Points Beyond: A Passage to Cartagena

Saying goodbye to lovely Georgetown, Bahamas

After a delightful month in the beautiful Bahamas, including an nice two weeks in Georgetown, we set our sights on our next destination: Cartagena, Colombia - a UNESCO World Heritage Site, complete with old forts, colonial architecture and a “walled-city” historic district. From our location in Georgetown, Colombia was nearly 1000 miles away. We would break up the trip by stopping over the course of several days at a few isolated islands on our way south. But our biggest chunk of this trip would be the portion from Great Inagua, Bahamas to Colombia, located at the top of South America. We would be sailing through the “Windward Passage” between

From Caribbean Atlas, http://atlas-caraibe.certic.unicaen.fr/es/

Cuba and Haiti, then across a 600 mile stretch of open ocean. Oh, and just to up the ante, that particular chunk of water just off the Colombian coast is notorious for large seas and heavy winds. At around 750 total miles from Great Inagua to Cartagena, we expected that it would take us about 5 or 6 days. And we were, truthfully, dreading it. This was to be a major passage, likely the longest of our entire cruise. The Caribbean is a big ocean, and we were about to cross a very large chunk of it.

Group shot as we are about to get underway.

We "caught" six fish on this trip.
All of them flying fish, with a bad sense of direction.

Some sailors claim that they really enjoy long ocean passages. These people are either liars, masochists, or completely insane. I’m gonna give it to you straight: passages suck. OK, maybe not ALL passages. The short little hops from island to island -ones that take a day or less- aren’t really a problem, perhaps akin to a nice leisurely drive

On passage, perfecting the foot-hold steering technique.

through the countryside. But longer trips, honestly, are no fun at all. You see, on a passage someone must be “on watch” (keeping the boat on course, watching for other ships, making sure the sails are set properly, keeping an eye on the engine and other boat systems, keeping track of the boat’s position, etc.) 24/7. So we take turns being on watch, a few hours on, a few hours off - around the clock. It works, but never getting a full night’s sleep is draining, with the end result being major fatigue. The longer the passage, the more the fatigue. Stop and throw out an anchor, you suggest? Nope. You can NOT anchor a boat in 5000 feet of water. There are no rest stops mid-ocean. Think cross-country road-trip with no turn-outs, no exits, no stretch-the-legs breaks, no stopping for a good night’s sleep, and changing drivers while the car is still rolling down the highway. (Although rather than hurtling down the

Jamie on watch.

interstate in a car at 70+, our boat speed is a considerably slower 6 knots. That’s like, um, 6.5 MPH., or approximately 10 minutes per mile. And we had 1000 of those ahead of us....)

Otto Pilot.

There is one piece of equipment that makes passage-making easier: the autopilot. This device allows us to set a course, and the the boat will steer itself, like a pimped out cruise control, without someone actually holding onto the wheel and hand-steering the entire time. Whoever is on watch is still busy with the other tasks, but at least they aren’t “tied to the wheel” for the entirety. So, of course, as we embarked on this grueling trip, our autopilot quit working properly. Oh it would steer the boat...as long as we wanted to go in tight counter-clockwise circles. I cried. Yes, I did. I cried as I contemplated what this meant; we would have to hand-steer each and every one of those thousand miles.

Matthew Town Lighthouse

Matthew Town Harbor.

We made several 24 hour hops down the chain of islands, stopping along the way for a day of rest at Long Cay on Crooked/Atkins Island, and then Matthew Town, Great Inagua. At Matthew Town we chatted up three guys on a rough-and-ready sailboat tied up to the sea wall in the tiny harbor, and asked them for assistance finding some fuel from in the town. We presumed they were native Matthew Towners.

Our new Haitian friends.

We presumed wrong. As we found out later that day, these fellows were Haitians. They periodically sail the 12 hour trip back and forth between their home in Haiti and this southernmost point in the Bahamas, without any sort of navigational equipment or engine, bringing cargo (sometimes human, sometimes items like yams and potatoes) to sell on either end.

