April 9 – April 30, 2009: the Hobbies to Providencia, Columbia

The other boats, Damiana, Tempest, Pelican’s Flight, Tisha Baby and Jacana intend to stay a while to fish, swim and snorkel. While we enjoy those activities, there is hardly any dry land around to explore and the weather window is too good to pass up. We decided we would leave the next morning for Isla Providencia, 196 nm away, with good conditions expected for the entire trip.

Before dawn, we had the anchor up and we were underway, motoring, retracing our course out of the anchorage and along the inside of the reef. By the time the sun was up we had sails up and had exited the reef. The wind was blowing about twelve knots from the north-northeast and our destination was generally south-southeast, so this is pretty light wind. We left the motor on and running at seven knots with the sails up as we navigated the bank for nine hours when, at 2:30, the wind shifted to east-northeast and picked up to thirteen knots. We had covered enough distance to be comfortable slowing down with the expectation that the wind would increase soon and we could expect to arrive at our destination with good mid-day sun, so the motor was turned off. We sailed at 6.2 – 6.6 knots for twelve hours and into the night with winds up to seventeen knots, until we encountered huge, dark clouds blotting out the full moon, with flashes of lightning and trailing rain. We reefed the sails as the wind speed dropped eerily and we turned on the engine. Three hours later, the clouds had disappeared without incident and at 6 am the engine was turned off again. We were under full sail doing 5.7 knots in 14 knots of east-southeast wind and .5 knots of opposing current in 2-3 ft seas, close-hauled for six hours arriving at the sea buoy off Providencia at noon. By 1 pm, on Good Friday, we were anchored in the beautiful harbor between Providencia and Catalina Islands and in touch with the famous agent, Mr. Bush (this one has a high approval rating), ready to clear into one of Columbia’s most far-flung islands. This leg of the trip was completed with the only excitement being the fact that it went nearly exactly as planned and without incident, safely.