A walk on the wild side -
cruising the exposed East coast of Martinique

Christmas over, I persuaded our good friends Drury and Jenifer to join us in exploring the East coast of Martinique with their Lagoon 38 catamaran Allways Sunday. Not many cruisers go there as it's exposed to the Atlantic rollers and strewn with reefs. But it promised lovely bays and I had a great pilot book written by Jerome Noubert who has spent years gunkholing around all the anchorages of the island. The winds and swells were light, so this was a good time to go...

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	The main area of interest to me was the Caravelle peninsula, reached after a 20 mile plug to windward from St. Pierre, on the other side of the island. The outer bay, Treasure, has anchoring restrictions, but the inner bay proved a wonderfully calm and huge anchorage with few other visiting boats around.
	Treasure Bay, viewed from the hills above. It was a long and exciting dinghy ride bucketing into the swells to get into the bay, but once there we found a lovely dinghy dock which got us started on one of the best walks in the Caribbean.
	The tangled roots of mangrove go for hundreds of yards. Luckily there is a fine wooden boardwalk to make the start of the walk easy.
	There's very little tide here - less than two feet. But enough to create this strange Dali-esque lunartic landscape.
	Ever made eyeball contact with a hermit crab? You can now - just click the pic. We found dozens of these scuttling around the in undergrowth.
	Drury and Jenifer admire the view out over the Atlantic from the peninsula's East coast
	Some parts of this lee shore are very rugged - you would not want to make landfall here!
	Leonie and Drury gaze at the turbulent waters below
	The whole walk was only about 4 miles but seemed longer with the wiggly bits and ups and downs. It certainly took longer than we thought - about 3 hours. Here we are struggling up the hill to the high point.
	The Caravelle lighthouse dominates the peninsula and is a fine traditional building.
	Fantastic views South over Martinique.
	Drury and Jenifer on the viewing platform.
	The nearby town of Le Robert isn't grand, but we found it charming and the people really friendly.
	This is one of the few places where some fishermen still fish by sail alone.
	Allways Sunday plugs out against a rising sea. With the winds picking up and deadlines to make, we decided it was time to clear this exposed coast. We'd had a lovely time visiting Le Francois and the lovely old rum factory of Habitation Clement. Getting out was not so easy though as the entire coastline was strewn with pot buoys - strings of little water bottles. In two years of cruising we had never picked one up but here we picked up two lots in the space of an hour. I discovered the first when coming up from below I found our speed had dropped to 4 knots! The first one became badly jammed in our keel but luckily Drury sent a fishing boat over and I cut the end, got them to throw me a line which I tied on and they towed it out. The second one came off by itself. I'd like to visit this coast again, but next time I'll stay well offshore and then make a very careful approach!

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