Next stop…
Cartagena, Colombia
We ended up in Cartagena for two main reasons: (1) It´s a convenient place to stop and provision before the San Blas Islands in Panama, (2) Fatty Goodlander (travel writer and sea gypsy extraordinaire) told Doug it was his favourite city in the world. The first being a relatively mute point in determining our affinity towards the city, all we could do was hope that Fatty had some idea what he was talking about.
On our first forays through the city, we were continually impressed. The city was vibrant and beautiful; Technicolor colonial streets with horse drawn carriages meander a short distance from modern high-rises striving for South Beach status. The people were friendly and respectful. There were grand, modern art depictions of Christmas decorations in the city centers and more Colombian tourists than foreigners (except on Cruise ship days). Neatly pressed cops protected every corner but, unlike the AK-47 toting 14 year-olds you find in the rest Latin America, very few of them even carried guns. The parks were alive in the evenings with families enjoying the cooler temperatures. It was nothing like the country that US news sources call ¨Colombia.¨ It turns out that the sea gypsy who´s in the middle of his 2nd circumnavigation may have learned a thing or two along the way.
Cartagena was founded in the1500s by the Spanish to be the capital of ¨The Spanish Lake¨ (aka the Caribbean). Because of its protected location, it was never captured and burned like many other Spanish cities of the time. Cartagena today is lively mix of old and new where economic growth nestles up against historic tradition, and modern ideals mold to colonial systems. Bearing witness to the fact that Colombia´s the fastest growing economy in South America, Cartagena is full of signs of ¨successful¨ economic development; land rovers and large scale development projects dot the city. However, as is often the case in Latin America, development has not come equally. The paint-by-number social caste system, a hangover from colonial days, seems to greatly influence ones ability to successfully develop in this city. Porches rule some streets while a couple blocks away, Technicolor school busses still dominate. Nice, new trash trucks adorned with giant sea horses and run-down old horses both haul garbage through the city streets. Corrugated tin shacks housing entire families struggle to maintain their integrity next to sparkling over-sized grocery stores with more security than an international airport. While on the surface the city seems to exist peacefully with itself, on second glance, there are glaring social crevasses precariously held in place.
The anchorage at Cartagena is urban cruising at its best. Navy ships on one side, a container ship loading dock on the other and high-rises lining the horizon and only a 15 minute walk to the historic center of the city. Besides the fact that if you fell overboard you might come up glowing green and infested with a multitude of mutant parasites, it´s a pretty ¨idyllic¨ urban anchorage.
We´ve been here two weeks now and, while we still really like Cartegena, the glasses aren´t quite as rose colored. The city is beautiful but if we were to really stay any longer we´d need to get jobs. We´re ready to move on. Ready to head to more desolate islands with quiet anchorages and clean water for swimming. Ready to leave the traffic behind for a slower pace of life. Ready to leave civilization behind for a while. Luckily we´re about to do just that.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Sailing Photos
Installing a radar reflector on mast. Not a bad view from up there either.
Morning light on the jib.
Moon above the mast in the morning light
Not the biggest mahi ever caught, but maybe the best tasting!
Scoping out the entrance to one of the 5 bays at 5 bays. A welcomed acorage in an amazing spot. Snow caped peaks would be off to the left of the picture.
Not a bad view from the galley
raging 40 ft swells (or maybe 4...)
solid fishing boat
Buenos Dias Cartegena!
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Bonaire Photos
Salt is still produced in large amounts on the south side of the island. 
One of four obelisks bult in the 1830´s along the south leeward shore. each one was a different color representing the location on shore where ships could pick up different grades of salt.
No climbing this fence! 
Look out! A Jaguar Shark!
Cody preparing the gear at yet another desolate dive site at Whashington-Slaagbi park.
Cody slowly descending into the crystal depths
This years christmas tree?
Some curious Horse- eye jacks.
Aaaarrggg!
Zach finally reaches enlightenment?
Cody training for the Navy Seals.
The rare and elusive sharp nosed eel. 
Tubular!Thursday, December 13, 2007
Sailing - Curaçao to Cartagena
After a few morning preparations, S/V Fellow Traveler and it´s excited crew set out for the 5 day passage from Curaçao to Cartagena, Colombia. In addition to Zach and I (the inexperienced yet enthusiastic new additions), the boat carried Doug (the captain) and David (the other crew who´d been on the boat for about a month already).
