SERENITY NOW

When checking in or out of a country, our preference is to do it ourselves: I’m something of a tight wad, and Capt. Chez is really clever, so generally it’s achievable and works out quite well for us. In Cartagena (which is now just a glow behind me on the horizon) by law, you have to engage an immigration agent - a first for us. José, our agent, was an efficient, but not overly chatty guy. All in all we shelled out approx $400,000 Colombian Pesos to him for the various immigration/customs fees and the service he provided. This incidentally is the same figure ($400,000 pesos) initially demanded by Sir Francis Drake from the Spanish in 1586 when he captured the city and held in to ransom. His asking price was not what was eventually paid: the Spanish countered with a lowball offer of $25,000. Sir Francis, showing he wasn’t one to be trifled with, responded by setting fire to large parts of the city… which speeded negotiations no end. We left there this afternoon, a couple of days after

We’ve been here a week now.. long enough to start to get a bit of a flavour of the place. Cartagena is a vibrant, colourful, friendly city. It’s significantly tailored toward the large numbers of tourists who throng the streets. They’re a mix of international visitors, cruise line passengers, hippy backpackers and lots of South American visitors from other surrounding countries coming for their holidays. There’s little to no language barrier. We get by with a combination of smiles, my poor Spanish, a lot of arm waving and pointing ….and Google translate when it all gets too hard. Architecture is a mix of 2 main types: tall rectangular whitewashed high rises with balconies for all. They’re not altogether unpleasant when looked at as a whole skyline. Then there’s the older original Mediterranean/Colonial styled two story places. Either white or colourfully painted, they’re quite grand with pillars and wrought iron balconies and lush gardens. It all makes for a nice mix - not an ugly city

  We’ll that’s frustrating! I’ve just lost/deleted the last two days diary entries. That’s twice now in the last month or so.. and I’m still not sure exactly how it happened. For now I’m blaming unnecessary Apple software updates, …rather than any user related ‘fat finger’ issues. Oh well.. worse things happen at sea! In summary of what was missed - Anchored in Spanish Waters, Curacao. After a very successful fresh food provisioning run, we left Curacao in blowy conditions. Not having checked in to the country, this counts as an illegal pirate raid on a Caribbean Island! Garrrrrr! Bypassed Aruba, and we’re now just off the NE tip of Colombia. We’ve had big seas, and following winds throughout. It’s been an exhilarating two days of sailing so far. We had our personal best daily total for distance: 162nms in 24hrs at an average of 6.75kts. Which brings us to: Day 3: I was nearly nodding off at the tail end of my shift last night, and was glad to get my head down when Chez came up an hour

  In the morning - New Year’s Day - we pop to shore to grab some wifi for the weather forecast. All seems fairly innocuous for the next three or four days, with the wind ramping up towards the end of our first leg (probably Curaçao by that stage). Day 1: We up anchor at 9:30am and head back out to somewhere else we’ve come to call home; the wide open sea. Waving goodbye to disappearing Grenada we make good progress, if perhaps a little more rolly than we’d like. I’m writing this at sunset, not much to report, sea stretching out as far as the eye can see. We were visited by one ‘introductory sized’ squall in the early afternoon, which wet us and pushed us around a bit. Other than that - happily plain sailing: lots of sunshine, both sails up, following seas, nudging along between 4 - 7 knots. Over night the wind increased sufficiently to allow us to sail well throughout. We were passed by two large container ships - growing from indistinct possible lights on the horizon to massive, city