A New Continent!

Date: 30th January, 2024

Where am I? 

Latitude: 11°14.5N

Longitude: 074°13.0W

Berthed at Marina Santa Marta, Santa Marta, Colombia.

How is the weather?

The weather has moderated over the last couple of days, in line with the PredictWind forecast. Lighter winds of 13 – 18 knots and waves up to 2 metres. Of course, in the marina, it’s hot!

What am I feeling?

Delighted to be have had a safe and more comfortable passage from Spanish Water, Curaçao to Santa Marta. Pleased with our downwind wing-on-wing rig which we are now getting the hang of managing in the conditions we have. I’m also excited to be on a new continent for the first time and looking forward to exploring Santa Marta for a few days!

What has happened this week?

We spent a few days this week in Curaçao, from Tuesday to Saturday, waiting for a weather window for the leg to Santa Marta. I had heard via www.noonsite.com that the clearing in process could take hours, but we found it to be pretty efficient even though one has to take a taxi from Spanish Water into Willemstad (30 minutes and US$35) to visit Immigration and Harbour Master (same location) and then Customs (different location). The officials were welcoming and efficient. One has to visit the Harbour Master within 8 hours of arrival and pay US$20 for a 3 month anchoring permit.

We found Curaçao (which was always a stopping point in case of bad weather, rather than a planned destination in its own right) to be a curious mixture of quaint and tatty. Some beautiful colonial-era Dutch architecture in the World Heritage Site old town of Willemstad. But also evident signs of catering to a voluminous cruise ship clientele. 

We managed a day of R&R at Coral Estate in the north west of the island – swimming, lunch, card games and drinks. 

On Saturday morning, we pulled up anchor and headed out on the Santa Marta leg. We had a variety of conditions en route – perfect fast  downwind sailing between Curaçao and the top of Aruba, followed by lumpy cross seas and 20-25 knots winds overnight as we progressed towards our waypoint 30 miles north of Punta Gallinas on the Venezuelan – Colombia border. We reached that point in the wee hours of Sunday morning and, rather than deal with gybing the yacht, we put the engine on for 4 hours to wait for daylight. After putting away preventer lines and spinnaker pole, we switched onto a deep reach on port tack which allowed us to lay course for a waypoint just off Santa Marta.

Night watch is always something. Under the light of a silvery, gibbous moon, we wended our way westward in our little floating covered wagon on an ocean prairie, looking for new lands and an optimistic future. Orion and his dog Canis Major of Sirius fame circled above, with the Plough, Cassiopeia and even the Southern Cross for company, pointing the way to the south celestial Pole. The vault of heaven on impressive display.

I disabled the link to our live position on www.yachtfujin2.com before departing Spanish Water and also disabled our AIS position transmission once we were clear of shipping off Aruba. There was a report last October of a yacht being boarded multiple times by pirates off the coast of Colombia with quite a lot of damage done to the boat and crew. Hence, we decided to stay at least 30 miles off the coast until closing Santa Marta while trying to be inconspicuous. We left on our navigation lights which have a short visibility range and kept a close eye on any targets appearing on our radar. We did not see anything unusual during the trip and our position locator on the website is now back on. We will probably do the same between Santa Marta and Cartagena  and on leaving Cartagena for San Blas, Panama.

I put out our StarLink at around 0300 on Sunday and it seems to be functioning normally.

We plan to spend a few days exploring Santa Marta, the first city established by Europeans on the South American continent, over the next few days and will then look for the weather window for the relatively short hop down to Cartagena.

Fujin out!