Happy Children

Elizabeth is a mermaid. She now has the confidence to swim around the boat several times with no buoyancy aid, and will jump in fearlessly from the deck. Matthew has mixed views on swimming, but has finally been bought a lego set which has replaced the Nintendo as toy of choice. He is now reading confidently and selected a book in Bequia – Leroy the Lobster – which he reads most nights. He says “I like reading – can I have more books?"

Happy children with 'Happy Meal' - gah!

We dragged them through the rain forest on a recommended walk past the statue La Vierge des Marins. This edifice of the Virgin Mary ended up blasted onto the road below in the 1902 eruption. We picked up windfall mangoes from the gutter and ate the on the way up, before ascending down a trail through the Jardin des Papillons. It was a shame we had bought bread as it would have been quicker to swim back out to Croix des Gardes rather than walk to the town pier and the rib.

Eating windfall free mangos

Mum was happy too as I dived on a coupe of the ship wrecks in the bay. They have all now been marked by dive morrings with a submerged buoy at 5m for deco stops - very nice. I dived one we'd seen a dive boat on. The wreck started at 42m and was amazing. The hull was one of the steel ones and was intact and erect on teh sea bed - covered in corals. The French don't think twice about deco and there were telltale bare patches on the shot line at 3m intervals on the way up. The second one I tried has been called The Gabrielle. She was a 3 masted schooner, now reduced to a few piles of timbers on the sea bed. I was told the others are also in 35m of water and many are silted up now, but one's rudder still stands erect. We have one more night in France then it's off to the contrasts of the extremely poor Dominica.

Sunset at St. Pierre