We have spent the last few days saying goodbye to Cartagena. A final trip into the old walled city, a visit to Louis and Karen's apt to meet Dillon and a few chats with fellow cruisers about our upcoming journey. On Friday we obtained our Zarpe clearing us out of the country. We have enjoyed our time in Colombia but we seem to have an unseen drive, pushing us on further west.
Today we are scheduled to leave the anchorage around 9am sailing out the channel heading for Panama. We did all the last systems checks, put the dinghy on the davits, it was time to weigh the anchor. This is usually not a time consuming task with our windlass. Today the extra 115ft of 1 inch line that we added to our 200 foot of anchor chain decided to wrap around the chain making it difficult to retrieve. Finally the chain was on the windlass and we thought we were almost free. Not so..... Today we were delayed by something we have heard many talk about but never experienced.
The anchor seemed to be stuck, Rod tried everything but it would not come loose. After much consideration we flagged a fellow cruiser in a dinghy down and bummed a ride to the dock in search of a diver. We were lucky to find one working at the dock and he was out at the boat 30 min later. The dive float went into the water and then the diver was following our chain down to our anchor. After a few min. the diver was up and we motored forward slowly to keep the anchor chain vertical as the windlass did it's job and brought up the anchor. The anchor had been wrapped around something on a sunken cargo ship directly below It's Perfect. We were soon on our way at 11am after paying the diver $140 for his services. It could have been a lot worse.
There seem to be an unending array of reasons that a cruisers carefully thought out plan does not work out. The two things that are the hardest to get use to in this life of cruising is not being able to stick to a schedule or a budget. All that said we are on our way to the beautiful San Blas Islands of Panama. After a 48 hour passage to a new country this difficulty will be but another memory of Colombia.
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