Marigot is a picture perfect cruisers hub filled with restaurants and dinghy docks, even a microbrewery. Apparently this was where a lot of the 1967 Doctor Doolittle was filmed. It would be a bustling and fun tourist town, if not for this pesky pandemic. As is, it felt like a ghost town, with almost no visible life aside from a couple of resort guests and staff. Jazz insisted on taking pictures from the dinghy of all the places we didn’t get to go to.
We anchored north of the channel, the only boat in a spot where there’s room for maybe six, or a dozen French boats. The south side is full of mooring balls, which seem to have spilled out from the central lagoon and which reportedly cost a shocking US$20 a night.
The central beach is nominally public, despite being right next to a resort hotel, and has a dinghy dock with an ominous warning posted in the form of derelict outboard engines. Message received: lock your boat.
So we were stymied in our goals of getting takeout food and beer, but we did manage to take a lovely hike. The trail cuts straight up the side of the mountain, among the most straight and direct sections of elevation gain that I’ve ever experienced. There was a rope handrail for a lot of it. The view over the bay is a nice reward. The descent is much more gradual, though it does pass through a currently-closed resort, and it was a stroke of luck that someone was around to open the locked gate for us.
We headed back to the boat for a lovely light dinner. Jazz cooked, so there was salad, and also cheese. And because it’s Christmas season, there were Christmas movies and even Christmas crackers, which Jazz had found at the gourmet Massy and was super excited about.
But there was nothing else to do here, and even the grocery store was closed, so we packed up and moved on. Though we would stop by again on our way out of the country, once Jazz had cast the appropriate candy cane bones and our Christmas tree had reached its final form.
