La Gamelle Touches the Caribbean

The La Gamelle Syndicate’s Olson 30 has made it, thanks to a combination of Dudley Yacht Transport and Dockwise Yacht Transport, from Alameda to Martinique via Florida. All that remains for her to reach her final goal of St. Barth in the French West Indies to live out her days as a daysailor is for the Wanderer and Doña de Mallorca to deliver her the 250 miles on a close-to-broad reach to St. Barth. As it stands now, the weather looks good — 12 to 18 knots — for a three or four-day voyage with stops at St. Pierre — the ‘Paris of the Caribbean’ until it was totally destroyed in massive walls of red hot lava — Isle de Saintes (Guadeloupe), and who knows, maybe Antigua and/or Nevis, too.

There are two words that describe Martinique: Green and expensive. The former is expected in the Caribbean, but not a 20-minute cab ride to La Marine that cost $120. And no, there aren’t any buses. Everything else is expensive in Martinique, too. We’d say the same style of cruising in Martinique would cost five times as much as in Mexico. Not that you have to dine out a couple of times a week or eat anything but baguettes.

It’s always great to see old friends. The first one we saw was about the first boat we saw in La Marine, which has about 8,000 boats. She was Elmo’s Fire, a sistership to Latitude‘s old Ocean 71 Big O, which spent a lot of time in Sausalito under Northern California ownership. We’re happy to report that she looks to be in excellent condition, and appears to have new masts. The other old friend is Siam, an exotic-looking — dashing facial hair and pony tail wrapped in a bandana — catamaran skipper we know from St. Barth. It was great to see him, and he’s been a big help so far. For example, he went through the dead battery dumpster for us looking for just one battery that had an ounce of life left. Hey, you’d dumpster dive too if the least expensive battery was $140. Siam struck out, but it was great to see him.

We’ll have more about this adventure in the May issue. But you can follow the progress of La Gamelle through the Spot updates we send to our Facebook page.

Ed. note: The Wanderer and de Mallorca left Martinique yesterday morning. Their last position report put them at the northern end of the island.