Late morning on the fourteenth after about two full days in San Blas, we raised the anchor, skirted the reef, and began the open sea crossing to Colombia heading almost due east. The Panamanian shore gradually faded from view as Quest rocked with the swells. Captain Persson said the Caribbean was quite calm compared to what it had been like for most of the last few months, but that didn't stop people from getting seasick. There were only a couple folks who lost their lunch, but as best I can tell all the other passengers were taking Dramamine or other motion sickness pills or using various other remedies such a pressure point wrist bands or sucking on fresh ginger. I am very fortunate in that I have no tendency toward motion sickness whatsoever. Quite to the contrary, I find the rocking motion of a boat in the waves to be a very soothing feeling. Maybe I should have been a sailor.

As the sun set, the wind picked up further and more sails were raised to take advantage of the breeze . Speed was up to over eight knots. It was a magical feeling moving fast through the darkness on a moonlit night with stars still visible and a great breeze on deck. Will I have to fight the others for some deck space to sleep outside in the cool air tonight? Actually not – when the boat is moving by the power of the wind it leans heavily toward one side. I’d have been afraid of rolling off if I tried to sleep on deck.

Colombia is a country that’s been pretty high on my travel list for at least five or six years. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s it was a no go zone, a dangerous place with one of the world’s highest murder rates, cocaine cartels, and a civil war going on between the army and leftist rebels of a movement called FARC. It’s another one of those parts of Latin America that’s fortunately become mostly peaceful and accessible again.

Colombia is a physically diverse country with many regional climates. Although not practical to take in the entire country on my Central American trip, sailing to the country and seeing the attractions of the northern part of Colombia – Cartagena, Guajira Peninsula, Tayrona National Park, and the Ciudad Perdida trek – made perfect sense since March is still the dry season in the north but is one of the rainier seasons in most of the rest of the country .

Our meals while sailing the open ocean were designed to be easily eaten in bowls or by hand – hamburgers for lunch, chili con carne for dinner, and cereal with fruit for breakfast, easier to control than food which you have to use a fork and knife to eat from a flat plate. When I got up around dawn in the morning the sea had calmed down somewhat. From then on it was smooth sailing until early afternoon when the first land in over 24 hours came into sight. Colombia, country #85.

The San Bernardo Islands form a national park and consist largely of mangrove swamps. We anchored for the night between several of them, including one with a small village. The captain arranged for an evening ride on a small boat to swim with bioluminescent plankton, but with a near full moon out it wasn’t dark enough to see much and I decided not to go.

Four days of forced idleness was getting a bit much for me . I know it’s something some people crave with their deepest souls as "relaxing", but I find it hard to spend my time in way that isn’t productive in some way. That could be watching a movie that interests me, reading a book, researching things online or writing on my tablet if I can’t get online. The book choices on the shelves on the boat, though, were mostly trash fiction other travelers left behind. There did seem to be WiFi on the boat since my computer picked up a connection and I saw the captain using Facebook, but no mention was made by captain of sharing his WiFi with passengers. And his Swedish built boat had European rather than American electrical sockets for which I didn’t bring my adaptor kit, so I only had so much time to catch up writing blog entries before the juice ran out on my tablet.

When I woke up on the last morning aboard the Quest the boat was already moving. The captain set sail around 3:00 A.M. for the last seven hours or so northeastward along the Colombian coast to Cartagena . We entered the large sheltered harbor through a relatively narrow channel, a favorable geography chosen as the site for one of the most important Spanish colonial settlements around the Caribbean. I find it much more exciting and interesting to be arriving in a new country by sea than by air or overland as are the usual ways of entering a country nowadays. If I somehow expected to be sailing into a small colonial port city, I was mistaken. The way into the center of Cartagena is lined with large industrial facilities on one shore and the modern high rise buildings of the Boca Grande Peninsula on the other. Cartagena is now a thoroughly modern place and Colombia’s fifth largest city.

The captain anchored the boat in the harbor, went to drop off our passports with an agent to take care of immigration formalities, and used the ship’s dinghy to take us and our bags to shore. We all met up later in the evening at a hostel for some last drinks together and to retrieve our passports from the captain. Overall, it was a great way to travel from Panama to Colombia, much better than an airplane flight.