Once we got out of Spanish Water and into the open water, we made like a rocketship. We had 18-26 knot winds (hey, what happened to the 15 knots that was forecast?) and a healthy current helping us along, so we zoomed at over 8 knots. Along with the generous wind came big fat lumpy swells, and we bounced all over the place. There was an incredible amount of shipping traffic near Willemstadt, container ships and cruise ships and a big tanker hauling propane, and staying out of everybody's way kept us busy, particularly since we had one sail poled out to each side of the mast, and couldn't turn too far to either side without backwinding one or the other.
As darkness fell, we approached Aruba, and happily tucked in behind its lee to take advantage of the smoother waters. The only downside of being downwind of Aruba was the refineries. Most people know Aruba as a cruise ship and vacation destination with sparkling beaches and elegant casino hotels. That's because they never get away from the northwest end of the island, and after sailing along the Aruba coast, we understand why. The rest of the island seems to consist of one refinery after another, countless tall stacks with orange or blue flames at their tips, and wow does it stink! But too soon, we got far enough from Aruba that the waves started building again -- fortunately I'd gotten some sleep while it was still nice and smooth.
During our night watches, both Britt and I kept busy avoiding ships and adjusting our course and the sails as the wind shifted this way and that. But of course there's a lot of time on passage which is just spent passing time. We read a lot, and try to sleep whenever we can. We also work on minor personal projects. We've both finally gotten to the point where we are capable of doing computer work below while underway, without feeling queasy, so I wrote a little (the previous log entry and some of this one were written on this passage) and Britt worked on his current obsession, learning Visual Basic. I practiced with my Spanish tapes, and got interested enough by an article in Ocean Navigator magazine to derive a few equations for working with radar. (Elementary trigonometry becomes a lot more challenging when you haven't slept but three hours in two days!) Nice and relaxing, a little boring -- until all hell breaks loose. Which it always seems to do, and this trip was no exception.
Just before sunset on our second day at sea, we got a strike on one of our fishing rods. I was closest to the cockpit at the time, so I raced for the rod and started trying to reel it in, but it was a big fish. Britt followed me up and started to try to slow the boat down, as we were going around 7 knots in 15-20 of wind and I was having a hard time working against the drag of the water on the fish. He turned enough to backwind the poled-out jib, a strategy he'd used on the passage from Trinidad to Los Testigos when a local fishing boat approached and he wanted to let Kajsa get closer in case of trouble. But the winds were a lot lighter then; the pressure on the sail in our current conditions was quite a bit more. Windom suddenly slewed, and we heard an ominous crack as the whisker pole buckled, punching a little triangular hole in our freshly-repaired sail.
The
first order of business was to get the boat under control, which
Britt did quickly, and the second was to reel in the fish, which I
did much more slowly. Fortunately for my aching arm muscles, it quit
fighting after a very short time -- I think we dragged it to death at
7 knots, because it was dead or nearly so when we finally hauled it
aboard. Tuna for dinner! (The next day we caught another one, even
bigger than the first, and it fought hard all the way in. We both
took turns working it, then released it once we got it close to the
boat. The first fish was 28", and tuna are thick and round in
cross-section, so that provided about ten meals worth of fish, as
much as we could reasonably keep.)
As soon as the tuna was taken care of, it was time to deal with the whisker pole, at least temporarily -- we'd figure the rest out tomorrow. Britt went forward and unfastened the pole end from the jib, then secured the bent pole against the mast. Without the pole, we can't sail directly downwind with both sails up, so we furled the main completely and rolled out the entire jib. This slowed us down considerably; when the wind dropped below 12 knots, around midnight, we fired up the engine. Well, we needed to charge the batteries anyway.
The
next day, Britt announced that he had a plan. Our whisker pole is a
telescoping aluminum pole, with two sections, and the smaller section
was the one which bent. He would use a hacksaw to cut off the bent
section, then drill and tap the pieces so we could re-insert the end
and bolt it permanently to the larger section. It would no longer
telescope, but as we normally use it extended only partway, the
resulting pole would be only a little shorter than before. Not
perfect, but good enough.
We both harnessed up and went out on deck to move the pole back to the cockpit where we could work on it. I was a little skeptical about doing such an involved repair while underway, but it turned out to be only a few hours' worth of work, and soon we had our jib back up on our reduced pole.
Actually, there was a small delay in getting the pole back in working order, but it wasn't related to the repair. When we went up to the foredeck to retrieve the pole, we discovered several dolphins swimming alongside our bows and occasionally leaping out of the water. Of course we had to watch them for a while, and as we watched, more and more arrived to join in the fun. Ten, twenty, thirty...eventually there were probably fifty or more dolphins, gliding and porpoising all around our boat, and it seemed almost as though Windom was being carried on their backs, rather than on the water.
