Here we are on the second day of the passage from Santa Marta in Colombia to the San Blas Islands of Panama and finally, I’ve settled down to write about it.
Writing a “passage piece” in the same way I would sit down two or three times a day as I do with the “Voyage” books is an idea that was prompted by the number of readers who keep asking when the next one is coming out.
Well, the answer is “when the next long voyage happens” – which won’t be until I set off from The Bahamas to The Azores and the Canaries in the summer.
But that doesn’t mean that three days running before the 25kt tradewind into the bottom left corner of the Caribbean is any the less noteworthy.
I did think about it when I decided not to set off at midday on Saturday after all – despite what I told the Colombian immigration officer. The trouble with leaving at midday is that Baranquilla is 40 miles away, which means you arrive off the river mouth just after dark – and the waters off the Rio Magdalena are notorious for being littered with all sorts of debris from the rain forest – like tree trunks which would probably come off best after meeting Samsara’s bow at five knots.
So, I decided to leave at midnight instead.
Actually, I nearly didn’t leave at all. Coming up to the fuel berth, I stepped on deck to slip a mooring line over the cleat and somehow got my foot on the wrong side of it, which meant that pretty soon I was lying on the side deck pinioned by my ankle up against the guardrail wondering in a dispassionate sort of way whether I was going to lose the foot. With a stiff breeze blowing the boat off at right angles and a couple of the boatyard marineros running to help, we managed to save the limb (if not my dignity). It was only later that I wondered why I didn’t release the warp at the winch.
Maybe I was too preoccupied with all the blood – not from the foot: The foot showed a couple of ugly welts but no sign of major trauma. But a large flap of skin was now hanging off the index finger of my left hand and there was more blood about the place than Santa Marta has seen since the days of the conquistadors. I anointed it with a mixture of my mineral solution and a liberal helping of tee tree oil, wrapped it in gauze and encased the lot in surgical tape.
When I have done this before, I have used white or blue tape. This stuff was more like Sellotape – so it was a bit alarming to see the blood soaking into the bandage and turning brown… and then black.
Gangrene turns bandages black doesn’t it? I should know. I’ve seen Gone With The Wind. But gangrene doesn’t set in for weeks, surely – and anyway, you can tell by the awful smell…
It was just as well the watermaker started playing up to distract me.
I have written about the watermaker in the post from Santa Marta, now it looked as though my bad decisions were coming home to roost. It seemed to me that making water was taking longer and longer – which was hardly surprising since the pressure gauge was definitely on the low side. One reason for this is that no sooner had Hemides and Leonardo fixed it from the last time I mistreated it, but now I ran it for an hour with the inlet seacock closed – at one point, the motor was too hot to touch. At the time, I didn’t think I had done it any real harm, now I wasn’t so sure. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it. I don’t carry spare bearings, and wouldn’t know how to instal them if I did.
But I could tighten up hose clips. I could inspect filters.
The 5micron filter was completely black – OK, so I shouldn’t have been running a watermaker in a marina but that only holds good if the water on the pontoons doesn’t come out brown. I changed the filter and measured the output – still only 18litres an hour, when it should be 25. I would just have to run it for longer – at least I have plenty of electricity. After two days, I still haven’t seen the new Lithium batteries below 93% – that’s with electric cooking and all the instruments – the hours of watermaking…
But enough of that. We’ve been making great progress. With the wind from the ENE at 15-25kts, I left the mainsail stowed and just had the headsail poled out with two reefs. Of course, we do roll – particularly when the sea built up off Barranquilla and I had several waves break into the cockpit – one of them pouring in all over the galley (it’s always better the galley than the nav station). I couldn’t have any hatches open, but I never touched the helm and didn’t have much to do with the Aries, apart from leaning over the stern somewhat precariously to give it some oil – maybe it would be better not to stow the boarding ladder against the pushpit for long trips.
I say I didn’t touch the Aries – meaning I didn’t adjust the course. I am forgetting about MV Tema.
Motor Vessel Tema, registered in St John and bound for Baranquilla was a small, nicely painted cargo ship on a course to cross my path about ten miles away. I didn’t pay much attention to him. Motor vessels are always crossing my path. Making anything from 10 – 15kts, they treat little Samsara’s plot on the AIS as a stationary object and just go round us (making sure they stay the statutory one nautical mile out of our way).
