So, after two days in paradise, was it time to leave San Blas and head out on the open sea to Cartagena. It’s a route that should take 40 hours for a sailboat to complete, but it took us 55 hours because of different circumstances.

To get from San Blas to Cartagena you will have to sail north and then east. Because of the rough weather that we encounted, and the natural direction of the wind and the currents, we were sailing against the waves all the time. The waves were up to four meters high at some points of the trip. All this waves and the constant movements of the boat made everybody on the boat feel sick. Only two of us actually threw up, although all of us on the boat probably had times when we were very close to give our food to the sea.

Except for the captain, that was sailing all the time, day and night, were we all laying down, trying to sleep and trying to think of anything except the sickness we were feeling. Nobody felt like talking so it was a very quiet boat. All you could hear was the wind outside. It’s hard to describe the feelings when you’re on a trip like this, and the waves are so high. That is something you’ll have to experience your self to fully understand.

The second reason why it took us so long to get to Cartagena, except for the weather, was the fact that our captain used beer as a medicine against seasickness. That meant that our dear captain Salvador had to drink a lot of beer to stay well on the open sea sailing. As we all know, a lot of beer normally gets you drunk and our captain was no exception. And to cope with the loneliness of the nights he was smoking one or two joints. The result of this was that he managed to sail in the wrong direction for ten hours and we had to spend one more night on the sea. This is probably not very common though, and shouldn’t put anyone off this kind of trip.

So, after 55 hours sailing on the open seas, we arrived in Cartagena in the afternoon the 16th of December, one day late. The captain, sober and healthy again, took all our passports to the immigration office to get them stamped. He came back and told us we had to wait an hour for the passport to be stamped. One hour later he went in again and come back empty handed. After the third attempt, and three hours waiting in the Cartagena harbour, he told us that the immigration wouldn’t be able to put nine stamps on our passport until tomorrow. We then had the options of staying one more night on the boat or be illegal immigrants in Colombia for one night. Nobody on the boat even considered staying one more night on the water, so the captain helped us to find a place to stay in Cartagena and brought us our passports the morning after.