Clearly, the water near the coast of South America is rich with sea life. Every few minutes, we scared another school of flying fish out of the water. We caught (and released) the second tuna on this part of the passage, and in fact we actually got simultaneous strikes on both poles, but the fish on the second pole ran the line off the reel and was lost. Most exciting of all, we saw a whale! All we saw was its tail, huge flukes pointed straight up in the air in the classic pose for enough long seconds that both of us got a good look.
The wind had remained fairly light all day. Since our whisker pole is now a little on the short side, we needed to roll up some jib to keep it tight enough to the pole so it wouldn't flap in the light winds, which kept our speed down around 5 knots. This wouldn't allow us to reach Cartagena by sunset the next day, but as we had motored all night, we really wanted to sail. Instead of pushing on with the motor, we decided to pull into what is called the "Five Bays" anchorage, on the Colombian coast just northeast of Cabo Aguja and Santa Marta. We wouldn't make it in before dark, but from the information we had it appeared to be a wide-open entrance, with deep water nearly to the shore on the eastern side. We had talked to Rick on Infidien on the SSB that morning; they had been anchored there for a few days, and agreed to listen for us on the VHF that evening. (We had figured that if we couldn't repair the whisker pole underway, we would anchor in Five Bays and work on it there, so when we spoke with them that morning, stopping there was already an option.)
At just before 8 p.m. we approached the anchorage, and I have to admit I was slightly terrified. We've gone into harbors at night in the US, but they are all nicely marked and accurately charted. Some of the charts we've been using in the Caribbean have been off by as much as a quarter mile. Our best chart of the Five Bays area is at a 1:300,000 scale -- the bay we were going into just showed up as an indent on the coast, with no soundings or details at all. Other than a big rock somewhere in the middle! (And our boat insurance doesn't cover us for Colombia.) But the images provided by the radar matched up perfectly with the shape of the bay on the chart, and when we spotted Infidien's anchor light we headed right for it. We dropped anchor in the first perfectly flat water we'd seen in two days, gulped down a hasty dinner, and passed out.
The next morning Infidien left around 8 a.m., and we followed 20 minutes later. Rick had told us he'd talked with Kajsa on VHF earlier, who were 15 miles out and ahead now, reporting 15-20 knot winds after a night of light air. But immediately outside the anchorage we hit very strong and gusty winds, along with large, steep waves. Rick had hooked up Infidien's whisker pole to their jib before setting out, and when they turned downwind, they were able to sail adequately in the deteriorating conditions by unfurling a small amount of their jib, without a mainsail. But we hadn't been quite so prescient. We rolled out a little mainsail to steady us as we motored out of the bay, but when we turned downwind and let the mainsheet out, the waves pushed us around so much it was very hard to keep the boom from swinging, even with our preventers (lines holding the boom to the side). We tried to put out some jib, but things quickly got out of hand as the windspeed climbed over 35 knots and headed for 40. Our autopilot couldn't cope with the force of the waves, which we guessed were getting up to 10 or 12 feet high; we'd get knocked around by a wave and "Bob" couldn't compensate fast enough. We were scared we might get forced broadside to a wave, so I hand-steered while Britt tried to get the wildly flapping sails under control. He finally managed to roll the jib back up, but the pressure on the mainsail was so great that it jammed while he tried to roll a little more back into the mast, so we sailed for a while on about half a main and nothing else, while the wind howled on the wrong side of 40 knots and we surfed down great huge walls of foam. The most we saw was 48 knots, which is also the most we have seen ever while sailing or at anchor. Needless to say, it is more than we care to see again.
We debated whether things would get better or worse closer to land, but the discussion was mostly academic as neither of us wanted to turn very far from the course which put the waves directly on our stern. To get more information, we radioed Infidien, who had been talking with Kajsa (out of our range); they had reported a spell of very rough conditions, but were now almost out of it (although not before losing their whisker pole overboard -- a bad passage for poles!), and Infidien thought things had improved for them as well. Neither of the other boats have windspeed indicators, though, so we couldn't do any comparisons. We chose starboard tack, angling slightly away from the land, and after twenty minutes of misery, things started to moderate as abruptly as they began. "It's settled down to only 30 knots," I shouted at Britt over the roar of the wind, conscious of how illogical it sounded to say "only 30 knots". Wrestling the wheel became less difficult, which gave me enough time to reset the autopilot parameters so it could handle the wind and waves, and soon Bob was back on duty.