MV Tema didn’t. I tweaked at the port rein of the Aries to make sure we got round his stern. And then again…
It wasn’t until the range was showing less than a mile that I thought to check how fast he was going: 1.6kts. More to the point, where normally it would say: “Making way under engine” (or the only alternative I have ever seen: “Anchored”) Tema was broadcasting: “Not Under Command”. The 1.6kts must have come from some sort of north-going current, although where that came from, I have no idea.
Anyway, now it was up to me to keep out of his way.
I was just returning from another Aries-tweaking session, when he called on VHF: “You are only eight cables distant . With a big swell running…”
I assured him I would pass behind him.
I did – but at a distance of only two cables, which – given the size of the Caribbean Sea – is just plain impolite. I did think of calling again to apologise. But what would I say: I was too lazy to read the whole of the screen?
It is a problem this laziness. I have noticed it at the beginning of other long trips, before I get into the rhythm of the voyage – or, to put it another way, before I make a point of sitting down with the laptop two or three times a day to write stuff like this.
On the first afternoon, I always like to get some sleep. But it is all too easy to get some more the next morning and, come to that, any old time. Of course I did have an excuse, what with all that time I had spent with my head in the bilges playing with the watermaker…
But now, on the third evening, I lay on my bunk looking up at the reflection of the sun and the water on the glass of the open hatch and thinking I really should get out in the cockpit with a beer and Alan Bristow’s Helicopter Pioneer autobiography. But it wasn’t yet six o’clock… although, of course, if I was heading west at better than a hundred miles a day, cocktail hour would be getting earlier and earlier…
I am hoping I have come up with an answer to the watermaker. I cut today’s session short because it was taking so long and the tank was almost full – but mostly because there was water streaming through the limber hole from the pump compartment.
Without doubt there is a leak somewhere – and if there is a leak then the watermaker unit will not be getting seawater at the pressure it is expecting and therefore can’t produce fresh water at the same rate. All I have to do is find the leak.
I did consider another hour of tinkering, but we’ll be anchored off a tropical island this time tomorrow (or possibly the next day. I want to arrive in daylight). Anyway, we won’t run out of water before then. Besides, getting to the pump and all the hoses and filters involves unscrewing the cabin sole which is now secured against capsize, following the unpleasantness north of the Canaries (see The Voyage #2). Then I have to remove a dozen six-packs of Club Colombia because in a “remote tropical paradise” you don’t know where your next beer is coming from. Besides, the new bandage on my finger is still looking very smart and I don’t want to get it wet.
While on the subject, I think I should be congratulated for typing this with a duff finger. I started out with the original bandage which was like something out of a Giles cartoon and really limited me to nine fingers. I know there is a tradition in journalism that many of the greats could type at the speed of light using only two fingers, but I started out with ambitions to be a proper Writer and felt the first requirement was to teach myself to touch type (and was never more proud than when I passed the National Council for the Training of Journalists 40-words-a-minute exam by a country mile).
Doing it with nine fingers has not been the same, but now I’ve snipped the end off the new and less ostentatious bandage – well, it’s more of a plaster really – things are pretty much back to normal. An injury needs some exercise, surely – help the blood flow and all that…
Now I’m in a pickle. Because I left Santa Marta at midnight instead if midday, I’m going to arrive at seven in the evening – just as it’s getting dark. Arrivals in the San Blas should be timed when the sun in high (and preferably behind you) so you can see avoid the coral and find a patch of sand to hold your anchor.
I’m planning to make my landfall at Aridup in the Ratones Cays. Eric Bauhaus says these are “a beautiful little island group. Water clarity is excellent.” He should know. He has devoted his life to The Bible of these parts, The Panama Cruising Guide
More to the point, neither Bauhaus’s chart nor the Navionics app shows a difficult entrance, such as might require perfect light.
I couldn’t cope with this before dinner, so I took down all sail – basically to stop and think. Then I set too with the calculator and worked out that either I could slow right down (and would probably still arrive too early the next day). Or, I could make a race of it: Averaging 5.2 knots would mean a two o’clock arrival.
I got up and gybed the headsail. When I came down again, the plotter said we were doing 7.45kts.
Also, I have a pinpoint position from someone called Chris on the Navily app showing where he dropped his anchor in sand in December 2024 (despite what another contributor had to say about needing to take a line ashore to a palm tree.)
I’ve just checked our average speed – 4.9kts – and with 79 miles to go, that is 14 hours which would get me in at 12.45 – plenty of time. In fact, according to Windy, before a couple of days of light weather, which would be perfect.
Now all I have to do is keep up the average.
