Grand Case is, well, just grand.

It’s Tuesday morning and we are anchored off of Grand Case, a charming little French seaside town on St Martin. This spot is known for the many French restaurants and shops that line the waterfront, the largest concentration on the island, I’m told. It looks, well, very French. Not surprisingly, they even have a little bakery in town. Can I have another baguette please? Actually, yesterday I bought two…

The anchorage is a bit rolly but picturesque. There is a pretty impressive concrete pier to tie the dink up to complete with some pretty good sized waves breaking on the nearby beach. Getting off and on the dink can be a bit challenging with the surge and there is no way that many would brave the surf to land a dink on the beach. That’s Pandora off in the distance, center. There is also a small airport in town and every so often a plane comes in from over the water appearing to barely clear the main street and boats in the harbor. This one came in just a few moments ago. It sure looked like it was awfully close to clipping the buildings on shore. “Yes, please, I’ll have some landing gear with my foie gras.”Yesterday Brenda and I walked downtown to look in the shops. It’s a pretty town. Very quaint. And yes, it looks very French. Funny thing. A little Catholic church right in town. Oddly, I hear that they do the entire service in French. Why is that, I wonder? It’s pretty amazing, even the little kids have learned to speak French here. I never learned. Too hard. This is where we are having dinner tonight with friends. Even this place is French. Go figure. Most of the restaurants have large tanks of lobster on display. These are bigger than they look.After our walk, more of a short stroll actually, we stopped for a drink at a bar near the town dock. The bar had set up a number of “samples” on the railing running down to the dock. It was a very inviting and creative way to show their wares, I thought. Just try that on a “public” pier in the US. “You can’t do that. Get those drinks off of private property. It violates the separation of government and private enterprise”. No wait, perhaps with Trump that will no longer be a problem for us. Something to look forward to. The view of the harbor as the sun went down was really nice and put even more “happy” in our “happy hour”. As the sun set behind the hills it was really beautiful off to the east.Pandora looked her best in the evening light.As we sat in the bar a few planes landed at the airport. It looked like we could nearly touch them as they passed overhead. “De plane, De plane!” If you get that joke, “you are really old now”. A beautiful view of town from aboard Pandora once the sun went down. Oh yeah, remember “whack-a-mole”? Well, he’s back at it again as my SSB and AIS both failed yesterday. Yacht repair in exotic places once again. I think I have tracked it down to a failed DC/DC converter. More to come on that. Besides, we will be back in Simpson Bay to pick up my mainsail as the new part for the batten will arrive tomorrow. I’ll have to try and get all of this fixed so we can make a run to St Barths over the weekend.