Været i Marigot (French Saint Martin) i januar

January here is low to mid eighties with brief showers, and regulars name the one variable that decides your week: the Christmas winds, the reinforced trades that blow through December and January and make some days genuinely blustery. Our column reads 30 kph as a monthly average, which is why the local advice is a map rather than a forecast - the west-facing beaches shelter and the east-facing ones take it. Rain looks frequent at 10.5 days but totals 28.6mm, under three millimetres a time, which is their ten-to-fifteen-minute shower and then sun. Air is 29.1C over 23.7C and the sea 26.4C, a degree under the 81F they quote. The record: humidity 77 percent, 10.4 hours of sun and AQI 38.

St. Martin's forum describes September as generally sunny day after day, hot and humid, with scattered 20-30 minute showers - often at night - rather than sustained rain. It's also the height of hurricane season (August through October are the most active months), so travel insurance gets recommended repeatedly. Marigot's French-side restaurant scene thins out noticeably in September as many close for the month, though posters said there's still enough open to eat well, just without the full peak-season variety - the trade-off being a genuinely quiet, uncrowded month for whatever stays open.

Forum posters call early March a genuinely nice time weather-wise, though it lands squarely in peak season - the Heineken Regatta (March 6-9 in a recent year) and SXM Music Festival (March 12-16) bring real crowds, mostly concentrated around Simpson Bay rather than blanketing the whole island. Marigot itself, on the French side, is described as distinctly low-key and French rather than typical Caribbean-touristy - fine restaurants, sidewalk shopping and an open-air market, with posters specifically noting the absence of the T-shirt-shop hawking common elsewhere in the Caribbean. One-way traffic and general congestion in town are called out as a genuine annoyance worth planning around, and a short ferry ride over to nearby Anguilla (Shoal Bay specifically) is a commonly recommended day trip from Marigot.