We set out from Curaçao about mid-morning under light winds and a brilliant blue sky. Zach was in love from the very beginning. My mind thought it was great - my stomach wasn´t so sure. Sometime about early afternoon we slid beyond the lee of the island and began our turbulent down-wind sleigh ride. That night we crept past Aruba and the sleeping herd of oil tankers anchored off shore. By sunrise of the second day it was nothing but blue; a blue boat bouncing on blue waves, bound for a blurry blue horizon, below a robbin´s-egg-blue sky. It was just us, the too-bright sun shining above, the billions of gallons of water churning below and the wind propelling us along. Aah, yes, blue water sailing at last. The next two days are a dizzy cerulean haze as we churned our way through a choppy blue existence. We napped, read, watched the boundless horizon for other boats, slept, ate, napped some more. At some point Zach caught lunch, a baby Mahi-Mahi, we can´t remember which day though.
At one point I wrote in my journal, ¨It sounds like I´m inside a washing machine. Laying here in the V-birth (the forward cabin), the boat bouncing through waves at a speedy 6.5 knots (7.5 mph), if I close my eyes I can imagine what a dirty sock might feel like. I´m not spinning quite as much, but my stomach couldn´t tell you that.
I am not a sailor. I´m from the mountains, the middle of the country, where the largest natural body of water is a puddle. Nor have I ´always dreamed of sailing.´ Yet, thanks to a philosophy of following life´s strange twists and turns where ever they may lead, I now find myself on a Morgan 46 half way through a 500 mile blue water passage from Curaçao to Colombia. People who circumnavigate the globe following the trade winds routinely say that the harshest conditions they encountered were along the Colombian coast. And here I am, a girl from the mountains with only a rudimentary understanding of sailing - armed to the teeth with medicine for sea sickness and still a little queasy.¨
On the third day (maybe...) the captain, Doug, came down below and announced with a slight chuckle,¨We just narrowly avoided a pirate attack.¨ What? Why does all the excitement always happen when I´m napping? Apparently a 70 ft. steel fishing boat sped rapidly over the horizon heading East. As it got closer, it hove to (stopped for a moment) and changed course to head more in our direction. It came along side of us at a distance of about 200 yds. (unheard of in these parts), at which point Doug, Zach and David all stood up on deck and waved. The guy on the deck of the ominous pirate vessel (appropriately named ¨Samurai¨) waved back and then the ship turned North East and sped off. Zach´s muscles must have scared them off. A little later Dough said in his off-hand, joking manner, ¨Well, I figured they had more firepower than I did and I couldn´t out run them, so we thought we´d try offering them ´la rubia.´ Sometimes you gotta make sacrifices.¨ Glad I could help out ...
After 3 days of sloshing around on our down-wind sleigh ride through choppy seas, we decided that a good night´s sleep at a calm anchorage was well deserved (we also needed to slow down a little so we weren´t arriving in Cartagena in the middle of the night). As the sun rose on the morning of the fourth day, the still-gentle rays reached out to illuminate first one and then another and another. A whole series of jagged mountain peaks lining the Colombian coast line. Under ordinary circumstances (whatever those might be) the sight would be breathtaking; but after several days of staring at nothing but a never-ending blue horizon, it seemed almost surreal in the soft morning light. We´d heard rumor of snow capped peaks floating in defiance above the Caribbean sea, and so we kept our eyes strained towards the heights pinnacles in hopes of glimpsing these frozen memories of another world. As the sun slid sleepily over the horizon, sure enough, we could see from our little boat bobbing in the Caribbean, snow capped peaks at 17,000+ ft. In the just-dawn chill, looking at the peaks from the forward hatch of the sailboat, I might have thought we´d sailed to Norway in the night if I hadn´t known better. A couple of hours later, as we were still oooing and aaawing, we pulled into a beautiful bay surrounded on all sided by steep green hills and rocky cliffs. That afternoon (after another nap) we went to shore to check out the two restaurants and 3 dugout canoes that dotted the beach. Both Zach and I started feeling dizzy standing in a door way and had difficulty walking down the beach; after only three days at sea we´d become ¨drunken sailors¨ and forgotten how to walk!
After a good night´s sleep, we headed out to sea again, bobbing along like a toy boat in a rain gutter - down one wave and across another. The wind was up and there was a good current moving against us, causing the waves to grow and bringing white caps clambering to the top. And then the wind shifted, we moved into a broad reach and started flying along. We reefed the main, furlled the jib and, with only enough canvas out to keep us on course, were still flying along at 6 knots! We´d be in Cartagena long before sunrise at the speed. You don´t generally think of sailors praying for no wind, but that´s what we were doing as the sun set that evening. Luckily, Mother Nature listened and we slowed down just enough during the night. We slid along the coast in the darkness, inching our way towards the lights of Cartagena in the distance. Finally, the sun poked its nose above the highrises and gave us enough light to slip through the 20ft. wide opening in the chanel (a wall was built across the rest of it to keep enemy ships out). The four of us had traveled 500 miles, propelled by the forces of the earth, and were ushered by the rising sun into Cartagena, Colombia.
