Martinique

After a long and turbulent history, Martinique, which is 80 km long and 30 km wide, is an Overseas French Department, a kind of French province. The baguette and croissants are not missing and the French language is the first audible characteristic. It is also an island where mass tourism has not yet struck.  The mountainous island has 2 main peaks, volcanic Mont Pelée in the North and Les Piton du Carbet in the central part. The island is of volcanic origin and the Pelée Volcano, in the Northwest, is still active.  In 1902, this volcano destroyed the then capital Saint-Pierre, killing about 30,000 people. The last eruption was in 1932. What strikes me most is that the whole island is beautifully green and that there are no miles of beaches, but that the coastline is dotted with bays and coves, covered with powder-fine sand, characteristic of the entire south and west coast. It is a pity that many beaches belong to the adjacent hotels. There are fishing villages with quaint houses in pretty pastel shades and some houses have beautiful colourful murals.

For sailors Martinique is an excellent yacht centre with many facilities. Some of the best workplaces in the Eastern Caribbean operate here. Jeroen has been to the Amel workshop several times with technical questions and has been actively collecting spare parts. Jeroen has also extensively checked all our stays, steel wires that are used to keep the mast of a boat upright, and discovered that a stay at our mizzen mast has a steel wire break. To be on the safe side, we had all rigging checked by a professional company. They also encountered a bad stay on the mizzen mast, which they will replace next Monday.  Something that was still missing from our boat was a good fishing rod for catching a tuna or a mahi-mahi and a harpoon for catching lobsters and snapper. To be able to live self-sufficiently for as long as possible, these two attributes are invaluable to us. Who will win the first fights?  Us or the fish?

We are often asked why we chose an Amel Super Maramu. Before we made the final decision to go sailing around the world, we followed a number of YouTube channels of different sailors with different boats. Among others from SV Delos (Amel Super Maramu 2000), sailing Florence (Oyster Heritage 37) and sailing Uma (Pearson 36).  Some years ago, we also followed the reports of Sally lightfoot (OVNI 435). We ourselves have experience in sailing Bavaria’s, Jeaneau and Adria Event. A minimum headroom of 1.95 m indoors is especially important to us.  As a result, many boats fall off immediately.  Furthermore, safety and easy to sail by one person are high on our wish list.  An Amel Super Maramu and OVNI were left as good possible options.  Ultimately, the final choice has become an Amel Super Maramu because the focus on board an Amel Super Maramu is mainly on long sailing trips, comfort and convenience.  Standard equipment includes generator, 2 refrigerators, freezer, washing machine, large water tank (1000L), water maker and air conditioning. The same philosophy applies on deck and the boat is designed to be operated from a well-protected central cockpit by one person who can lift no more than 30 kilos. Both the in-mast mainsail and the headsail are operated with electric furlers via a joystick, the smaller mizzen sail in the aft mast is manually rolled out of the mast by means of a winch handle.  The sheet winches for the headsail are electric. The electric windlass, like the integrated anchor chain spool system and retractable bow thruster to aid mooring, can be operated from the cockpit. Equipment lists like this often translate into a lot of maintenance and repair headaches, but Amel overcomes this as much as possible by making all original system installations standard and identical.  To ensure systems are accessible and easy to maintain, these are all installed under the cockpit in a large engine room with almost headroom in front of us.  In addition, Amel provides good technical support for the owners of its boats and has service centers in both Europe and the US that are staffed by certified technicians.  This was also very noticeable in Martinique, where extensive time was taken to answer all questions that Jeroen had.

The next week we will stay in Martinique. After all necessary repairs and maintenance have been done, we will rent a car for one or two days before sailing on to explore Martinique by land. Martinique has beautiful walking areas through tropical forests with beautiful flora and fauna that is interspersed with sugar cane fields and banana plantations and during the many beautiful sunsets everything turns red, orange and yellow. Breath-taking.