been agreed by all that it compares to rides at Disney World. Alex has a pretty good sized bruise from sliding sideways and she is enjoying showing everybody.