S/V Delilah

A Blog to track the wanderings of the S/V Delilah, a 37-foot Tayana sailboat.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Les Amis

Wednesday, December 13
Trois Ilets, Martinique

N 14 degrees, 32.730 minutes
W 061 degrees, 02.427 minutes

After a few weeks on our own, we've had a very social weekend in St. Anne, and a busy calendar. Highlights include an early Christmas brunch on Dreamweaver (I made a key lime pie from scratch), afternoons on the Club Med beach, viciously competitive card games on Dragonfly, southern cooking on Crossroads, dress shopping in St. Anne, a couple of long hikes along the coast, and bodysurfing at one of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean. We also went to a cocktail party on Rainbowrider, new friends who took us in for Thanksgiving. Rainbowrider is a spacious Lagoon catamaran. Gary and Linda invited about 16 people for drinks. Everybody came, and everybody fit comfortably in the cockpit, with room to spare.

Yesterday we tore ourselves away from St. Anne to try a few days in Trois Ilets, where the Empress Josephine was born and lived until she was 16. We started out so far east that most of yesterday's sail was downwind. We flew along with just the genoa out, snapping pictures of Crossroads and of Diamond Rock. Diamond Rock's claim to fame is that in 1804 the British managed to get a few cannon to the top of it and commissioned it as a ship. Looking at that barren, steep-sided lump of rock jutting out of the sea and surrounded, we are told, by hammerhead sharks, I feel for the crew of marines that were left to live on it for 18 months.

Unfortunately, because Trois Ilets is tucked into a protected part of the Fort de France area, the water is a bit stagnant and made murky by mangroves. We don't dare swim off the boat, so I'm not sure how long we'll last here, no matter how lovely it is on shore.

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