The notorious Colombian Coast

Everyone warned us that we were going to get our butts kicked by the Christmas winds. The stretch of ocean off the Colombian coast has its own weather system with a combination of trade winds, a semi-permanent Colombian low, a 2 mile high snow capped mountain and warm ocean water all factoring into the weather. Winds over 50 knots and waves over 25’ are a regular occurrence. Fortunately for all us, the weather gods looked after the two families making the passage. One day, we motored in glassy calm seas that looked like oil. Other days we had a gentle breeze. One of the top 3 worst passages on Earth, yeah right!! Get me the pontoon boat honey, got another passage to make. Our rhumb line was very close a lump of Venezuelan rocks that some cruisers stop over at. The Costa Guardia there e very lonely and so contact any vessel that they see asking them for tons of information ….all in Spanish. Questions such as: “How long is your vessel?”; “What is your flag?”; “How many people on board?”; “Are you carrying weapons?”; “When is your birthday?” etc. etc. Fortunately, another vessel interjected trying to help with the translation. Poor guy ended up getting the 3^rd degree on his boat also. “So, who are you?” “Where are you going?”

The only cruising info is a word document by a boat named Pizazz. Now Columbia is one of the safer coasts with people on shore welcoming you to Columbia. Having such a bad international image for so long regarding corruption and drug trafficking, the people are trying very hard to change it. Our first land fall was 5 Bays next to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At daybreak, the clouds had not cleared yet so we missed one of the coolest sites around, a snow capped mountain right next to shore! Crystal, who was behind us by a few hours, did see it and said it was spectacular. Ashore one of the bays were subsistence housing occupied by a co-op of fishermen and their families. Redaldo befriended us as he does all the arriving boats. We signed his log book and left our boat card. As a regalo (gift) he gave us a fragment of an old clay pot he found near by. This particular area is loaded with historical artifacts of an ancient civilization that once occupied this area some 1000 or more years ago.

What made this area particularly exciting were the infamous wind gusts created by the huge adjacent mountains that would trigger wind to come BLASTING down into the anchorage at nearly 40 knots at random moments. Crystal, who store their dingy on the deck, had to take their dog Henna to pee on shore at night. The dingy, while being lowered into the water, acted like a kite and caught the wind with such force it snapped the line and sent the dingy moving rapidly out to sea. BLAST, BLAST, BLAST goes their air horn at 2:00 a.m. With no dingy, they can’t get their own boat. We jump out of bed thinking we were dragging while Crystal shines the light on their dingy. Marc, in such a hurry, tripped on a line and fell face first, dropping our only spot light into the salt water. Luckily, he caught himself. Marc quickly races to get their dingy, which luckily finds a cove or it would be in Panama. Henna still has to go potty and seeing Marc, jumps into our dingy full bore. Kurt has to grab the dog and pull him out of our dingy. The joys of buddy boating.. we are there to help each other out. They were feeling particularly chagrin as earlier they had run out of fuel and need to siphon off of us.