The town is about two streets wide and a mile or so long, directly behind a wide white power sand beach. The cruise ship docks are on the east side of town. And, the cruise ships were in and the beach was packed. A group of Caribbean dancers and musicians were in a parade on the board walk and the restaurants on the town side of the walk were beginning to fill, even though it was still well before lunch. The main part of town had narrow pedestrian scaled streets with mainly one and two story well constructed shops, with a european feel.
The wind was blowing from the north east at 22 nmh, and our trip along the east shore was windy. As shown on the charts the entry to the bay at Oyster Pond appeared tricky, particularly with a north east wind and seas of 8 ft that were present on that day. The entry is parallel to shore putting the 8ft seas on your beam as you enter a narrow channel. Once inside the bay was well protected. Leaving Oyster Pond we headed north Baie Orientale, Orient Bay as we called it. We had planned to have lunch at Club Orient. Club Orient is a clothing optional resort. After parking our car in the resort parking lot we headed down a path to the beach. The path was along the north side of the Resort. At the end of the path was a beach bar and restaurant to the left and to the right there were 100 of yellow umbrellas, three deep, stretching south in front of the Resort for a half of a mile. The beach was crowed with several hundred totally nude people, except for a few hats.
In the open beach front restaurant there was one couple, besides us and the restaurant servers, with clothing. Not only was everyone naked but everyone we saw had shaved all their body hair. We only saw a couple of nude sun blathers with tan lines. Everyone else was tan all over. These were serious nudists. Most were well over 50 and most were overweight. We didn't see any playmate pin up models. Shucks!
It was noon and the restaurant was busy with nude patrons sitting at the bar and tables talking. Finally a beach side table opened and we set down with nude blathers on a raised sand area beside the table, and nude restaurant patrons eating on tables on the other side of us. Even though we were the aliens, we eat lunch comfortably without anyone starring at us. If any of us had the urge to strip down and jump into the surf with these serious nudist, by the time lunch was done the urge was gone.
At the north end of Orient Bay is an anchorage behind Ilet Pinel that looked calm. It looked that there was a beach bar on the island. We could see the anchorages at Ilet Tintamarre beyond. The seas in these anchorages were rough. We next headed to Anse Marcel at northern end of the island. This was a beautiful cove with its own marina. The marina and the hotel are operated separately. Although there are two hotels in the cove one is in poor condition and appeared to have few if any guests. The second larger hotel, the Riu Palace has about 250 rooms, a series of beautifully laid out interconnected pools just behind the beach, and great beach. At the south end of the cove is a new up scaled beach bar and restaurant that is not connected to the hotels. In the right sea conditions it looked like a good anchorage. As we were thinking about coming around the island and anchoring in the cove, before leaving we checked with the hotel to inquire how much a day pass would be to use their facilities. The answer was $90 per day per person. The hotel appeared full and there were lots of guests at the pools and on the beach. They didn't appear to need or want outside business.
On the road down the western side of the Island we drove past the 50 plus restaurant on both sides of the narrow road that runs along the beach of Grand Case (more on Grand Case in a subsequent blog) and drove through Marigot, the principal city on the French Side. Marigot Bay includes the man made Fort St. Louis Marina. Although the wind was from the north east the same north swell we had ridden to St. Martin on was still running. The swell was about 3 ft in Marigot Bay and it was causing a significant surge in the Marina. Most boats in the marina were tied off with 2 to 3 lines on each tie to hold the boats against the significant back and forth jerking caused by the surge. One of the boats we saw had one of its two bow lines at one station, severed, surely from the jerking.
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