February 18, 2024
Colombia is now in the past, at least my first visit.
Sometimes people ask what my favourite places have been and it is hard to pick them because most every stop has something wonderful about it.
Colombia will be on my list of favourites because of the colorful and dynamic nature of the two places we visited, Santa Marta and Cartagena. On top of that, by a wisp of good fortune, we struck up a conversation with Marcela from the Colombian Armada and that led to meeting a large group of local people who made our experience exceptional.
I spent four weeks getting tutored in Spanish and many, many hours on my own improving my vocabulary. The time at ECOS Escuela de Espanol, Ingles y Salsa was valuable for the new friends I met there as well.
My Spanish is still very, very poor, but I believe that if I work at it, I may actually improve. Panama is just ahead and also a Spanish speaking country (similarly for all of Central America), and so I will have more opportunity to learn, practice and hopefully I can catch up to Megan (who studied Spanish for four years) and Andrew (who’s girlfriend is from Colombia, so, he has a long haired dictionary).
I enjoyed the cycling in Cartagena to a degree, but the traffic was very busy and the sun/heat was almost unbearable in the middle of the day. Last weekend all the sitting and learning Spanish seems to have worked my back into a state of disrepair. I am hobbled, and so staying to ride, as well as trying to be smooth with all of the ‘dynamic’ driving in Cartagena seemed dangerous. Hopefully Panama has many good roads and courteous drivers as well.
I departed Cartagena on Friday at 5pm. I was hoping to go much earlier, but paperwork was delayed and then I put in some fuel. Ultimately I anchored just behind Pendales (Isla Baru) on Friday night.
The weather window is pretty good. Seas are mostly calm until Tuesday and I am trying to cover as much ground as I can before the wind and waves pick up.
Unfortunately sitting in one spot for a long time is not good for the bottom of a boat, and I knew that I was picking up some growth on the bottom. My dinghy sat in the water for a long time and it was a big mess. I knew my hull would also be covered. Instead of paying someone to clean the bottom I wanted to leave early and do the scraping myself.
On Saturday morning, tucked in behind Pendales with calm water, I pulled out my diving apparatus and my scraping tools and tried to get working. Unfortunately, I forgot how to work the breathing apparatus and I can’t find my weights to balance the floatation.
I was forced to try to clean a bit by holding my breath and diving. I worked at it for an hour, but I was largely unsuccessful. The other lesson I learned is to wear a LOT of clothes when scraping the bottom. Those little barnacles cut the skin like a thousand sharp knives. I kinda look like I fell off my bike and rolled down the road in a ball. I have tiny cuts all over my legs, arms, hands, back, etc. It was an important lesson.
With my weather window being what it is and a lot of distance to cover, I decided to move on.
As I moved along, I noted that my little bit of scraping (mostly on the keel cooler, which cools the main engine coolant fluid) was not improving my engine temps. So I travelled for three hours to Isla Grande where I could get another protected anchorage, and tried again.
By this point I had figured out how to get the diving equipment to work, and while I didn’t find my weight belt, I simply tied a string to a 20lb weight and used that as ballast while I cleaned the bottom. Not all of it, but I spent quite a bit more time on the keel cooler, and more importantly, the propeller.
I have figured out (trial and error) that the propeller was the cause of the overheating. There was so much bulk on the prop, that it was putting strain on the engine. The dirty keel cooler isn’t helping of course, but a prop that is 80% clean is much, much better. The dirty prop was also a huge deterrent to making decent speed with the boat.
Another hour or so below the boat scraping (with a LOT more clothes on) and I decided to try again. I wanted to get to Isla Fuerte before dark. And so off I went. My boat speed improved by about 8% and most of that is related to cleaning the prop I think.
Last night I arrived at Isla Fuerte before dark and it proved to be a quiet place, with a few other boats anchored there. None of them were lit, not even an anchor light, so they were probably locally owned boats or abandoned. despite the calm waters, and almost no wind, the boat was getting rocked quite a bit. It wasn’t so noticeable in the evening, but it got worse in the middle of the night (when the tides peak high/low it tends to get worse).