Later, when we arrived in Cartagena, we compared notes with other cruisers. Most of those we talked to also encountered unusually strong winds and rough seas right around Cabo Aguja. Our theory is that the intense winds here are due to the cape effect (cabo means cape) which causes winds to accelerate as they round a high headland and are funneled together. The big waves were steepened by the effect of the current which flows from west to east close to shore. (If you look at our vessel track on the chartlet, you can see where we moved in toward the coast and then out again; we had started to hit this countercurrent and were trying to get out of it by heading away from land.) The east-to-west wind against the west-to-east current turned the already large waves into steep monsters.
Peculiar conditions prevailed for some distance after we rounded the cape. The wind dropped slowly all the way down to10 knots, the wind shifted to nearly due south, on our beam, and the waves practically disappeared. It was too much to hope that this might last, though, and it didn't. The wind soon settled on a "normal" 20-25 knots, directly behind us as usual, and the waves to the 6-8 foot range. We kept our speed up so we would pass across the mouth of the Rio Magdalena before sunset; we were warned that debris from the river spreads out as far as 30 miles at sea, and people had reported seeing big logs and other scary objects. It was obvious when we entered the outflow zone of the river, because the water changed color from blue to green to murky brown, and a cross-current began to sweep us away from the coast. But although there was lots of debris, particularly on the western (downwind) side of the outflow region, we didn't see much we needed to avoid.
After the water changed back to blue, it was time to slow down, to time our arrival outside the harbor entrance for right around dawn. We furled the jib until there was only a tablecloth-worth of sail out, and centered the mostly-furled mainsail so it would act more as a steadying sail (as seen as some trawlers) than to provide propulsion. It seems to be inevitable that when we want to make tracks, the wind dies down or is in our face, so naturally when we wanted to travel slowly, we had more wind that we knew what to do with. and despite being just a few square yards of fabric away from being under bare poles, we still made 4 to 5 and sometimes even 6 knots.
Santa Marta, Baranquilla, and Cartagena are all major ports, and we saw a great deal of ship traffic. Most of it gave us no problem, but in the middle of the night, while Britt was on watch, one ship came up from behind and looked like it planned to go right through us. Britt made a turn....and a few moments later the ship made an identical turn, staying right on our butt. (Britt later said that he probably should have turned left, toward shallower water, but that it seemed like we were a little right of the ship so he turned right instead, plus he had limited options due to the way the jib was set on the pole unless he wanted to wake me and take the pole down.) He turned the spotlight on our sails and hailed the ship, to no effect, on VHF. Just as he was ready to take more evasive action, the ship turned and passed us with a mile of clearance.
We sailed nearly to Cartagena with the jib poled out to port, but finally the angle of the wind and the necessity of closing with the shore made a jibe necessary, and since we were almost in we decided to just put the pole away. This was the first time we had taken the pole down at night, so naturally it was blowing over 25 knots and we were rolling in big seas. I was on watch, so I woke up Britt to do it since it takes both of us to handle the pole with our current set-up. I expected he would be a little groggy, so I made him put two tethers on his harness, instead of just one, and told him he was not allowed to unclip one until the other was clipped onto something else. (I should point out that we only started regularly using jacklines and harnesses when we left Trinidad, and are still getting used to them. From Florida (where we bought the webbing to make the jacklines, which run down each side of the deck) to Trinidad, we never had any reason to go out on deck while underway, and we don't wear harnesses in the cockpit unless conditions are scary, which so far has not happened, knock on wood, except for a short time on this passage.)
I put on the foredeck lights and then worked the lines, as usual. Britt got out on deck, clipped in at the mast, and prepared to detach the pole from the jib sheet. Just as he did, the boat rolled in a wave, and the free end of the pole swung around the mast, with Britt attached. If he hadn't been clipped in, he would have been hanging onto the end of the pole as it swung over the lifelines, an unpleasant ride for sure, but on his short leash he didn't go anywhere, and soon the pole was back under control and stowed on the front of the mast. Britt headed back below to catch a few more hours of snooze time, and I steered for the Boca Grande entrance to Cartagena harbor.
The Boca Grande entrance is the northern approach to Cartagena. Although at one time it was much wider than Boca Chica, the southern entrance used by large ships, a submerged breakwater stretches entirely across the entrance with only a few small-craft passes. We had a waypoint for one such pass, marked by an oil drum painted green next to a wooden stake, but the waypoint was off and spotting the mark was tricky in the early morning haze. Fortunately, Infidien was just ahead, and we followed their lead. Inside the harbor it was dead calm. We motored past dugout canoes, container ships, and a statue of the Madonna, and dropped our hook in the yacht anchorage, within sight of the ancient city walls of "Cartagena of the Indies". Maybe Christopher Columbus anchored in this very spot 500-odd years ago.
Statistics: 475 miles, 94 hours (~24 motoring or motorsailing, 58 sailing, 12 anchored), two big tuna landed (one released)
