Sailing - Cartagena to San Blas

We left Cartagena just in time, just before our bodies turned to jello from inactivity and melted in the sun. It´s not that we were trying to be lazy, it´s just that it was too damn hot to do anything. Having long ago traded it´s dimmer switch to the benevolent sun of Northern latitudes, as soon as the sun pops over the horizon in Colombia it is on, blazing in full force. Cartagena is an awesome city, and would be even more so were it not for one thing, the heat - the blazing, sticky, hot-as-balls, too heavy to breathe, hard to move, melt you to the sidewalk, fry the eggs inside the chickens heat. Realizing that water and shade were the only two things that made the heat bearable, we left in search of water clean enough to swim in.

After getting a later start than we’d hoped for, we picked up the anchor and contemplated leaving it behind it was so covered in grossness. In the end we decided to keep it and just scrubbed all 200ft of anchor chain as it came up. Free at last, we slowly slid out of the anchorage (thanks to a very hairy prop) and crept over to the Islas Rosarios. Clean water at last!

Unfortunately all the hype we’d heard about the Rosarios proved to be just that. As soon as we’d relocated the billions of barnacles who’d hitched a ride on the bottom of our boat, we were outta there!

Christmas Eve we began by cutting glass. Slice sublimely though slippery, silent seas. By lunch we were sailing with dolphins. By dinner time we´d found the bottom where our chart said it wasn´t supposed to be and anchored off another set of islands, the San Bernardos. Christmas day was full of laundry (there´s nothing like washing clothes in a 5 gallon bucket of salt water), snorkeling and eating pork tenderloin fixed by Doug.

After Christmas we continued along the southern route to Panama and stopped at Isla Fuerte. The Colombian coast is infamous for its winds, but by staying south along the shore line we managed to miss them all, every last bit of breeze. Instead of struggling against 30 knot winds, we were motoring - motor sailing at best. Oh well.

Isla Fuerte was great! Friendly, beautiful, peaceful, safe. We spent Cody´s Birthday searching for sloths. We didn’t find any but we did have a great trek around the island. It was one of those place we probably could have gotten stuck for a while but, unfortunately, we had people to meet and things to do so we set sail to Panama.

There’s something breathtaking about watching mountains rice up from the blue ocean horizon through the early morning mist. Your breath becomes particularly hard to find, however, when you’re riding 15ft. swells into an unprotected anchorage surrounded by clandestine reefs and jagged rocks. Somehow we managed not to turn our boat into a 46 ft surf board, stop our momentum before we reached the beach and drop the anchor outside of Puerto Obaldia, Panama. Puerto Obaldia is a completely isolated, almost forgotten, ramshackle little border town that exists for the sole purpose of supporting immigration bureaucracy. It is surrounded by misty, jade, Oregon-esque mountains that break barely enough to allow for one sketchy runway and choppy green seas that beat at the one attempt at a dock. It´s a wild place with the jungle nibbling at its edges, but for the sake of bureaucracy it perseveres.

As soon as we hit the dock they had us filling out paperwork and it took 2 hours to get it all done. Finally, we´d filled out every form they had in the town and picked up our 4th crew member, Clive. We rocked and rolled back out of the bay, on to a more protected anchorage and into the San Blas.