Ciao Colombia!

Isla Tintipan

We prepared to leave Cartagena by dropping nearly a million pesos at the Jumbo supermarket at the mall. Indeed this translated into only about 400 Canadian dollars but set us up with a month’s worth of food and drink for our trip to the isolated San Blas islands of Panama. When transporting that amount of food, one is sure to forget something - in this case it was two flats of eggs (60 huevos) left on the sidewalk and returned to us by the surly security guard at the dinghy dock.

Clear water once again

We bid farewell to our South African friends on Lalamanzi and headed south with the aim of visiting a few picturesque Colombian islands on our way. We left the Cartagena anchorage under power but quickly hoisted sails towards Islas Rosarios, where we had been once before. The wind dropped a couple hours into the sail so we fired up the engine for the last hour. Strangely enough, however, we couldn’t get our speed above 2 knots. We can usually motor at around 5 knots in favourable conditions, which is comparable to a slow bicycle ride; the 2 knots was comparable to a very slow walking pace. After ruling out an engine problem and weird currents we suspected something wrapped around the propeller. We very slowly made our way into the anchorage, which fortunately was in clear warm water, and went for a snorkel. We couldn’t believe our eyes - after weeks anchored in the notorious Cartagena harbour the prop was covered with a thick coat of barnacles and was unable to turn properly! We scraped the little buggers off and went for a successful test drive - phew...

El Islote

Back at it the next day we proceeded to Isla Tintipan near El Islote, one of the most densely populated islands on the planet. It sounds a lot more impressive than it was, and although all the fishermen there were very welcoming, we peeled out the next morning for our final Colombian stop.

Our guest

The overnight passage was quite eventful with several visitors. Our first was from a little bird that joined us as we started to lose sight of land. It must have needed a bit of a rest from flying as it landed on the boat but must have liked what it saw as it promptly flew down below. We coaxed it back out and tried to feed it a few breadcrumbs and water as we tried to figure out what to do with it. Eventually we made a little birdhouse out of a beer box and corralled the poor thing inside for the night.

Approaching Sapzurro

Our second visit was in the pitch black of the night as we were sailing along in a light breeze well offshore. All of a sudden I heard a motor approach but did not see any lights or any traffic on our AIS system. As South American waters can often conjure up images of pirates, I was more than a little freaked out. I woke up James and we got ready to shine our spotlight on the approaching vessel when all of a sudden over a loudspeaker we heard “Sailboat Nomads this is the Colombian Coast Guard, we are approaching your boat.” We were more than a little relieved. These friendly folks just wanted to make sure we were okay and after a quick check of our paperwork we were on our way.

Sapzurro

When it started to get light in the morning we noticed that (a) our bird friend had left and (b) we were surrounded by a big flipping storm. We hunkered down while lightning cracked directly overhead and we were hammered by squally winds and torrential rain. To be completely honest, with our updated remote navigation console, we both went below and let the autopilot do the work while this thunderstorm did its thing. We had heard about the terrible lightning in this part of the world and this was definitely our introduction.

Sapzurro

Our third visitor arrived as the storm subsided, in the form of a small fishing boat with two men and two women on board. Attempting to decipher their frantic Spanish we learned that they were not pirates, needed some kind of help, and were cold wet and uncomfortable from the storm. After radioing the coast guard we determined that they had been out far from shore and with the storm and clouds could no longer see the mountains and thus were having trouble finding their way back home. We told them we were headed the same way and to follow us!

Sapzurro

Soon after, we made it safely into the bay of Sapzurro the last port in Colombia. This prompted our fourth and final visitor, the Colombian navy, who assured us that our paperwork did not cover a stop in their bay and we’d have to leave. This was a major disappointment as the bay was surrounded by green hills, tropical birds, and clear water just beckoning us to explore. We were able to convince the soldiers to let us stay overnight as long as we didn’t leave the boat. Sapzurro would forever be a jungle oasis left to our imaginations.