Sailing to St Pierre Bay Martinique

Mount Pelée   

After our fabulous snorkel with turtles we left Anse Dufour at 1230 on Sunday 11 March. Leaving the small bay, we continued up the western coast of Martinique making our way closer to the Mount Pelée vocano at the northern tip of the island. With a 20 knot wind blowing from the east BV romped along with the log rarely reading below 8 knots.

Baie de Fort de France   

To our right we had a good view of the Baie de Fort de France with the northern coastline of it dominated by the built-up area of the island’s capital city, Fort de France. On the south side of the bay are a few nice anchorages at Trois Ilets. Empress Josephine (Napoleon’s wife) grew up here on a large estate near to Trois Ilets and the village is written up as being very picturesque. We would have liked to visit there too but we felt that we really needed to be making progress north so, Trois Ilets has been left for our next visit to the island.

Pitons du Carbet

As we worked our way north the scenery became more undulating, sculpted by volcanic activity. Despite its peak being hidden in cloud, the Mount Pelée volcano still dominated the skyline but looking into the bays we also saw the smaller peaks of Pitons du Carbet, Jardin de Balata and Bellefontaine.

Approaching St Pierre Bay   

Even relatively close into the coastline and the potential lee of the island we still made excellent progress covering the 15 mile passage in just 2½ hours including raising and lowering the anchor. We only lost the wind as we rounded the last headland on the approach to St Pierre Bay. St Pierre is more of a curve in the coastline than an enclosed bay but the shelter was fine.

Anchored off St Pierre   

The only issue we had is that the anchoring area is relatively restricted as there is only a narrow underwater shelf of around 4-10m depth before the depths increase rapidly. Finding a shallow enough spot to drop anchor meant that we had to be close in to the shore, but not so close that if we swung we’d go aground. Our initial selection proved not to be so good because we swung a bit too close to a dive boat on a permanent mooring for our comfort. Repositioning, we carefully selected a new spot to anchor having watched a Dutch yacht anchor just before us. He got quite grumpy because he thought that we had stopped BV over his anchor. Having told him that it was unacceptable to expect a 70 metre radius anchoring exclusion zone around his yacht, we gave him a stiff ignoring. Later on, we went snorkelling to check our anchor and took a quick look at his; it was 10 meters behind our transom, exactly where we had judged it to be.

St Pierre used to be the cultural, commercial and social centre of Martinique with a population of 30,000 but, in early May 1902, Mount Pelée erupted catastrophically wiping out the area. The volcano is still active but hasn't grumbled for many years and so we planned to spend a few nights in the bay exploring ashore and finding out about the history of the eruption.

St Pierre, Martinique