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.

The old city, across the harbor from our spot at anchor.

Colombian pirate ship?

More on our explorations of Carta in our next post....

Member of the Cartagena welcome committee.

In El Centro, Cartagena

Messing About In Boats

 

Some of you are wondering why we haven’t left Key West and started cruising yet.  Well, we have.  Sorta.   

In any endeavor, there is a certain amount of planning and preparation that goes on.   Sailing off for a few months is no exception.  The thing that most people do not understand, and we want to explain, is that there are things unique to cruising a sailboat that make planning a particular date to “leave” a difficult process.  In the first place, cruising isn’t about rigid structure and dates.  It is about the process.   It is about exploration and adventure.  It has been our experience that when you set a date to meet someone at a particular spot, you are only asking for trouble.  Indeed, if you look at any cruiser’s rally where many sailboats get together to sail to a particular destination, inevitably there are a few who don’t make it to the starting line on time.  Sure, poor planning can play a part.  But often it is just the nature of the beast when preparing a sailboat that different delays crop up.  Because so many systems are in such a small area, when you tear into one thing, you discover other things which must be fixed, replaced, repaired or toyed with until you can focus your attention back on the original project.   A.D.D. is not only common on boats, it is contagious.   One could argue that O.D.D. (ie: odd) is a secondary infection.  It is not always easy to categorize boat projects into what is “safe” or “necessary” or “that would be nice and I just want to play with this little thing some more”.  

Corrosion at its finest.

So we have had a long list of boat projects to do.  Some of them involving new equipment, some replacements, some maintenance and some “I’m glad I discovered this bolt is corroded through before it failed mid-ocean”.  Of the thousands of hours that went into building a boat in the first place, many thousands more are spent maintaining it.  It would not be unfair to say that we know this boat like the back of our hands and yet there are still many things to keep track of at a given time.  Here is a short list of categories.   

Engine, sails, canvas, plumbing, electrical, interior, exterior, rigging, dinghy/outboard, fuel/water, supplies, safety, varnish, electronics, dog food...   

Within those categories are often many other items which must be addressed.  But by way of example, here is one little item that needed to be checked off the list.  Read on at your own peril.  

REPLACED THE DEPTH TRANSDUCER (aka: “That Was Easy” [tm])   

Our depth transducer is as old as the boat and needed replacing.  Not because it didn’t work at all, but because the old analog electronics made by Datamarine that tell us what depth of water we have under the boat don’t work properly anymore.   Datamarine went out of business years ago, so we can’t just easily upgrade.  The transducer is a small bronze or plastic device that sticks through the hull of the boat and sends a sound wave signal down through the water.  The sound bounces back and the delay in the return signal tells it how deep the water is.  This comes in handy when in the Bahamas where there might only be a few inches of water under the hull.  It also comes in handy as a navigation tool in deeper waters when finding contours on the bottom which help confirm where you are.  Hey, let’s just pick out a pretty shiny new bronze transducer from the West Marine Catalog!  HA!

Our old transducer is toward the front of the boat on the centerline of the hull and sits in a small three inch horizontal notch on the gently sloping hull midway between the waterline at the bow and the keel at the bottom of the boat.  It has a 2-3/8" surface pointing directly down.  One might think this goes all the way through to the inside of the boat, but it does not.  The part that sticks inside the boat is a 1" bronze threaded pipe with a wiring sticking out of it.  So by a process of deduction honed through years of higher education, we deduced the bottom part is bigger than the top part.  Thus, to get the thing out, we needed to loosen the retaining nut and through force of will and torque, push/hammer it down and out to remove it. [Note, this works best when the boat is hauled out of the water and sitting on dry land.  Otherwise, water would probably gush in quickly, and soon after the boat could possibly become a sunken treasure.]  From the photo, you can discover like we did that the bottom part is about 2" high and circular by 2-3/8" wide and about 8" long.  It fit perfectly in the hole.   The thickness of the hull in that area is about 4 ½".   The extra length is to fit a nut down on the shaft to secure the transducer to the hull.  

Old transducer, on the way out.

Old transducer hole.

New transducers are all 2" around.  Most of them are 4" long.  So that’s a problem.  The West Marine catalog had nothing to help us.  

