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La Gamelle Touches the Caribbean

The heck with ‘Where’s Waldo’, where’s La Gamelle? This already being late in the season, most boats aboard the Dockwise ship had been picked up in Florida or St. Thomas for shipment to the Med. Sixteen more Med-bound boats were loaded aboard in La Marine.

latitude/Richard
©2012 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

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.

That it’s a small world was proven once again by the fact that the first boat we saw in the massive boat haven of La Marine was Elmo’s Fire, an Ocean 71 ketch that was based out of Sausalito for a long time. Somebody has been giving her the care such a great design richly deserves.

latitude/Richard
©2012 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

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.

Doña de Mallorca at the helm of La Gamelle waves adios to the long Dockwise ship which, thanks to just coming out of the yard, looked great. Thanks to a bad back, we were having a heck of a time mounting the Honda 5-hp on La Gamelle’s outboard bracket, then getting it lowered. So this Ukrainian guy in an orange jumpsuit asked if he could help, and he ended up doing all the heavy lifting. He was not only a really nice guy, we later found out that he was the captain of the ship!

latitude/Richard
© Latitude 38 Media, LLC

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.

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"As we were headed to South Beach Harbor on Saturday morning, we saw two antique-looking tall ships leaving the City and heading toward Sausalito," writes Jan Wigle of the Brickyard Cove-based Ericson 38 Wiggle Room.
Since many long-term cruisers now have their own blogs — which tend to detail every tiny moment of every single day of their travels — sailors new to the cruising life may find themselves smothered under an avalanche of information, in contrast to a couple of decades ago when topical cruising info was relatively hard to find.