Our Great Adventure : Cartegena

Beautiful Colombia

After we had recovered from the hike, we got down to business. Important decisions needed to be made. With about four months to go until my brother’s wedding in Halifax, two months left of strong trade winds, and five months until the start of the next hurricane season, we only had a handful of options:

Leave the boat in Panama. Panama is out of the hurricane zone and has a nice boatyard. However, if we went there now we would be stuck there until the end of hurricane season, another four months.
Leave the boat in Guatemala. Although technically in the hurricane zone, Guatemala has a very protected river, Rio Dulce, which offers suitable protection for storms. But we’d have the same problem as Option 1, and we’d really have to hustle to get here.
Leave the boat in Colombia. This is a nice one because we’re already in the country. And when we get back after the wedding we can finish cruising Colombia and head over to explore Panama.

Punto Hermoso

After much thought, we went for Option 3. This option also leaves us with a few months of extra time to do some land travel in South America. But the first step was to sail to Cartagena. For our Overlander friends this would be as simple as filling up the tank and making the three hour drive down the coast. But in its wisdom, the Colombian government has made this much more difficult to accomplish at sea. Each time you travel to a new location you are required to clear out of the old port and into the new port. As we experienced in the Dominican Republic, this is certainly a pain - but it gets worse. In Colombia you are not allowed to stroll down to the port captain’s office and ask for the papers yourself, you have to employ an agent to do that for you. And pay the agent. And give the agent plenty of notice of your plans to depart. For small vessels this is where the system breaks down. As any cruiser knows choosing a date and time to leave and actually leaving at that time is a very rare event. Another boat in Santa Marta was forced to leave in very strong winds because of this - very dangerous!

Approaching Cartagena

Once we saw some good weather forecasts approaching we gave notice to our agent that we were leaving - four days notice! When the time came to leave, we were promised by the marina reception that we’d have our papers that morning. When the agent arrived we were told he had our papers in the stack on the desk. When we returned an hour later, we found that the agent did not have our papers, he had forgotten to bring them to the Port Captain to be signed! After almost a month of becoming familiar with Colombian culture, we realized that admission of a mistake would not be forthcoming let alone an apology, and that we would be lucky to have our papers that day let alone in an hour as the agent now promised. Keep in mind that getting the papers completed was just a matter of running down the street and obtaining a few signatures from one person. 11am seemed to be far too close to lunchtime to get this done so there was no way we would be leaving until after the lunch break of 12-2. A minor miracle occurred and by 3:15 we had our exit papers and with only three hours of daylight left we were finally allowed to leave Santa Marta! Luckily we were able to anchor just 1/2 hour around the corner before departing on the longer trip to Cartagena.

Colourful Cartagena!

The rest of the voyage to Cartagena was uneventful. Crossing the Rio Magdalena where it meets the sea can sometimes be a harrowing experience in the rainy season, with the rains washing trees, dead animals, and even cars out into the sea. But thankfully we didn’t see anything except muddy brown water. We did manage to run over a long line in the water however. We noticed a small boat in the water in the distance and another small boat about a mile away, out to sea. What we didn’t see, until it was too late, was the mile-plus line of rope submerged between them. There were a few small white buoys marking the line and when we passed it the buoys became slowly submerged as we pulled them under until - snap! Our magnificent speed of 6 knots allowed the line to slide off the keel and (thankfully) not snag on the rudder. We were free and for whatever purpose the line served it seemed intact. Thanks for the heads-up on the radio, guys!