Cartegena
Serai
Jason and Emily Willis
Sun 18 Feb 2007 18:22
10:24.56N 75:32.6W
Hola Amigos
Today we are in a Spanish mood, as last night we arrived in Cartagena. After 452 miles in 82 hours, we finally pulled into Cartagena just as the sun was setting. We fell asleep to the sounds of Salsa pulsing out of this amazing city.
After our last blog, we were in a bouyant mood - excuse the pun! The weather had been great and of course had lulled us completely into a false sense of security. As we passed the headland at 5 Bays, all hell broke loose. the wind quickly hit 25 knots, gusting 30. The seas jumped up to 12 feet and over. Wow, what a ride. We stuck another reef into the mainsail and furled the genoa. We were charging along at 6 knots - so nice and controlled. I have to say - Serai was loving it. She just took it all in her stride!
We made a silly mistake and the wind backed and we came round with it, putting us a little too close to a lee shore. We gybed around to find we were now on a beam reach in big seas. A couple of early waves came crashing into the cockpit. The boat healed right over and we were completely soaked! We came up on the wind a bit, to take the waves more forward. Serai settled into it and we spent 4 hours trying to get back on course to our waypoint at the Rio Magdelena river. Now this river is meant to be the point at which things get worse, so you can imagine our thoughts as we neared it - not that we communicated this to one another! Tired, wet and cold, we got to our waypoint at around 9am in the morning. In fact the wind settled somewhat. The water went from blue to green to brown...and I mean a really dark, horrid, dirty brown. The sea bubbled up quite a bit, but nothing worse than we had already encountered. After a couple of hours, we were across, and the water turned back to blue again. We had a near miss with a small container ship coming out of the river. It kept coming at us, and we thought it would pass behind us, but instead forced us into an emergency gybe to get out of its way, after running to get the preventer off the boom! As you can imagine, a few kind words were uttered to the bridge deck, but it seemed no-one was there - probably playing cards with the autohelm on!
We carried on up the coast with an anchorage 10 miles from cartagena in mind. On arrival though it was completely untenable in the NE winds we were getting. We decided to run to cartagena, although the afternoon was near an end. We had no choice, we had to make it there. We gunned the engine and stuck out the genoa. We got there in an hour just as the sun was setting, and found our anchorage just outside the Club Nautico, which we have not had a chance to check out yet.
All said -an interesting, and in hindsight, fun trip. It was good for us to experience those waves. Again Serai performed admirably, and we were delighted. We plan to spend around 4 days here before heading out to some of the outlying islands and then up to the San Blas.
Keep the emails coming. Love to hear from you all.
Take it easy. Buenos Dias!
J and Ems xx