Anse Dufour Martinique

Raising our anchor in Grande Anse D’Arlet   

I finished drilling the bracket for the Duogen first thing in the morning when the chemical metal had had its full 15hrs to set properly and as soon as we had refitted the DuoGen [Ed: always a tense job, hanging over the stern holding a heavy weight and trying to accurately manoeuvre it so that the other person can secure it in its bracket with one pin!] we got BV ready to go. We were amazingly efficient and raised our anchor in Grande Anse D’Arlet at 1015 on Sunday 11 March to start heading north. 

Once we were clear of Grande Anse D’Arlet we could see Mount Pelée, the volcano in the northwestern part of Martinique. We’d sail up there later in the day but our initial passage was just 2 miles around the corner into one of the adjoining bays, Anse Dufour. 

Anse Dufour   

Anse Dufour is an attractive little bay with a small holiday village and whilst there were lots of people swimming and snorkelling, we were the only yacht anchored in the bay. 

Our main reason for coming to Anse Dufour was that we had read that the snorkelling here is particularly good. Almost as soon as the anchor was down we got our gear together and started swimming out to see if reality matched our pilot book’s claims. The middle of the bay is sand and weed and we glimpsed the odd turtle in that area. Around the edges of the bay we found rocks covered in all sorts of soft and hard corals. 

The whole area was teeming with brightly coloured small fish….. 

…. as well as having lots of interesting corals to look at. 

Nicky diving down to look at the coral on the rock wall   

On the north side of the bay there is another good snorkelling area. This is a little different though because instead of being rocky, there is an underwater wall covered in coral. To see it all we had to dive a little deeper than on the other side but the views were great on the way down and on the way back up to the surface. 

As we swam back to BV we were lucky enough to see several turtles in the middle of the bay. One was on the bottom sitting on a bed of weed quietly munching away; we didn’t want to disturb it by diving down to see it from closer up. Another was just too far away to get any reasonable pictures but the third one swam up to the surface right past us. It didn’t seem to be bothered about us at all. As you can see from the photos we got a fabulous close up view of it gliding along. 

Anse Dufour, Martinique