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.