We find it hard to believe that on this day twelve months ago, we were on passage from Puerto Rico to Cartagena Columbia, we had planned to head straight to Colon, Panama to transit the Panama Canal but the wind and the seas quickly had us looking at our second option and that was Columbia. We were about half way between our departure port and our destination port, the weather had dished up a rather nasty Caribbean Low Pressure system that was about to give us a taste of what Mother Nature could dish out. We had just had two very easy days of light winds and flat seas but on this day the barometer was falling at an alarming rate, the wind was strengthening from the 10 to 15 knots we had for the first two days and was now a steady 38 knots with the odd gust smacking us at over 60. This was fast turning into the passage from hell, we had reduced our sails down to less than 10%, Annecam was running off the breaking waves like a freight train and was holding course like she was on rails. This was fine until the first of five rogue waves picked us up and threw Annecam down into the trough and rolling us over putting our spreaders and rig into the water, these rogue waves were coming at us from ninety degrees to the prevailing seas and for the life of me to this day I still can’t figure out what the hell was generating these crazy inconsistent waves. The good news from this situation was that we came out the other side after another two days without a scratch except for a very sick laptop computer that leapt off the navigation table and flew across the cabin to come to a smashing stop on the wall of the rear head. The seas were still giving us a wild ride right to the safe water mark at the southern entrance to the Port of Cartagena.
This day we would set our all-time record for miles sailed in 24 hours, a record we hope to never be in the same circumstances to break, we sailed 241 nautical miles in the 24 hours with almost no sails. That is an average of just over 10 knots, sure we have had much higher speeds but not for a full 24 hours.
We were not alone out there in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, we had to dodge several commercial cargo ships, the Cape Breton, Megacore Philomena, Gas Diana and the SV Xing all came within one nautical mile of us while we were battling the seas. There were several more ships that passed but further away, we had enough on our plate as it was without the added extra element of big cargo ships that seemed to be lining us up.
The video is one that some of you would already have watched, it is the video that I managed to be in the right place at the right time to capture one of the knock downs and this one was the gentlest of them all. I had just turned the GoPro on and was at the top of the companionway about to step out into the cockpit when this wave came through.
The photo is a screen shot taken off the video showing the gentle knock down, take note of the solar panels touching the water and have a look at where one of our fenders finished up, I thought that I was going to have to stab it to get it out.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, life isn’t measured by the number of breaths you take, it is measured by the number of moments that take your breath away.