The entire night and morning the rain is pouring down with buckets. I had planned another swim with the turtles in the morning but everyone feels more like curling up in bed rather than jumping overboard. Even trying to convince them that while swimming they are also getting wet didn’t help… Until now we’ve barely had any squalls or rainy days, the weather has been fantastic. This day would have been great for me during my solo round the world voyage because I could catch so much freshwater. With the luxury of a watermaker, the appreciation of rain becomes a bit less which I think is a shame because it’s an amazing feature of nature to supply fresh drinking water. However, the weather doesn’t stop us from setting course to our new destination. We all put on our foul weather gear and beat through a couple of squalls which are fun and exciting as Guppy bashes through the waves and rain that is streaming down our faces. The rain sometimes is so hard that I like to steer with goggles, which causes some laughs but at least it’s warm rain 😉 

Around lunchtime, the squalls stop and a lovely wind with a blue sky accompanies us further. We have to sail high upwind so the speed isn’t great but we don’t care much. Sander decides it’s a good time to give his fishing skills another try again. And to everyone’s big surprise it doesn’t even take long before we see a big Mahi Mahi go for the bright yellow fake squid. Sander hauls it in while everyone is cheering him on, fresh fish for dinner, yes! We have just finished cleaning up when we spot a whale not far from Guppy, cruising towards St. Vincent. We watch the whale for a while as the sun is setting, casting a golden glow over the island. The night brings some rougher weather with more squalls and very shifty winds, which means we can’t hold our course and have to make a tack to get to Martinique. When morning comes and the sun dries our faces, I scrape a handful of salt from my face. Actually nice to have some challenging sailing again, become salty and see Guppy smash through the waves, but a bit tiring as well, haha. We arrive in Le Marin early afternoon. A very busy bay, and when I say busy I mean hundreds of yachts that we had to wind around to find a place to drop anchor. The bottom doesn’t have particularly good holding so we drag the anchor through most of the bay before finding a spot that has some sort of acceptable holding. Of course, here we also have to do another corona test and take an isolation period in account. However, we are allowed to go on land and also go to the supermarket. Being in Martinique is like having a breath of fresh air, there are lots of people on the streets, most of them not wearing a mask they are laughing and apparently we have just missed carnival last week. It’s like the only Corona they know here is drinkable and served cold. We had a couple of nice get-togethers with the family of the Turtle which has two teenagers on board and we have met before in Barbados. For us, Martinique also means stocking up on supplies. Here we also do our big grocery shopping for the next few months. There are big stores with good food and we definitely emptied a couple of supermarket shelves 😉  Since Guppy is anchored the dinghy is our car and it took quite a few runs up and down the bay to bring all of the food on board and then the rest of the day to stow it away. A hard day of work and I’m so proud of our young crew who have become such a good team to work together, not only in the fun things but also in the day to day tasks and big jobs like this massive grocery shopping. Tomorrow morning we will fuel up and set sail again. To St.Maarten this time 😉

Laura