We set out from Curaçao about mid-morning under light winds and a brilliant blue sky. Zach was in love from the very beginning. My mind thought it was great - my stomach wasn´t so sure. Sometime about early afternoon we slid beyond the lee of the island and began our turbulent down-wind sleigh ride. That night we crept past Aruba and the sleeping herd of oil tankers anchored off shore. By sunrise of the second day it was nothing but blue; a blue boat bouncing on blue waves, bound for a blurry blue horizon, below a robbin´s-egg-blue sky. It was just us, the too-bright sun shining above, the billions of gallons of water churning below and the wind propelling us along. Aah, yes, blue water sailing at last. The next two days are a dizzy cerulean haze as we churned our way through a choppy blue existence. We napped, read, watched the boundless horizon for other boats, slept, ate, napped some more. At some point Zach caught lunch, a baby Mahi-Mahi, we can´t remember which day though.
At one point I wrote in my journal, ¨It sounds like I´m inside a washing machine. Laying here in the V-birth (the forward cabin), the boat bouncing through waves at a speedy 6.5 knots (7.5 mph), if I close my eyes I can imagine what a dirty sock might feel like. I´m not spinning quite as much, but my stomach couldn´t tell you that.
I am not a sailor. I´m from the mountains, the middle of the country, where the largest natural body of water is a puddle. Nor have I ´always dreamed of sailing.´ Yet, thanks to a philosophy of following life´s strange twists and turns where ever they may lead, I now find myself on a Morgan 46 half way through a 500 mile blue water passage from Curaçao to Colombia. People who circumnavigate the globe following the trade winds routinely say that the harshest conditions they encountered were along the Colombian coast. And here I am, a girl from the mountains with only a rudimentary understanding of sailing - armed to the teeth with medicine for sea sickness and still a little queasy.¨
On the third day (maybe...) the captain, Doug, came down below and announced with a slight chuckle,¨We just narrowly avoided a pirate attack.¨ What? Why does all the excitement always happen when I´m napping? Apparently a 70 ft. steel fishing boat sped rapidly over the horizon heading East. As it got closer, it hove to (stopped for a moment) and changed course to head more in our direction. It came along side of us at a distance of about 200 yds. (unheard of in these parts), at which point Doug, Zach and David all stood up on deck and waved. The guy on the deck of the ominous pirate vessel (appropriately named ¨Samurai¨) waved back and then the ship turned North East and sped off. Zach´s muscles must have scared them off. A little later Dough said in his off-hand, joking manner, ¨Well, I figured they had more firepower than I did and I couldn´t out run them, so we thought we´d try offering them ´la rubia.´ Sometimes you gotta make sacrifices.¨ Glad I could help out ...
After 3 days of sloshing around on our down-wind sleigh ride through choppy seas, we decided that a good night´s sleep at a calm anchorage was well deserved (we also needed to slow down a little so we weren´t arriving in Cartagena in the middle of the night). As the sun rose on the morning of the fourth day, the still-gentle rays reached out to illuminate first one and then another and another. A whole series of jagged mountain peaks lining the Colombian coast line. Under ordinary circumstances (whatever those might be) the sight would be breathtaking; but after several days of staring at nothing but a never-ending blue horizon, it seemed almost surreal in the soft morning light. We´d heard rumor of snow capped peaks floating in defiance above the Caribbean sea, and so we kept our eyes strained towards the heights pinnacles in hopes of glimpsing these frozen memories of another world. As the sun slid sleepily over the horizon, sure enough, we could see from our little boat bobbing in the Caribbean, snow capped peaks at 17,000+ ft. In the just-dawn chill, looking at the peaks from the forward hatch of the sailboat, I might have thought we´d sailed to Norway in the night if I hadn´t known better. A couple of hours later, as we were still oooing and aaawing, we pulled into a beautiful bay surrounded on all sided by steep green hills and rocky cliffs. That afternoon (after another nap) we went to shore to check out the two restaurants and 3 dugout canoes that dotted the beach. Both Zach and I started feeling dizzy standing in a door way and had difficulty walking down the beach; after only three days at sea we´d become ¨drunken sailors¨ and forgotten how to walk!
