Dock & Dine in Martinique

Martinique's dock-and-dine answer is unusually concrete, because one operator publishes a price for coming in without staying the night.

La Rade de Saint-Pierre — the organised mooring zone in front of the old capital — publishes a "stopover without overnight stay" day rate: €8.00 for boats to 29 feet, €10.00 from 30 to 49 feet, and €12.00 over 50 feet. That is a published tariff for picking up a buoy, going ashore for lunch and leaving before dark. Stay the night and the same buoy is €12, €15 or €18; a week is €65 to €100; a month is €162 to €210. The 50% multihull surcharge applies here too, and there is a €0.66 tourist tax per night. VAT of 8.5% is included, water is delivered afloat at €2.50 per 100 litres, and the office is open every day 08:00–12:00.

What you walk into at Saint-Pierre is the point. The operator's own page describes a market on the square facing the communal pontoon, grocery, healthcare, restaurants and bars a few steps from the water, and the town's ruins — the theatre, Cyparis' cell, the cathedral under restoration — under the volcano that destroyed it in 1902. Its buoys are "connected", fitted with sensors that detect a vessel's presence and departure.

At Le Marin the mechanism is the marina rather than the restaurant. The capitainerie publishes shops, restaurants, car and boat hire and a dry cleaner on site, a fuel pump and an ice machine on the quai d'honneur, and marine weather posted from eight in the morning. Cruisers' information goes out over the radio: the Martinique Cruisers Net runs three times a week on VHF channel 8 at 08:15, in English, for three-quarters of an hour — run partly by the capitainerie's own team, about life ashore and afloat and who to call for a repair.

Beyond those two, dining here works the way it always has: take a berth or a buoy, and go in by tender. The waterfronts at Le Marin, Sainte-Anne, the anses d'Arlets and Pointe du Bout are all walk-up from a dinghy dock.

And the tender is regulated, which catches people out. The gendarmerie's notice, published by the capitainerie, records a control campaign on the water at Le Marin and Sainte-Anne covering "la vitesse maximum autorisée (2 nœuds)", boat licences and identity papers, and — the one most boats fail — dinghy registration. The finding was that "la majorité des annexes ne portent pas d'immatriculation… de façon visible", and the notice states plainly that after the awareness phase, fines will follow. Put the boat's name or number on a tube or the transom before you run ashore for dinner.

So the working instruction for Martinique is: take a buoy or a berth, register the dinghy, and keep it to two knots. The chart below runs the island south to north — Sainte-Anne, the fuel dock and the yard at Le Marin, out through the pass, up past Pointe du Bout and Fort-de-France to Saint-Pierre — because that is the run a boat actually makes.