We rolled up on Martinique like we owned the place, dropped the hook and then what? We sat in silence for about an hour and stared at shit while our minds and bodies caught up with each other.
When a meat-bag body gets tossed about for 23 days at sea and suddenly stops, there a thing that happens. It’s as if the imaginary parts of your body, the parts that dwell in the mind, keep going at the same rate as the sea while your physical self is anchored with the boat. It’s a reality shift and it takes a while for the two parts to catch up with each other. My (James’) mind was still traveling through the Milky Way galaxy at the relentless pace of the multiverse while my bruised and battered meat-sack recoiled from the sudden relative stop. It was beautiful and terrifying… It was calm and chaotic… It was and still is an altered state of being that words will ultimately fail at describing.
23 days at sea from Africa to the Caribbean on a single downwind run is a life-changing experience and, when it’s over and done, what the fuck do you do next?
Grocery shopping, of course!
We weighed anchor after coffee to do an exploration trip of the inner harbor on the southern most part of the island of Martinique, a highly protected bay known as Le Marin. If you look at a satellite view of Le Marin, it’s mind boggling how many boats are packed in that tiny little bay on any given day but we figured it was worth it to at least check it out.
The first place we anchored, Sainte-Anne, was protected by the island but wide open to the north and the east. There were well over a hundred boats anchored off the beach and we settled in about a half a nautical mile from a dinghy dock.
Because we ran out of almost all of our provisions on the crossing from Cabo Verde, we knew we were going to need quite a few trips to the local grocery stores. It was worth it to at least check out Le Marin to see if we could get closer to provisioning.
Well, man did that pan out! The big local discount supermarket in Le Marin actually has a dinghy dock that we managed to anchor about 600m from. We launched the dinghy and rowed in but didn’t even look at our provisioning list. We tried to find an open restaurant but Martinique in a civilized island so they siesta for about three hours every day, right about the time we went on the hunt for food.
We got about a quarter of a mile from the dinghy dock/grocery store and realized we hadn’t walked over 15 feet in a stretch for almost a month. We’d best just get our basics (bread, eggs, butter and rum) and get our out-of-shape asses back out at anchor where we belong. On the way back, we stopped at a creepy chain “taco” shack and paid way too much for a fish wrap that kind of tasted like velveeta, paper, and mayonnaise… who puts french fries on a taco?
We got back to the boat and began the chilling process that we so desperately needed. Let me tell you folks, it was an awesome experiences!
So now we re-begin the routines of our lives…
Finding stuff, getting stuff, and putting stuff away.
So here we sit…at the top of the food chain, in the second decade of the 21st century… taking our pick from the flora et fauna and we still decide who lives and who dies.
We humans move through the multiverse as if we own the place and yet our mortality is spelled out to our ignorance on the daily and yet it’s so spinningly beautiful that sometimes it hurts so bad that we freeze in place and yet can’t resist the motion of the world we’re on among the planets and suns and stretched out arms of this galaxy among all the fuzzy-looking fascinations that are the other galaxies…
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