Our sail from Colombia to Panama began happily, since Brian fixed the autopilot! It was a relief knowing we would not be hand steering for the two day voyage. While that made things easier, sailing from Colombia to Panama was not a fun trip.
We love when autopilot works
It Gets Scary
When home is a sailboat with a 65 foot high metal mast and you’re alone in the middle of the ocean, you don’t want to see lightning. A lightning storm is a nightmare. We had a very small taste in Colombia and it didn’t prepare us for the scary lightning storm our first night sailing from Colombia to Panama.
It’s rainy season in Panama and electric storms are common. We saw flashes in the sky throughout the day Saturday, but weren’t concerned. We didn’t think it would get worse. And we were wrong.
Sailing in Colombia is different from the ideal conditions in the Eastern Caribbean: trips are a lot longer and other cruiser boats not as common. Conditions can be rough, with strong winds, and navigating is challenging with incomplete charts. Because of these difficulties, some cruisers don’t stop here at all on the way to Panama, and others only visit one port: Santa Marta or Cartagena. As longtime fans of Colombia, we spent extended time in both! Here’s what our experience has been sailing in Colombia.
Colombia in the Western Caribbean
All information in this post is based on our experiences sailing the Caribbean coast of mainland Colombia. The country is vast, with Pacific coastline and occupied islands alongside Central America, which are not discussed here.
Welcome to Colombia
Arriving in Colombia on our boat was different from other sailing destinations. Colombia is so big that we saw the country a full day before we could enter a port. And the conditions are rough. Santa Marta, Colombia is infamous for heavy winds and rough seas, so much so that many sailors coming from the ABC Islands or further choose to skip the port entirely and head straight to Cartagena.
We just got home from a hectic month of selling our house and everything in it, well mostly. It’s been less than a week since we returned to the boat in Cartagena, and I finally feel relaxed. It was a mad dash to get it all done before closing and visit the people and places we wanted to in Toronto. This city was a great place to live and we will always enjoy visiting Toronto. Selling a house and moving out is a big life moment, but doing it to stay full time on a 46 foot boat and travel on it is life-changing. I also realized there are a lot of tips I could have used about how to purge, so I am sharing them here.
What to Keep
Selling our house and everything in it could have been traumatic. But we were primed for it through a combination of terrible tenants and a fun life on our boat. Other people have to do this under much more trying circumstances, and I am aware of our fortune. Here are some ways to make this process easier.
The hardest part is deciding what to keep. Will you use it and do you even like it? If the answer to both is NO, then don’t keep it. This time, our second and more final round of purging after 2.5 years on the boat, I was more cutthroat. I washed any clothes that seemed even mildly off – the beauty of an in-home washer and dryer – and piled up anything I have no chance of wearing anytime soon. If clothes were in good shape, they went into the DONATE pile. If not, straight into trash bags. On a boat, those would become rags, but we weren’t flying rags back to Colombia with us!
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
You can revoke your consent any time using the Revoke consent button.
