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Port of Call -St. Lucia to St. Croix -April 18, 2002
Position: Port of Call -St. Lucia to St. Croix -April 18, 2002 After St. Lucia we continued to visit more Leeward Islands. In the French Island of Martinique we anchored in the main harbor. This is a very large open bay. The main town is Fort of France, which is a large Metro city of 250,000. Very little English is spoken here, but we fortunately found an excellent taxi driver that learned English from his children. The city is very old but the island has well kept nice homes and a beautiful rainforest built around two large mountains, one of which is a smoking volcano. The volcano, Mt. Pelee, last erupted in 1902 killing 30,000 people in the capital town of St. Pierre. Only 1 person survived and only 4000 now live in St. Pierre. The capital was moved to Fort of France. The land created from the volcanic ash is now a large sugar cane plantation used only for producing rum. The modern mechanized rum factory had an excellent educational tour. The process is much different than the knowledge we know of the historic days of sugar cane plantations on St. Croix. Martinique was our first experience with the Euro dollar. The Franc has been converted to the Euro Dollar. $20 US was exchanged for $20.80 Euro. The US dollar was readily accepted if you could speak French. This exchange started on Jan 1, 2002. The local cashiers all have a difficult time making change as they learn to use the new currency. The Independent islands of the Caribbean are still using their individual money or the EC (Eastern Caribbean). Traveling further north up the Leeward Islands we passed Montserrat to view the devastation caused by the most recent eruption of a Caribbean volcano. More than half of the island is still evacuated and inhabitable as it is covered with volcanic ash. The Airport is closed after being partially covered with the lava flow. A beautiful remote Caribean Island destroyed by nature. Our last anchorage before reaching St. Croix was in Guadeloupe's Isles de Sainte's Harbor. This is definitely a destination as a tourist ferry stop from Guadeloupe. A quaint island full of shops and restaurants that closed at 6PM when the last ferry returned to Guadeloupe. From Montserrat we sailed directly to St. Croix arriving Sunday morning April 21, 2002. This completed our circumnavigation of the world. We have been traveling for five years, covered 100,000 miles, cruised to approximately 70 countries, in 4 oceans, thru numerous seas and enjoyed several hundred Ports of Call. We plan to keep sailing, as there is still much more to explore. |