After a good night´s sleep, we headed out to sea again, bobbing along like a toy boat in a rain gutter - down one wave and across another. The wind was up and there was a good current moving against us, causing the waves to grow and bringing white caps clambering to the top. And then the wind shifted, we moved into a broad reach and started flying along. We reefed the main, furlled the jib and, with only enough canvas out to keep us on course, were still flying along at 6 knots! We´d be in Cartagena long before sunrise at the speed. You don´t generally think of sailors praying for no wind, but that´s what we were doing as the sun set that evening. Luckily, Mother Nature listened and we slowed down just enough during the night. We slid along the coast in the darkness, inching our way towards the lights of Cartagena in the distance. Finally, the sun poked its nose above the highrises and gave us enough light to slip through the 20ft. wide opening in the chanel (a wall was built across the rest of it to keep enemy ships out). The four of us had traveled 500 miles, propelled by the forces of the earth, and were ushered by the rising sun into Cartagena, Colombia.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Bonaire
Well, the adventure has begun.
First stop - Bonaire, diver´s paradise and starkly beautiful desert island in the Netherlands Antilles (just north of Venezuela).
Above water the island looked like an informal merger between the western US, Florida and the moon.
Stringy cactus towered above the trees and fenced in yards of white coral. Rocky deserts stretched for miles and abruptly dropped off into crystal clear blue water. Fresh water lakes dotted with bright pink flamingos hung peacefully between mountains and jagged cliffs. It was very beautiful in its own unusual way.
Below the water a completely different and equally impressive world began. Every dive began with a short swim through the shallows that quickly dropped off into a crystal clear abyss, the edge of it meticulously decorated by an incredible coral garden. It was like diving through the most incredibly crafted aquarium or the most breathtaking scene of a Blue Planet video - only better! The reefs were healthy and huge and looked like something Dr. Seuss would have drawn or Tom Robbins would have described. Drip-castle corals drooling down the wall. Giant fungus shaped corals elegantly reaching towards the deep. Spheres of brain coral proudly contrasting the drooping reef with their perfect symmetry. Soft gorgonians, standing tall and thin among the hard corals, gently swaying their hips with the current.
With the blatant arrogance of a holy cow in India, the fish paraded themselves in front of us, seemingly aware of their protected and worshiped state.
Turtles so close we could touch them. Eels on every dive (one tried to bite the camera while Zach was taking its picture). Porcupine fish (commonly known as puffer fish) swimming out in the open, tasting the water with their fleshy lips and closely watching everything with their strange alien eyes. White spotted file fish drunkenly swimming sideways. Schools of Horse-Eyed Jacks, Spanish Mackrel, Needle Fish, Black Durgeons, a rare Sharp-Nosed Eel, even a Manta Ray (well, Zach saw it anyway) all set against a back drop of huge, beautiful coral and water that brazenly excedded the universally accepted standards of the World Wide Levels of Water Clarity Act of 1829.
All in all, it was a great week in a gorgeous place.
First stop - Bonaire, diver´s paradise and starkly beautiful desert island in the Netherlands Antilles (just north of Venezuela).
Above water the island looked like an informal merger between the western US, Florida and the moon.
Stringy cactus towered above the trees and fenced in yards of white coral. Rocky deserts stretched for miles and abruptly dropped off into crystal clear blue water. Fresh water lakes dotted with bright pink flamingos hung peacefully between mountains and jagged cliffs. It was very beautiful in its own unusual way.Below the water a completely different and equally impressive world began. Every dive began with a short swim through the shallows that quickly dropped off into a crystal clear abyss, the edge of it meticulously decorated by an incredible coral garden. It was like diving through the most incredibly crafted aquarium or the most breathtaking scene of a Blue Planet video - only better! The reefs were healthy and huge and looked like something Dr. Seuss would have drawn or Tom Robbins would have described. Drip-castle corals drooling down the wall. Giant fungus shaped corals elegantly reaching towards the deep. Spheres of brain coral proudly contrasting the drooping reef with their perfect symmetry. Soft gorgonians, standing tall and thin among the hard corals, gently swaying their hips with the current.
With the blatant arrogance of a holy cow in India, the fish paraded themselves in front of us, seemingly aware of their protected and worshiped state.
Turtles so close we could touch them. Eels on every dive (one tried to bite the camera while Zach was taking its picture). Porcupine fish (commonly known as puffer fish) swimming out in the open, tasting the water with their fleshy lips and closely watching everything with their strange alien eyes. White spotted file fish drunkenly swimming sideways. Schools of Horse-Eyed Jacks, Spanish Mackrel, Needle Fish, Black Durgeons, a rare Sharp-Nosed Eel, even a Manta Ray (well, Zach saw it anyway) all set against a back drop of huge, beautiful coral and water that brazenly excedded the universally accepted standards of the World Wide Levels of Water Clarity Act of 1829.All in all, it was a great week in a gorgeous place.
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