I woke up at 2:30am with the boat rocking enough that I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I simply pulled up anchor and started moving on. A few hours of sleep is better than nothing. I also would have liked to spend more time cleaning the bottom, but I will do that when I get to the San Blas islands. The boat speed and temps are pretty good now and getting to the next anchorage in daylight is a bigger priority than waiting until 6 am to scrape more (That would cost me four hours or so of time, most of it wasted with me rolling about and not sleeping, and push my arrival in Panama until 9pm, well after dark.)
Today’s run will be about 15 hours to Bahai de Sasardi. I won’t sign in there, rather just fly a Q flag and wait until Monday when I will head to the top of the San Blas Islands. There is supposedly a good place to sign in at Isla Porvenir. My plan may be changed if there are locals that require me to sign in at Sasardi, but I wll try to avoid it.
If I arrive with a decent amount of time before the sun goes away I may be able to get under the boat and scrape a bit more growth off. Although it’s always a bit dangerous to be swimming at dusk when fish feed, I will see what the anchorage is like.
I have arrived. This is a quaint little village with a very protected anchorage and only one other boat, S/V Chinook with Carl and Evan (?) aboard.
Getting to the anchorage was a bit stressful. The charts are a bit sparse. Note the blue area in the chart below. There is no indication of what’s there. On my path through I didn’t see anything less than 100 feet of water, but you just never know.
Meanwhile as I approached the anchorage, one area that the chart said had 25 feet really had about 11 feet. Uncertainly is a scary thing sometimes.
After getting through the gauntlet, though this is what awaited. (It’s a panorama shot so everything is a bit small.)
There are not a lot of pictures again. I don’t think pictures of me sitting in a Spanish classroom or listening to Spanish Stories are very exciting. For what it’s worth, though some Dolphins came out to make my world a better place when I departed Pendales, enroute to Isla Grande and I have some video.
I hope that brings a smile to your day. It always brings a smile to mine.
Addendum:
Here’s a list of my Spanish Resources:
Slow News in Spanish – Stories from the current headlines, read slow, with some parts translated. It’s available from an app as well, allowing for easy navigation to hear things a number of times.
Babel – A useful online course. I find these courses a bit slow, but they are ‘go at your own pace’ and focus on repitition. I will continue working through the exercises because I need a lot of help with conversation.
Simple Stories in Spanish – You can find these stories online (smalltownspanishteacher) and I think this is one of the best resources. I listened to these stories daily, printed out the translated text and then made word lists ad nauseum. This site is free, but she takes donations. The stories are also available on Spotify.
Tales for Kids in Spanish – These are short stories as well, but lack the ‘learning tools’ that make those provided by smalltownspanishteacher so valuable. Still, they are useful to improve listening skills and that is one of my biggest weaknesses.
Spanish in your car – I found this useful when I had 10 minutes to fill (walking for groceries for example), when you could just review a snippet of vocabulary without much context.
Audible has a number of free podcasts which are simple books or stories in Spanish. I downloaded a few and have listened to them. Again, I now am able to pickup vocabulary words that I couldn’t even distinguish before.
Netflix – There is a lot of good stuff on Netflix that can be played in Spanish (note many shows offer European Spanish and Latin America Spanish, but the closed captions don’t always line up). I watched a lot of Spanish language TV in the past four weeks and I am not sure how much that helped.
Griselda – About 20% of the dialogue is in Colombian Spanish.
La Viuda Negra – This is a Spanish version of the same story (different production) about Griselda Blanco. I didn’t watch this one.
Animated movies – Disney’s movies use mostly European Spanish and the subtitles don’t line up with the Latino Spanish, so I gave up on many of these, but Pinocchio, … I will come back to them and try again because kids shows/movies often have simpler language. Unfortunately it also comes really, really fast.
Online, the three additional apps/online resources that I used daily were:
Spanish Verb Conjugator app (Ian tipton)
Bravolo Diccionario app
Google Translate