St Martin




This morning at 7.45 after breakfast we pulled the anchor up and crossed the Simpson Bay Lagoon to the french side. At 08.15 the drawbridge opened and we went into Marigot Bay. We dropped the anchor here to clear in.

Customs and Immigration are at the ferry docks and so i went there by dinghy. After typing in all the details (Yes, the french system does NOT support saving the data like with eSeaClear.com) i printed the information out and the customs officer realized that the toner cartridge was empty.

No problem, i will wait until he changed it BUT he did not have another one. So he told me i should go to marina Fort Luis to clear in there. Usually they do it only for marina guests but he would call them.

So i walked there and they did not know anything. The lady had to call her supervisor and then i could clear in. Guess what: YES, i had to type everything again. Now they told me it is NOT possible to clear in and out at the same time so i have to type all of that again tomorrow!
And they charged 15 EUR for that! Maybe it is for new toner?
Good that this is the last french island on this trip!

Now we are flying the french flag again and went north to La Grande Case where we anchor with only around half a dozen other boats.
There is no free wifi (yeah, we are in France) but i still have some money in my paypal account and so i purchased 24hours.

The good thing here is the clear water and there is no swell since the wind currently is quite southerly. That is good for Ralf who might be already on the way to St Thomas from Grenada. We hope to meet him there.

Talking more about clearances with foreign countries, i already did the ESTA clearance online for the US Virgin islands. Within one second you get a response which could be one of the 3:
-Accepted, in progress (might be up to 72hours) or rejected. Of course we got accepted.
This is now vaild for at least 2 years.

For the flight to Miami (yeah we are flying to Miami from St Thomas) i also did the APIS registration. It is nice to be able to do that over the internet.

The big trimaran on the picture is the Pilar Rossi, a yacht which has been converted into a trimaran later and has been through several refits to be now around 64m long and fast!

On the propeller you can see the marine growth of around 5 weeks in tropical water. Our antifouling is still ok on the hull but the props did not have any protection.

Looks like i need to dive and clean them!

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