Gualby Nation : San Andres, Colombia

We left for San Andres, Colombia on July 24 with awesome conditions.
Well, I guess my idea of "good conditions" has been skewed since our last few passages but it was east winds at about 20knots, seas 9-10feet but with a 8-10 second period so it is like sailing on gentle hills (gentle hills that you hope don't get choppy and confused when weather deteriorates). We have a single reefed main and the genoa out, flying along at 8 knots and I am smiling back at the sun shining down on us. The last hour of the passage, the seas got a little bit rougher so we were glad to tuck through the reef pass and into calm waters by early afternoon.

The water here is beautiful and clear and the bottom is white sand. It reminds us of being tucked behind the reef in San Pedro, Belize. Several hours after we arrived two of our friends from the sailing trip in Providencia, Michel and Esmeralda, stopped by in their pontoon boat. Now, if any of you were on our pontoon boat back in Key West, picture the opposite and that is what was pulling up to Gualby. Michel invited us aboard for a booze cruise tour of the harbor. We excitedly agreed and as I climbed aboard, I couldn't help but notice the curious heads of the other cruisers suspiciously peeking out of their cockpits at the newbies in the anchorage that are getting picked up in a pimped out boat by locals. We got a great tour of the harbor and Michel and Esmerelda pointed out places to check out and told us the rumors behind the freighter hard around on the reef, perfectly perpendicular to it. We saw the freighter coming in and from far away it looks like a boat leaving through the reef pass, thankfully we realized that the boat was ON the reef not passing through it the closer we got. The boat is just starting to decay into a rusty relic of its past glory and we were excited to hear the scandalous story of its past. Esmeralda claims there are two stories. One is that, simply, the captain was drunk and thought he was at the reef pass and didn't realize his mistake until he had driven through a third of the reef. The second story, the one that clearly Esmeralda believes, is that the boat was carrying drugs and they were about to get boarded so the captain crashed the frieghter full throttle into the reef and in the confusion and turmoil was able to toss the drugs overboard. I had to agree with Esmeralda, I liked that story better too. As the sun was setting we were dropped off on Gualby with a little buzz from Michel's good rum and exchanged hugs and promises to look them up if we ever make it to mainland Colombia.

That night we went into town to check out the San Andres scene. San Andres couldn't be more different from Provadencia. Provadencia has small, quaint houses, a few restaurants, and one or two office buildings. San Andres has Las Vega style hotels on the water, busy streets filled with fancy cars, and a whole downtown area that could easily been mistaken for Miami Beach. In fact, if everyone wasn't speaking spanish I would have thought I was in Miami Beach. . . wait, scratch that, I thought I was in Miami Beach. We walked around and found a place to eat and checked out the shops for future provision shopping. (Boys checked beer prices, girls checked fresh produce).

Over the next few days we got health certificates for the dogs, got our paperwork together for checking out of Columbia, provisioned the boat a little, and waited on some decent weather to get us to Panama. Our weather arrived on the 27th of July. We bid farewell to the islands of Colombia and after a quick stop by our friendly neighbors on their boat, Charlotte, for some pictures for one of our favorite two year olds, Charlotte Sellers, we headed out past the reef and looked south towards Panama.
M.