Colombia! Sunday, 19/06/2022
An excellent sail west to Colombia! Left Aruba with a 20 knot following wind, and another 2 knots of current, which makes a big difference. When you’re sailing at say 6 knots through the water, the extra 2 knots pushes you to 8 knots over the ground, so it was lively sailing: with one reef in the mainsail and only a third of the foresail out, we were doing 7.5 to 8.5 knots, two metre waves lifting the stern and giving us a nice push forward!
This was the case for the first 30 hours. At times we were going a bit too fast; I ended up taking in the foresail altogether and happily doing 7-8 knots. By the afternoon of the second day, the wind began to lighten as forecast, so it was slower going for the last 100 miles of what turned out to be a 313 mile journey.
I deliberately chose a longer course, quite far off land: initially Venezuela, where prudence suggested it was good to be 25-30 miles off the coast, well out of sight of any potential pirates – several boats have been attacked in the last few years. And then I maintained this distance after entering Colombian waters, mainly to avoid the strange wind patterns you tend to get close in to the coast. Very quiet seas: I saw only three or four ships on the horizon over the whole 48 hour trip. This is positive too: it means that sleeping at night is very low risk – you are very unlikely to hit anything!
It was a pleasure coming into Marina Santa Marta. A beautiful approach, mountains coming down to the sea. A great marina, very useful too because they handle all the paperwork with the authorities (they even took my passport and returned it the following day with an entry stamp in it!). You can anchor here in the bay, but it isn’t ideal – no one is. People have been attacked and robbed doing so.
The city of Santa Marta is the fourth largest in the Caribbean region of Colombia – it’s one of those cities you’ve never heard of, although it has a population of almost 500,000 (the same as say Bristol in the UK). The city was founded in 1525 by the Conquistadors, and is the oldest in Colombia. It has a reputation as a friendly, happy place, and cheap as well!
Having had two nights sailing with not much sleep, I slept like a baby on Wednesday night. Was asleep by 10:30pm and slept till 8am – enough to feel fully recovered. Thursday evening there was a sort of party in the marina, around their outdoor cafe/bar – free snacks, very much Mexican orientated, nachos with various dips, guacamole etc, and some sort of local sausage. Music and people singing… Great atmosphere – very much the spirit of Latin America! Everyone, especially the young people working for the marina, so friendly (the last time I had this sort of experience was visiting Anna when she was in Buenos Aires, working in a hostel, back in 2015. I remember from there that the Colombians were reckoned by other Latinos to be the nicest people in South America).
Funny thing in coming into the marina on Wednesday morning: as I tied up, I noticed that the boat next to me had a familiar name: Mi Amore. And yes, there was a golden Labrador in the cockpit – I’d met this guy in Prickly Bay, Grenada, an American from Seattle. We’d often chatted in the bar on shore. Whereas I’d gone in a big loop north, west and then south, he’d come here directly west from Grenada via Bonaire and Curacao. There’s an eclectic mix of people here, a few Germans, a couple of Dutchmen, a few French people, a young Belgian couple with three small kids under 5 and an English couple from East Sussex – I said to him Sorry old chap, I’m a fraud, I’m masquerading as an Englishman. He grinned and said You’re South African! You can never fool an Englishman. With a British passport and a British-registered boat, it’s just a lot easier most of the time to say I’m from London! Especially for the benefit of the locals, who find it terribly confusing if I say “but I’m really from South Africa!” (Can’t resist terrorising the Dutch though by speaking to them in Afrikaans – the initial astonishment that someone has understood what they’ve said in Dutch – who ever learns Dutch? – and then the big smile at the unmistakable sound of Afrikaans, which they always seem to regard as a very comical language. No surprise, historically it was considered to be “kitchen Dutch”, spoken by illiterate whites and slaves).
Well, Santa Marta has a great atmosphere – there are several streets surrounding a square in the oldest part of town that are just jam-packed with cafes, restaurants and bars. They’re all busy, plus lots of people just walking around in the evening, lots of buskers, beggars and ladies of the night!
Compared to Caribbean islands, you can feel that you are in a substantial country. For a start, prices are much lower, mainly because Colombia does not import most of what it needs, it makes it locally. Fifty million people and a land size similar to South Africa. Although tourism is important, much of it is local, and it only makes up 2% of the economy – compared to 75% in Aruba and 40-50% in most other islands. So you could say it’s “a genuine working country”, rather than everything depending on the tourist dollar. I will travel inland – it’s incredibly diverse, from mountain climates to desert to Amazon rainforest to the hot and humid Caribbean coast. It has the second highest level of biodiversity in the world, only Brazil (which is 7 times larger) being more diverse. (e.g. Colombia has 1,900 species of birds – more than Europe and North America combined).
Colombia’s been independent from Spain since the 1820s, liberated along with Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia by Simon Bolivar. A very volatile history: until 2005 a long-running civil war with the Marxist FARC guerrillas, who were often in league with the cocaine barons, notably Pablo Escobar, the richest criminal in history, who amassed a $30bn fortune before the police finally shot him. The country is in the middle of a presidential election, the run-off vote happening today (Sunday). Ominously, the choice is between a leftist ex-guerilla (bringing fears of a slide towards a Venezuelan-type disaster) and a colourful businessman very much modelled on Donald Trump!
Wherever you are: do not at any time believe that your country has unique problems! It’s everywhere! I can promise you: the only time that you know that you are free of human craziness is when you’re at sea and you look 360 degrees around and see no boats!