Sail-World's Blackwattle - Bonaire to Cartagena

by Nancy Knudsen on 7 Mar 2007 I am nervous. Strange. After taking advice from ‘everyone’, we have decided to get to San Blas – our next destination - staying close to the Colombian coast, rather than the direct route.

‘This is not the season to sail to San Blas’ we’ve been told, ‘You’ll be hammered.’ On the other hand, cruisers’ lore says that the Colombian coastal route is pirate/drug running prone, to be avoided.

It’s time to find out for ourselves.

So I am nervous. Haven’t been nervous since Oman, when we were approaching the pirate prone Gulf of Aden. Have I been too long in Disneyland sailing destinations?

It should be four days to Cartagena. Let’s get on with it. Smile, Nancy.

We’re away and sailing, and 24 hours later, the day dawns gloomy. The sun can’t seem to break through a strange haze in the air. There are no clouds but the sky is a beige colour and we can’t see far. As our tiny speck of boat inches across the moving circle of the ocean, the glinting grey water seems oily, slippery in the misted sunshine. It’s dizzy-making this sun; the world has a distant look, like backward through binoculars. It’s fuggy inside the boat as well, strange. I’m not hungry. The watches pass at night as in a dream, or maybe nightmare. Ships leap out of the dark only a few miles away. Only a few determined stars can pierce the gloom, and even the bioluminescence in the water below is muted, dull.

By morning two things are clear. I am running a temperature, and the weather in front of us has turned foul. As my eyes ache and the world outside my head is glassy and unreal we decide to take shelter behind a cape – Cabo de la Vela – for which we have a waypoint – no small scale charts, except Cmap.

We anchor in a large windy bay, with fishermen’s boats slim black streaks in the distance. Snatches of thoughts about pirates and drug runners. The bay is barren and rocky, with frigate birds all around us, swerving and arching elegantly as they hunt the waters.

Not long after we anchor suddenly a large open fishing boat approaches at speed, three dark clothed men aboard, holding - I can’t believe it - automatic weapons. And it is all happening very fast, too fast. This is not looking very good, I am thinking, wanting a Disprin and bed, not a confrontation with an AK47.

They pull up like a show-off skier, spray everywhere, the sudden wash rocking us all, and cleverly just avoid ramming us. The very very young leader immediately shouts, ‘Welcome to Colombia, we are the Colombian Coast Guard!’

It turns out that this is about all the English the guys know, but the smiles tell the story well enough. ‘Europe?’ they ask, with big knowledgeable grins. ‘No, Australia,’ we say, grinning back. They look blank – even though my fluey fog vision I swear I can tell they have never heard of it.

As they speed off after looking at our passports we can’t help admiring the THREE 200 hp outboards driving their ‘fishing boat’, and the many 55-gallon drums of fuel that virtually fill the boat.

So we rest and I sprawl and cough for a couple of days, living and breathing cough lollies and weather forecasts.

One part of my perception had nothing to do with my ‘flu – the sky, we now realise, is full of flying yellow sand. The high winds are blowing the deserts of Colombia into the sky and a lot of it is falling on Blackwattle.

It’s blowing 35 knots and sometimes 40 in the anchorage. The boat’s jarring and leaping around, and it’s very noisy, with the whine of the wind, the banging of the halyards, rush of the water. Nevertheless, we are delighted to have left the Disneyland of the Eastern Caribbean for this, more real environment.

The terrain is just low hills and rocky desert with a desolate looking village. Only a small ragged flag standing straight in the wind beside the lighthouse tells that we are in Colombia.

It’s 10.00am before the sun can get through the haze.

The fishermen motor past to look at our sailing boat. Some just smile, and others ask for Coke and rope and food. We can’t stay here too long or we’ll have nothing left. We thought of trading goods for fish, but they look so poor, and have so few fish that we just couldn’t do it.

……………………………

After two days, choked with yellow dust over the dodger and topsides and deck of the boat, over every life-line, sheet and halyard, we think we can make a break for a place called Five Bays. We’ll sneak across a giant 120 mile bay, where the seas should be lower than the forecasts.

Soon we hear from friend boat we met in Bonaire – some Americans Ken and Larry in a boat called ‘Julia’, just at the end of their circumnavigation - that they have ‘HUGE’ seas and will break from their own direct route to San Blas and join us in Five Bays.

The night is dark again and ships appear out of the gloom just a couple of miles away. But it’s a flowing sea, with a good 20-knot wind behind us. After daylight we search the murky horizon vainly for the Colombian coast. Finally we realise we have been looking in the wrong place – the mountain line appears high in the sky, and we are no more than five miles away when we finally see it. Of course, there’s a 5,000-metre mountain just ahead!

By the time we get to Five Bays and try to enter the middle bay – there are very high mountains on either side - the wind at the entrance goes up to 45 knots. There’s white water all round and the noise of the wind and sea is ear blasting. Momentary thought of retreating is quickly discarded. There’s nowhere else to go now anyway – the weather forecast is too bad to continue on, so we push past the surf and into calmer water, and finally find ourselves in a long quiet bay. The further in we go, the calmer the sea, until a mile and a half later, right at the end of the bay we anchor in still water just metres away from fishing shacks on the beach.

It’s a fantastic anchorage. Vast sandy bottomed, ringed with forested mountains. Even though it’s so quiet, there are katabatic winds that gust from the mountains across the flat waters from every direction, bending the boat at sharp angles with each blast, which lasts only seconds. We record 45 knots in some of the air blasts, and Ted spends the first night sleeping in the cockpit – he says it’s because of the wind, but I think he just wants to avoid the sound of my growling cough all night. We’re very pleased to be here, and we don’t know yet that the best is yet to come!

………………………………………..

Julia arrives with its crew of three, and now Colombia starts to become a wonderful hospitable place.

First we are greeted by a local resident in a dugout canoe ‘I am Ronaldo Garcia!’ he says proudly, and we all shake hands. He tells us (via Nick on Julia, who speaks Spanish) that the reason we are suddenly surrounded by lots of fishing boats with outboard motors is not because we are sitting in their school of fish, or that we are about to be attacked and robbed. No, they have lost a 40hp outboard motor below us. (At a cost of about US$4000 a piece, this must be a tragedy for simple fishermen, when 45% of the entire population of Colombia lives below the poverty line.) Julia loans them diving gear, and the hunt continues for all the days that we remain at anchor.

Ronaldo Garcia, who becomes our informal host, explains that this is a national park, and only fishermen are allowed to stay here.

We find that among the quaint buildings on shore are several a restaurants, catering for local Colombians in