1/10/02 | Spanish lessons

Lately we've been catching up on all those little boat chores done that we have neglected over the past months. It's partly because a friend of ours is flying in next week to join us, so we have to get all the half-completed projects out of what's going to be his bedroom. And we'd be embarrassed for him to see how much we've let things slide; like people who only get around to vacuuming the rugs and mowing the lawn when company is due to arrive, we are being shamed into activity. We might as well work on the boat, since we're hanging out here waiting for him to arrive.

We're cheating though, and not doing all the work ourselves. After we discovered that the local labor is relatively cheap, we decided to contribute to the Colombian economy and hire a few men to do some of the work. Alvaro stripped the anchor platform and the wood accents in our cockpit, and is currently hard at work on the stainless steel; Eduardo and Jaime cleaned our waterline and are washing and waxing the hull. I don't think Windom's ever looked better. Plus, I'm getting lots of Spanish practice and learning lots of new words, mostly having to do with boat maintenance. ("Wax", in Spanish, is "cera".)

One thing that had really gotten decrepit was the teak, especially our cockpit table. I had picked up some oxalic acid in Bonaire, and after sanding all the old finish off, we cleaned the wood with the acid. Wow, what a difference!  Then I applied four coats of a semi-gloss polyurethane finish. It looks so much better than the Cetol we had before. The original finish on our exterior teak was Cetol, and we'd continued to use it, but we discovered that its longevity in a tropical climate is not up to its reputation. We don't care for the orange color, and if it's not going to be 100% maintenance-free, we might as well expend effort on a finish we like rather than on one we don't. It doesn't look quite as nice as Kajsa's twelve coats of varnish, but polyurethane's way easier to use. On the other hand, everyone knows what you're talking about when you say you've got to do some varnishing -- "polyurethaning" hasn't made it into the vocabulary. ("Varnish", in Spanish, is "barniz".)

(I guess that those of you who have just started reading these logs probably think that all we do is work on the boat! But in truth we go long times without doing a stitch of maintenance or repair, mostly because things really don't break all the time -- just recently, it seems! -- and because it's hard to get motivated to sand teak or polish stainless when there are fish to catch or mountains to hike.)

In order to hire our crew, we had to move to a slip in the marina. It's the first time we've been at a dock in almost exactly a year, other than for taking on fuel. At $12/day including water and somewhat dodgy electricity, it's about the least expensive marina we've ever seen -- and for good reason. The docks are not in the best of shape, and there are no real finger piers, just stubby little concrete arms, and no pilings. It's sort of a med-mooring arrangement, where one end of the boat is tied to the dock and the other is held off the dock by a mooring or anchor. When we came in, we had to toss lines to a guy snorkeling in the water, who tied them to moorings on the bottom. When we leave, the diver will release them. Our bow is pointed in to the dock, so to get on and off we have to "walk the plank" -- we have a plank tied onto the dock which juts out over the water a few feet, from the end of which we can scramble onto our bow pulpit. ("Plank", in Spanish, is "tabla".)

Shortly after we arrived at the marina and got all our lines sorted out and squared away, a group of around nine people, adults and children, came wandering down the dock, looking at the boats. "Buenos dias," we all said to each other, then one woman asked, "Podemos ver su bote?"

"Claro que sí!" I replied and invited them all aboard. The woman who'd spoken to me, introduced herself as Beatriz, and then they all stepped forward and gave their names. They were, like us, tourists in Cartagena. They live in the Colombian state of Antioquia, which is in the central mountains. I pulled out our atlas and we showed each other where we were from, and then Britt and I showed them around the boat. The youngest girl, Sara, went down the companionway and then popped up to tell the adults, eyes wide, "Hay una cocina!"  (There's a kitchen!) Then we all trooped below and I gave them a tour of our "casa flotante" as best I could in my poor Spanish as they peppered us with questions. Where did we sleep?  How much does it cost to stay at a dock?  Did we get scared in the middle of the ocean?

This is the kind of experience that makes me feel like I am truly traveling. So much of the time we cruisers are hanging out with other cruisers; it's hard to get to know the people who live in a place when we are only passing through, and even harder when we don't speak their language. But it was such a joy to have Beatriz and her family come aboard, so much fun to talk with them even in our limited shared vocabulary. It reminded me of our encounter with the family from Santiago in the Dominican Republic, when we went to climb Pico Duarte. Funny how both times, the "locals" we met and spent time with were actually local tourists. Maybe when people are on vacation, their attitudes change, and they become more interested in engaging with other transient people.