After helping arrange us buying fuel from a neighboring workboat (in which the captain siphoned fuel from his tank into a large jerry can, which we then had to siphon into our own tanks and jerry cans), we paid the workboat for the fuel. We asked him to give the ten dollar change he owed us to the Haitians. We found out later that afternoon that he didn’t pass the tip on, and the Haitians asked why we hadn’t tipped them for their help. We felt badly about this, having at that point finally figured out that these fellows were truly dirt poor, hard working men who could surely have used any extra money. Or food. Or anything. In fact we saw them digging through a pile of rubble, pulling out any useable pieces of wood or tin to take back with them. So we gathered together a few items to donate to their cause: a solar “Luci” Light (they had no lights of any sort), some coils of rope, and a few dollars. We watched them sail off into the sunset, the captain standing on the stern of the boat holding on to the tree limb which served as the tiller.

Haitian Cargo Ship.

OK, you can't see it, but that's Haiti in the distance.

The first evening after leaving Great Inagua for Cartagena, as we passed Cuba on the right (we saw the flash of a lighthouse from Cuba) and Haiti on our left (completely dark, but we smelled wood fires) things went well, and we sailed along quite contentedly for the first 24 hours. The next day as we exited the Windward Passage, and putted along with the coast of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the distance, the wind died to almost nothing, and the great Caribbean was flat and calm. So, we stopped everything and all jumped in (even Sophie) for a swim. Naked. I mean, how cool is it to be able say we skinny-dipped off the coast of Haiti, right?

Skinny-dipping off Haiti.

Although the first 24 hours passed fairly quickly, the following 5 days did not. It was, simply put, a LONG Haul. We motor sailed for a time while the wind was weak since we wanted to keep our speed up, lest the trip last even longer than necessary. At one point our engine wavered, and died. It sounded like a fuel starvation issue, and after checking out the fuel filter we found that was indeed the problem. So after changing the black-sludge-filled filter we were back in business. As the days wore on, the wind/sea conditions varied from the flat calm we experienced off Haiti, to the complete opposite as we closed the Colombian coast, when we had 35+ knots of wind and VERY large (12-15 foot) swells. And, remember, NO

Uh-oh. That's a wave beginning to break. At eye level.

Ya, it's breaking. Cause it's big.

Hard to capture. Trust me it looked
bigger in real life.

autopilot...meaning one or the other of us was behind the wheel through every moment of it. Devan pulled the longest watches, winning the stud award for standing watch one evening from 3 am until noon the next day. Then he collapsed in a puddle, and I took over until he rose from the dead. The boys periodically stepped in for steering spurts lasting from a few minutes to an hour. Although we were completely exhausted, and getting punchier as the days wore on, our boat handled every bit of the rough stuff beautifully. She rode the big swells very comfortably, and sailed well through it all.

If you look carefully, you will see a large cargo ship just to the right of the crest of the swell behind us.
Do we appear unconcerned?

As we came within 15 miles of Cartagena the shipping traffic increased and we had several close

Close Encounters...

...of the shipping kind.

encounters with some vary large cargo ships. We talked to two of them as we needed to arrange how NOT to be run down by them. Which made for some great photo ops. Night closed in and we traveled in toward the port. In the olden days (ie, before GPS chartplotters showing real-time positions) we probably would not have attempted entering a strange port at night. But, this ain’t the olden days...and we put our trust in our trusty Garmin (as well as our binoculars), and threaded our way in through the narrow entrance through the breakwater. We continued on in past the anchored cargo ships, around past the shipyard and Navy Base, and tiptoed into the anchorage near the “Club Nautico”.

Sweet, red sloop "Salsa", with the skyscrapers of Bocagrande
in the background.

At nearly midnight, 5.5 days after we left Great Inagua, we dropped the hook surrounded by dozens of other cruising sailboats, hailing from around the world. Cartagena is not a destination that one arrives at easily -from any direction- and we commented as we looked around that everyone here had really earned being here. As we sighed with relief at surviving what was our longest and most challenging passage, probably ever, we
smiled, felt extremely proud, and congratulated ourselves on a job well and competently done. We had a celebratory cup of chai tea, admired the gorgeous harbor lights, and spied the spires of the old city in the distance. Then we went below, collapsed into bed, and slept the sleep of the dead.