19th to 21st February 2019
Our first experience of a busy anchorage. We found a spot between a few anchored boats and the mangroves, not too far from the supermarket-with-a-dinghy-dock. Given the shallow depth (1.6m where we dropped anchor) you don’t need a lot of scope/swinging room which is fortunate as the gaps we could see in the anchorage were not large! A few people have suggested we don’t swim in this anchorage, and there isn’t much ashore here for the kids, so we decided to make this a flying visit to check in and stock up.
Checking in to Martinique at the marina was easy enough. There’s a dinghy dock in the marina, as well as plenty of dinghies tied up at the roots of the pontoons, so I think it is safe to say they are anchored-yacht-friendly here. I brought along a copy of the forms (which can be downloaded from the marina website) and the office staff showed me how to upload it into their system before printing the form, stamping it, and collecting their 5 euros. Easy as can be, and I was on my way back to the boat in 5 minutes. By the time I got back to the boat I was nearly dry, too (having been caught in a downpour on the way to the marina).
The other big plus about this anchorage was the Leader Price supermarket which has its own dinghy dock. We dinghied over, tied up at the dock, did our shopping (good prices as they don’t really stock brand-name products, local produce where possible, great fresh selection as well as the things we needed to stock up on), took the two trollies back to the dock and unloaded them straight into the dinghy ready to ride back to the boat. Lovely 😊.
As we had decided not to swim, we got the kayaks out and both Charlotte and I had a turn at taking the two larger kids into the mangroves for a look around. They didn’t find the “mangrove monster” that they were looking for, but found an abundance of crab species including a very large family of sally lightfoots (their old favourites). We had a good look at how the mangrove roots are put together, chatted about what their contribution to the ecosystem and coastline was, examined leaves/branches and stopped a few times to look more closely at the wildlife… all the normal incidental learning stuff.
