After almost five weeks in Santa Marta, on the morning of Tuesday 19th we set sail for Cartagena. This meant an overnight trip – the shortest possible distance being just over 100 nautical miles. And in practice it’s further. On the way you pass the mouth of the Magdalena River, which is one of the great rivers of South America and the largest in Colombia. It flows for 1,000 miles from high up in the Andes and is navigable for a good 600 miles inland. It is a hazard to shipping, because various debris comes downriver and out into the ocean, including tree trunks. So I gave this a wide berth, sailing at least 15 miles offshore – having been told by Dutch neighbours that they found a lot of serious debris 10 miles out when they sailed in the opposite direction. Hitting a tree is something that has sunk a good number of yachts. So I sailed well out and at night I cut my speed to only 4 knots to be on the safe side. All went well: no sharp bangs in the night! 

Cartagena is interesting to come into, as the city is situated on the north end of an 84 square kilometre bay, protected by a large island. I came down and around the south of this, dodging large patches of floating water hyacinth that must come down some river (didn’t want my propellor fouled by any of that either). Sailing up into the city past the naval docks was great, and just before the old town is Club de Pesca Marina. Not the easiest place to get into. I was tired, having dozed for maybe three hours, and the marina staff kept me waiting outside for 50 minutes by repeatedly saying over the radio “Uno momento” until I dropped my anchor and turned off the engine. When I finally came in at about 2pm it was to discover that they wanted me to get into an unbelievably small space between two pilings, against a moderate wind. I tried for about 10 minutes with just no luck. A party of people on a yacht unbelievably tried to squeeze past me, despite it being impossible, so I was shouting at them, telling them to back off, while trying to persuade the three marina employees (who didn’t speak any English) to give me a different berth. Fortunately I think that a certain old Anglo Saxon word is now so well known internationally that they gathered that I was not a happy chap, and they obliged – and with only modest difficulty I came in. Two of them jumped on board and made fast to the pilings and all was good. I was then very polite with them, but I could see that they were very wary of me! I admit that I had been roaring like a lion – let’s face it, when nothing else works, sheer rage often does. It’s by far the most difficult marina to navigate that I have yet been in. 

Happily, it’s a nice place! The shower facilities are great, everything is well maintained and the staff are very pleasant. And just under 800 meters away is the old town, in effect the newest part of it. You walk over a bridge and enter Getsemani, which was a run-down old working class neighbourhood which has been developed into a charming area of narrow streets full of restaurants and bars and small boutique hotels and hostels. Walk a few hundred metres through that, and you come to the walled city proper, which is large and mostly given over to tourism. Endless bars and restaurants, shops, small hotels etc – but it’s very, very attractive, with some nice squares with large trees that provide a respite from the heat. 

Sitting in one, the Parque Fernandez de Madrid, I got talking to a 77 year old black Colombian man. Turns out he’d been a sailor, including on Norwegian ships, and he was talking lovingly about all the coastal towns of Norway. He’d been in Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town too and laughed, saying he spent one night in prison. He’d gone ashore in Durban and walked into a hotel and sat down, wanting a drink. He was arrested, because of course back then the hotel was for whites only. He spent much of the night in a cell and then they released him (probably realising that there was trouble on the way from a Norwegian shipowner). He seemed to find the whole episode amusing… amazing to think that it’s not very long ago that that was the reality of South Africa – it was certainly the Durban I grew up in. He seems to be a bit down on his luck these days, so I gave him some cash – he seemed to me to be one of the very few people you come across who was really deserving. The sad reality is at least half of the population of Colombia has a hard luck story, it’s just the way life is in this part of the world (as it is in Africa and quite a bit of Asia for that matter).

I wandered into Getsemani on Friday evening. (Very appropriately wearing sandals and a beard – while it’s always possible that one could be mugged, the risk of crucifixion happily seems to be pretty low). Much like in Santa Marta, the narrow streets were pulsing with life. Not easy to find somewhere to eat: places were either heaving or ominously completely empty… After walking around a bit, I chanced on a great little place in a side street, that seemed to be patronised mainly by locals. Had a delightful waitress, although I think I made a mistake – in response to her question of where I was from, I managed to tell her in Spanish that I was here on my boat and in the marina – she kept coming back to me and calling me Capitan and talking to me and I didn’t have a bloody clue what she was saying! But she clearly had a great heart, full marks for that! Typical of a lot of Colombians, just really nice people. 

On both late Saturday and Sunday afternoons I had the entertainment of a very large cabin cruiser coming back in next to me in the marina. It’s an Italian-built Pershing 56, and it’s huge, towering over me, almost 60 feet long (and appropriately called Hooligan). It makes a throaty roar, which led me to investigate online… Unbelievably, it has two 1,360 horsepower engines, giving it 2,720hp (by way of contrast, the Mercedes Benz 3.0 litre diesel engine generates 221hp – and my Volvo Penta diesel only 55hp!). The Pershing has a 3,200 litre fuel tank – so you think, wow, you must be able to go a long way on that! Not so – at its cruising speed of 38 knots it consumes 400 litres per hour – so your range would be only 8 hours! That’s right, four hundred litres of diesel per hour. Imagine what a modest two-hour outing would cost: here in Colombia diesel is subsidised and very cheap, only 57 US cents a litre, so the cost of 800 litres would be “only” $456. In the US, the average cost of diesel at the moment is $1.43, so it would cost $1,144. In the UK, at about $2.40 a litre, $1,920 (£1,600). All extraordinary! And of course these big boats have air conditioning etc. – it’s onboard generator uses 5 litres of diesel an hour. 

The poor environment – it is difficult to think of anything, other than a private jet, which would consume more fuel (and the private jet, on similar fuel consumption, would be carrying you closer to 500 nautical miles in an hour, rather than 38!). These sorts of vessels will be the hardest to convert to alternative energy sources, simply because the power requirements are so large that the weight implied would be huge (this is a problem with trucks, and yet the average 18-wheeler truck only needs roughly 500 horsepower, not 2,700!). What a strange world we live in.