It's a good thing we're at a dock now, for a variety of reasons. Our recently-submerged wind generator is not performing up to par, and our batteries have been getting more and more drained, especially since we've been using the power sander and the computers a lot. Being plugged in gives us a chance to charge back up. We were also almost out of water, since the harbor water's too filthy to run the watermaker. (We run three or four gallons of our "homemade" reverse-osmosis water through the watermaker every week or so to keep it clean, since we didn't want to "pickle" it chemically for the relatively short time we'd be here.) We filled our tanks on the passage here, but that was three weeks ago. We certainly could have jugged water from the dock, but it's so much easier to just run the hose out here. ("Hose", in Spanish, is "manguera".)

It's also a little more peaceful here. Although the anchorage is well-protected from waves caused by the wind, it's just about the "wake-iest" place we've ever been. We might as well have been anchored out in the ocean for all the rocking we've been doing. From dawn to well into the night, water taxis, fishing runabouts, tourist sightseeing boats, and local pleasure craft zoom through the anchorage, apparently taking special pleasure in coming as close to the anchored yachts as possible. The water taxis are 20-person or so boats with, typically, twin 100+ horsepower outboards, and they throw huge wakes. There is a marked channel on the far side of the harbor. Nobody uses it. Even the tourist ferries seem to prefer slaloming among the sailboats. ("Sailboat", in Spanish, is "velero".)

Maybe all those wakes stressed our ground tackle, because last week we dragged anchor for the very first time. I had gone out to "Home-Mart", kind of a mini-Home Depot type place, to buy some polyurethane finish for the teak, and when I came back I noticed that it looked like we were much further from Kajsa than we had been, and much closer to a nameless local steel boat we refer to as The Rustbucket. As I tied the dink on, I called out to Britt, who was below, "Did you move the boat?" He came up shaking his head, and looked around, trying to decide if we had actually moved or not. The clincher was when we looked at the depthsounder, which read 25 feet -- we'd anchored in 10. We were doubtless still moving, as our 60 feet of chain that had been (we thought!) adequate at the lesser depth was not enough to hold us at the greater depth. But we dragged so slowly through the soupy bottom that Britt didn't notice from inside the boat.

We quickly got the engine started again, and re-anchored. It seemed strange that we dragged after having sat in one spot for two weeks -- you'd think the anchor would have buried completely. The wind was in the 15-20 knot range, a little higher than normal but not what we'd call a strong wind, although with our big awning up we have extra windage. Our only guess is that our anchor slowly slid through the very soft mud and "fell" out the other side, off the 10-foot ledge we were on. Maybe this process was assisted by all the yanking our anchor chain got from all the wakes, and the rotation that went on each day as we swung around with the changing current. We don't know.

But later that afternoon, we noticed another boat dragging. This one is a South African sailboat which has been "sort of abandoned" -- the couple who owned it split up, the woman bought her partner out but then moved to Aruba. Supposedly she hopes to move the boat there as well, eventually. But nobody's been aboard for a month or so. We watched the boat drift neatly between two cruising sailboats and start to head for a third before we decided we should do something about it, and jumped into the dink. We got to it just as it slid into the anchor chain of the next boat, and spent some time trying to figure out how to start the engine, before another cruiser dinked over and told us it didn't have one. The three of us worked to get the anchor up and move it with our dinghy, and then one of the water taxis came over, empty, and helped as well. It turned out that the boat's anchor chain was about rusted through, and its anchor is just a small Danforth, not a good type in a place like this where all the boats swing around in circles with the current. The water taxi guys moved the sailboat to just off one of the marina docks, and then tied a long line to the dock to keep the boat from swinging and dislodging the anchor. ("Anchor", in Spanish, is "ancla".)

All these wakes, and the possiblity of dragging anchor, are not conducive to a good night's sleep. But it doesn't really matter, because the strip along the waterfront between the marina and the walled city is filled with one discotheque after another, and every night the music begins around 10 p.m. and doesn't stop until after 4 a.m. So a good night's sleep is pretty much out of the question. Here in the marina, we've gotten a bit of a respite, because the direct path between the noise and us is no longer over the water, but across the land and a bunch of other boats. We hardly hear the music. However, since we are cheek-by-jowl with lots of other boats, many owned by loud, gregarious Colombians with lots of friends, who like to stay up late and party in their cockpits, we haven't been able to catch up on our snooze time. Maybe tonight things will be quieter. So good night -- or in Spanish, buenas noches.