And hey, if you want a new transducer, you need something to display the data it is putting out.  We decided we liked the new Raymarine digital displays so we wanted a transducer that would talk to Raymarine.   However, our GPS is a Garmin and can display depth.  But only if it is talking to a NMEA0183 transducer.  HA!  As it turns out, our Garmin is a couple years old and we can’t find a transducer to talk to it.  So back to the Raymarine.  Try finding a Raymarine transducer that is the right size.  Nope.  It is too short and too small.  But surely you can put a 2" transducer into a 2-3/8" hole, no?  Well, maybe......  

As you can tell, the hole in the boat is 4 ½" that narrows down from 2-3/8 to 1".   Nobody makes a transducer shaped like that anymore.   Ok, so we will need to make the hole work with a 2" transducer. Now to find one that long.   After calling around, we start hearing the name “Airmar”.  In one conversation, someone lets slip that “Airmar makes pretty much all the transducers in the world for everybody”.  A call to them is sorta helpful.  After a bit they refer us to their wholesaler, Gemeco.  The Gemeco people will make time for stupid sailors with stupid questions who don’t understand much about transducers, but that is only because Gemeco actually sells Airmar products, but since they don’t sell directly to anyone, they can refer us to several online distributors who will actually take your cash in exchange for a product.  Multiple calls to multiple sellers does not clear up what kind of transducer we need or if they even have a properly sized transducer in stock.  We spent most of a very intense day online while making calls to various distributors, Airmar and Gemeco in order to find a transducer that can be modified on their end so that we can somehow work with it on our end to make it fit in the existing hole.  Oh, and another morning doing the same thing.   As it turns out, you can get a transducer with speed, depth AND temperature all in one!!  Naturally, that is $800 for just the speed part and they don’t make it in a size that will fit the boat.  By the way, we have a separate transducer for speed.  It has a little paddle wheel that sticks through the side of the hull about a foot away from the depth transducer.  It is in a protected spot where it can’t be harmed by the big nylon straps from the Travel Lift when we haul the boat out of the water each time.  The depth transducer, on the other hand, is directly in the middle of the boat where the straps often touch and hold the weight of the boat, so it must be rather beefy to handle such loads.  So the all-in-one transducer really isn’t.  There is the solid state one with no moving parts which costs a fortune and then the one with the a paddle wheel that is more affordable but can’t be on the centerline of the boat because the boat straps will destroy it.  After toying with this idea, we decide to go with just a depth transducer and leave the new speed and temp transducer for another time.  (Sigh.)

During this time we spoke with our good friend Bill Ramos at Shannon Yachts, the people who built our boat.  We put in one or two calls a year to Bill.  We can just say “Hull # 95" and he knows who we are.  As always, Bill couldn’t be nicer and refers us to his electronics guy who has yet another opinion as to what might work since he has experience installing transducers into Shannons.  He says that it is something of a challenge to replace the transducer and he had it done on a boat somewhat recently.   “You need to get the boat yard involved because there needs to be some fiberglass work done on the hull to make it work” and “that ran a few thousand dollars”.   Uh huh.  We are not interested in stimulating the economy for four grand to replace a simple depth transducer.  And we are not at all interested in involving Robbie’s Boat Yard at any level.  (See previous post about our feeling on that subject here.)

We know there must be a way to put in a 2" transducer in our hull.  After the above noted “research”, we found a transducer that was long enough.  The core of it was located inside a submarine shaped fairing that sticks outside the hull, something that would not work on our boat.  We figured we could ditch the fairing and use just the transducer.  Cool!   Sure enough, they are willing to set that up for us and kindly keep the $150 fairing for no charge!   So by the end of the second day, we were fairly confident in ordering up a transducer we thought we could make fit our boat.  

Did we mention that it was a “Garmin” type transducer?  They didn’t make this one in a Raytheon friendly version. Waaaa!!!  We wanted the Raytheon transducer because we loved the Raytheon display :(((   But hey, maybe we could get this Garmin version to talk to our Garmin!   Not so fast buddy.  Our Garmin talks the old NMEA 0183 standard, an electronic language that is going the way of Latin and the current Pope.  We opted for the newer NMEA 2000 language.   Woo hoo!  Somewhere in this process we were told that “pretty much any NMEA 2000 product will talk to any other NMEA 2000 product, which means a Garmin transducer really is the same as a Raytheon transducer as long as they are NMEA 2000.  Buuuuut, they only make our transducer in a Garmin version, not a Raytheon version.  So how can all this common language stuff be true? We dunno yet.  But we got the Garmin NMEA 2000 transducer and hopefully it will plug into something somewhere down the road and all our electronics can talk to each other and tell bedtime stories about how deep the ocean is.  

