28th February – 5th March

With the car safely in port and with nothing more for me to do, I had carefully choreographed a single night’s stay near the port and to sail the next day from nearby Puerto Lindo. Sylvain and Marjorie, the French couple in the VW T5, had a similar idea and had booked via the same company for the same days but on a different boat. We grabbed a reasonably long Uber to an easy-to-forget hostel in Puerto Lindo run by a crabby German woman relaxed for 24-hours waiting for our own water transportation to take us to Cartagena.

The general format of the Panama to Cartagena sailing passage is more-or-less the same each time they sail, depending on the direction, and takes around five days. From Panama towards Cartagena it begins with an overnight sail (with motors on) from Puerto Lindo to the San Blas islands, then three days of playing around on islands followed by a 30-hour underway from San Blas to Cartagena. Most people (myself excluded) don’t enjoy the time under sail or motor but rather love the island time and that’s what they go for.

All the islands are exquisite and pretty much look exactly the same - just like this

The first night is about getting to know the people on the boat. Those that can handle drinking on a moving boat stay up, chat, play cards and generally work their way through their supplies of rum and cigarettes. The others call it a night, try not to throw up and sleep as many hours as their body will let them (which is usually a lot less than they’d like).

You really roll the dice with what you get in terms where your boat sits on the party spectrum and depending on what you’re looking for you may or may not find it. Our boat was pretty well in the middle which worked out well. But I had heard stories of other boats where the passengers brought mountains of cocaine on board and tried to get through it all before reaching the ‘border crossing’ at the end of the voyage.

The other key determinant of how good the boat is (and, again, completely up to chance) is the crew. We did amazingly well with ours and Gonzalo (cook and designated English speaker), Carmelo (Captain) and Luis (first mate). While neither Carmelo and Luis spoke English and in fact spoke a difficult to understand coastal dialect (very fast, lots of slang), I eventually found some conversation topics (fishing, boats and women) that they seemed to enjoy talking about at length and gave me a chance to practice Spanish. Gonzalo, an Argentinean, was an absolute legend and kept the passengers happy, kept us informed and cooked delicious food the whole way across. We’ll no doubt cross paths again down the track when I get to Argentina.

Enjoying our first day ashore after an overnight sail (motor) to get to the San Blas Islands

For the time we were in San Blas, each day blended into the next. But highlights were:

Drinking on the first day on an island and playing volleyball. With everyone’s alcohol stocks high and all keen to enjoy a party on the island, I think the first day was the most fun
Catching a fish hungover on the second morning and it being prepared for the group that evening for dinner
Lobster dinner prepared by Gonzalo. We bought 25 live lobster from a Kuna fisherman selling from his dugout canoe. I watched the captain hand over US$15 for the lot
Getting a bit too drunk to recall which was my cabin and trying to go to bed in the wrong bunk
The local ‘shop’ which was an island with a small thatched hut. You could buy beer, cigarettes, Coca Cola, water and not much else. But what else does one need
Going for a swim off the boat and swimming right into Sylvain and Marjorie, two good friends I’d made through the shipping process and were sailing parallel to us on another boat

Blessed with a beautiful sunset every night

Eventually it was time to get underway and put the motors on to Cartagena. Personally, I’d been looking forward to this as much as the time on the islands because being underway meant that I could trawl lines out the back and I’d brought two rods with me for that reason. So once underway, I fished literally the whole day and for as long as it was light. However, 13 straight hours of fishing yielded only two bites and both jumped off the hook before I could get them to the boat which was a touch disappointing in the end.

By night, those that could stomach alcohol on the rough seas drank and chatted a little but, ultimately, we all tried to sleep as much as possible.

Our trusty boat, the Nacar 2 (photo credit to one of my fellow passengers)

On the final morning I woke up to a screeching sound and the boat lurching to halt. Amazingly, I was the only of the 12 passengers on board to notice that this wasn’t normal and went upstairs to see Gonzalo, Carmelo and Luis frantically trying to figure out what had happened and if we’d damaged anything running aground. After perhaps 20 minutes of manoeuvring, they’d managed to dislodge the boat, checked that everything was fine and we were away again. I still don’t think that any of the rest of my fellow passengers (other than the few I mentioned it to) were ever aware that this happened.

While our grounding was slightly concerning, it pales in comparison to a tale I heard a few weeks later from a fellow traveler. In Santa Marta hanging out with a bunch of backpackers who’d generally followed the same route as we had, I met an Italian guy named Fabrizio who told us a great story. To set the scene, Fabrizio is one of the most animated and stereotypically Italian guys I’ve ever met (ex-director of high-end restaurants in the Middle East and absolutely passionate about Italian food). Traveling with him for multiple days, I heard his story several times and it seemed to get better and funnier with each telling. He was doing the exact same route as us on the exact same days but with another company.

He told us how one of the passengers on their boat noticed water in the bulkhead starting to come through the floor boards. Forming a chain gang to pass buckets of water, they weren’t bailing fast enough and were forced to put out a distress call. The boat slowly took on water from early afternoon into the evening and as time wore on there was no sign of a rescue boat. Eventually what he described as an ‘oiler’ (perhaps an oil tanker?) came by and the passengers were shuffled aboard up a ladder. In the darkness of the night and with a little time to spare they also salvaged their luggage shortly before their sailboat sank, never to be seen again. Fabrizio finished the telling of his story each time by saying (and please picture a thick and exaggerated Italian accent), “my arsehole was puckered up so tight, you couldn’t have stuck a pin up it”.

Shortly after our grounding, we were ashore in port in Cartagena with our passports stamped and were free to begin exploring Colombia. For my part, it was the beginning of the long wait for my car to be freed from the belly of the ship and the bureaucratic port system but also a boisterous time partying in Cartagena with my new (and old) friends in the ocean-side city.