All through the night, I woke up at hourly intervals, determined to wait until daylight to set the main – and at the same time watching the ETA advance from 1430 to 1500 and then 1550. At one point it showed 1643.
Finally, at dawn, I rounded up into a surprisingly strong wind and hoisted the mainsail. The ETA started going the other way. The waypoint appeared on the screen instead of being some theoretical feature of time and space which would become apparent when it was ready.
“1415”. I could live with that.
The other decision was where to enter the island chain. I still marvel at how we do this today. It must an age thing: Fifty years ago, approaching a reef-strewn lee shore completely devoid of lights or, indeed navigational marks of any kind, after a 350 mile passage without any terrestrial positioning would have been completely unthinkable.
And yet, here I am, about to make for the middle of a half-mile channel between two coral reefs…
Well, I was. I’ve done it before. When I arrived at Carricou after the Atlantic crossing, the passage through to the west side of the island was only half a mile wide. But I’ve just looked at the San Blas chart on my old phone (only because it was closer and avoided getting up). I wanted to check that the gap really was half a mile wide before I wrote it down, and this screen – for some reason – showed a different chart. Oh, the land and the reefs were still in the same places, but while the new phone shows two areas of “obstruction” as circles of little crosses, the old phone has them in blue just like all the other very shallow water.
“Obstructions” can by anything – a wreck on the seabed that might snag a trawler’s nets, redundant mooring chains in a harbour ready to foul an anchor…
Or coral.
Well, you don’t know, do you. I checked Bauhaus. He had them marked as 5metre soundings.
The alternative was a detour that would add slightly less than two miles.
Chicken…
By eleven o’clock, we were down to ten knots of following wind and only showing three over the ground. The ETA had clicked over past four o’clock – and the wind would get lighter the closer we came. I was loth to use the engine because I only carry 50 litres of diesel and don’t believe there’s anywhere you can get it in the San Blas (no ATMs either – not that there’s much to buy).
In the end, there was nothing for it: I hauled the Super Zero out of the forepeak. Rigging it under way can be a bit complicated – especially if the boat is rolling and the deck is really too hot for bare feet but not so hot that you absolutely have to stop what you’re doing and go and find some shoes.
It took me 25 minutes to rig it in spinnaker mode – that is wing-on-wing with the headsail which together gives me 90% of the area of my old symmetrical spinnaker (but with a lot less trouble, so it gets put up sooner, taken down later and used more frequently.)
I was pleased to see our speed jumped from 3kts to 4.5kts the ETA was back a 1400.
Time to settle under the bimini with the Kindle and a beer.
The mini-bimini is turning out to be a big success. Samsara’s original owner installed two built-up hatch covers in the afterdeck. I’m not sure why – although when I bought her I found they allowed just enough room for two big 14kg Calor gas bottles. Everybody else seemed to like the way you could sit up high on them and see everything – and of course the new bimini is right over the top of them. You do have to climb over the tiller lines for the Aries and move the boarding ladder – and position a couple of cushions just so (without dropping them over the side). But in the end, it’s worth the trouble. I spent hours up there in the heat of the day.
As predicted, the wind fell lighter and lighter the closer we got to the land, until I had just 2.6kts over the deck and the sails all over the place. There was nothing for it. I furled the headsails and turned on the engine – there was only eight miles to go to the waypoint.
And even though the new wider gap did add two miles, I was glad I had been chickened out of the narrow channel. Passing to the east, it appeared to be filled entirely with white water.
And so, at about 3.30 in the afternoon, Samsara crept between the two reefs to the south of Aridup. There was no one else about – no sign of life on the Island.
Until the a dugout canoe appeared from nowhere, anchored next to the reef and two of the three occupants disappeared over the side. Half an hour later, they were alongside offering me a pair of lobsters.
This was the difficult part. My Spanish was actually better than theirs – and so it was with a lot of gesturing that I had to explain that I don’t eat lobster. But I did give them the big frying pan I’ve been trying to get rid of for ages. Then they asked for soda and all I have is a limited supply of iced tea – but beer would do, apparently. I have plenty of beer (although I won’t if I keep on giving it to every fisherman who comes past).
So, the next canoe got a hat I don’t wear any more … and the third a cheery wave before I ducked down below apparently busy with something else.
Finally, a big Wharram catamaran with a junk rig on each hull and flying an enormous Stars and Stripes came ghosting in and anchored next door. After an excursion ashore, James and Yael came aboard to deplete the beer supply further.
It really is surprising how much social life you can find on an uninhabited island.
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I do enjoy your posts…cheers
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