Exploring St. Martin : The Beach

It is Take Tuesday, the photo series I am participating in, and the prompt for this week is “Something Blue”. Hmmm … Let’s see, what have I photographed recently that is blue?

As I mentioned yesterday, we stayed on the French side of St. Martin, more specifically at a hotel which was located along Orient Bay Beach.

All beaches on St. Martin are public so they aren’t ‘owned’ by any hotels and you can walk along them freely, and settle down with a blanket wherever you’d like. However if you want to sit in a comfortable lounge chair and have shade from an umbrella, you can rent those from some restaurants and small bars that have them set up on the beach. While our hotel was located across a little-traveled sandy road from the beach (about a minute’s walk) they had arranged for their guests to have access to chairs and umbrellas at no extra cost, which was nice.

We spent a few mornings on those chairs, reading, swimming and people watching, but towards the middle of our trip realized that we preferred a late afternoon ocean swim, after the beach chairs had been packed up for the night. So we would just walk a while, and then drop our towels, sandals and cover-ups somewhere on the sand, went go into the water.

We ended up swimming in the ocean every day we were there except for the arrival and departure days. It was absolutely glorious.

Being nude or topless was allowed on the beach so we quickly got used to seeing topless ladies, however we did have a bit of a laugh one day. We were sitting on those chairs when a party of two middle-aged, pale chubby couples walked by in all their naked glory. Eye spy with my little eye, I see something that is … ;)

And then there was the time we were walking along right towards a man wearing the most see-through yellow g-string bikini imaginable. At the time I was pointing at some cacti but got suddenly distracted and I guess I ended up looking like I was pointing at the man. Nick then made matters worse by laughing and telling me not to point, which made me laugh. So it must have appeared as though I was pointing and laughing.

Nick is an experienced sailor, so one day we rented this Hobie Cat sailboat and took it out for a ride. It’s not up in the photo, but this type of boat has a second sail (called a jib) at the front, and I became his skipper handling that sail, while he managed the big sail and steered. The wind was great so we were really moving. It was a blast! We saw a couple of huge sea turtles and lots of jumping fish that sparkled in the sunshine.

A funny outcome from our sail is that, while I was fully covered in sunscreen, I had to kneel on the tarp between the pontoons, to work the jib whenever we made a turn. This resulted in the sunscreen washing off of my knees so I ended up with a slight sunburn on my knees only!

Aside from that, I managed to avoid sunburn for the whole 10 days. While I absolutely adore going to the beach and swimming in the ocean, I don’t do any sunbathing because I have skin that just won’t get a tan. I turn red and blotchy and there is nothing attractive about that! Nick on the other hand, soaks up colour like a magnet, in spite of wearing sunscreen, because he is part Spanish.

On the last full day of our trip we joined a group and took a boat to the reef along one of the islands you can see in the pictures, where there was a Marine Reserve, where we went snorkeling. We saw some beautiful fish, sea urchins, conches, and a gorgeous variety of corals. The other people on our boat were actually going scuba diving and they saw a shark. It was only a small one (about a metre and a quarter), but still.

Thanks for visiting.
loulou