Hole saw, with Starboard chunk.

The new transducer arrived and we pulled its shiny little bronze body out of the box (minus the submarine fairing which at this point I wanted as a souvenir of our efforts) and fondled it.   Now to install it.  The first problem was making a centered 2" hole inside the 2-3/8" hole.  If you know what a hole saw is, it has a central 1/4" guide drill in the middle.   But the middle of this hole was a blank spot and therefore useless to the guide drill bit.  So we taped over the small hole and poured epoxy into the 1" existing hole.  Atfer letting it set up, we then had a solid center to use to drill through the remainder of the hull.  After drilling the 2" hole, we could then slide the new transducer in.  But we needed to have the transducer flush with the outside of the hull, not the recessed old 2-3/8" hole.  What to do.....

We checked around at various places to find washers, nuts, or anything to fill the 3/8 gap but for reasons unknown, not even Home Depot stocks such obviously necessary items.  So we made our own spacers.  We used the hole saw to drill holes into some Starboard (tm), which is a plastic replacement for wood used on boats.  Then we took the hand saw and cut around the outside of these holes to form a crude washer/spacer.  We then shaped and faired the spacers so they would fit.  After multiple checks and re-checks, we got the transducer to fit perfectly into the hole and lie flush with the bottom of the hull. 

New transducer with home-made spacers attached.

Moving inside the boat, we put the retaining nut on the top of the transducer and tightened it down.  Because of the U shape of the hull, the nut wouldn’t go all the way down.  So we got the grinder out of storage to grind down that portion of the fiberglass so the nut would have room to fit.  Problem is that the grinder wouldn’t fit down into the hold to do the grinding.  So we fashioned yet another spacer out of Starboard (tm) to fit under the nut.  After making sure everything fit, we backed the transducer out, gooped up the whole mess with an appropriate amount of calking, tightened it down and WaaaaaaLaaaaa !   The following item was checked off our list: Replace Depth Transducer.  Check.   That Was Easy! (Tm).   Total elapsed time on this one project: 3 days. 

McGyver at work.

So when we say we’ve been “working on boat projects”, this is the kind of thing that often takes place.  Sometimes it goes easy, but most of the time a simple project turns into a larger one.  It could just be us, but having talked to many boat owners over the years who do their own work, this seems to be the nature of the beast.  You can always pay someone else to maintain your boat, but the intricacies of a given project and knowledge of the boat itself are crucial.  We derive a lot of satisfaction from completing a job.  It often brings out the McGyver in us and forces us to be resourceful and creative.  In general, we try to do a good job although occasionally we use the “it’s good enough for who it’s for” quality assurance program. 

Cardboard and Duct Tape

We plan to homeschool the boys (7 and 11, 2nd and 5th grade) while on our sailing adventure.  The prospect is a bit daunting.  Over the last year I spent quite a bit of time researching how best to handle this big job.  I bought books, bookmarked many websites, and girded myself for the coming educational battle.  Just before we left, I went to talk to the boys' teachers (both of whom are gifted educators).  Here's what they told me:  Just have them read.  Lots.  Have them write.  Keep a journal. And don't worry too much about the rest of it; it'll come along the way. They'll be fine.

Today Jamie decided to make a boat of cardboard and duct tape.    

When it was done we went down the the water's edge
and launched his creation.

We are closing in on our first week of our new adventure, and other than having the boys write in their journal every evening we haven't officially started homeschooling yet (or "boat school" as we find ourselves calling it).  And so, today I made no effort at schooling of any sort.  But I found that Ms. Calvert and Ms. Long were right on the money - it'll come along the way.  Here's Jamie's journal entry this evening:

My Cardboard and Duct Tape Boat 

Today I woke up and started to make a cardboard and duct tape boat.  First I made a cardboard frame of the boat, then I covered the boat completely with duct tape in the inside and the outside. Then I made a rudder completely out of duct tape.  NO CARDBOARD.  Next I found some chopsticks, and a rag and I used that for a mast and a sail. Then I taped the end of the sail to the bow.  Then I was done.  Then I took it out in the water and I put it in the water and then it floated.  I sailed the boat for about 20 minutes.  Then I went back to my boat Points Beyond.  I felt proud.

 By Jamie, age 7

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