13 November 2012; North of Colombia.

After leaving Aruba we sailed west, keeping a large number of those waiting tankers on our portside. They were drifting with about 1.5 miles in the hour to the west due to the current that flows under Aruba. We had that current to our advantage for a few hours as well and a free push in the back is always appreciated.  We lost that current around 9 pm. and from then on we just had our ships speed with a following wind. We will keep that following wind until a few hours before we reach Cristobal as the weather chart is indicating that it will be wind still in the Panama area.

A clear defined boarder between clear and muddy ocean water……………..20 miles from shore.

 Today we had something unusual, that we do not see very often. I have never seen it in this area although I knew that is was possible.  We had a very clearly defined line between deep blue sea water and the muddy water along the coast.  The rivers in Colombia are depositing an enormous amount of sediment in the ocean here, brought from the inland by rivers such as the Rio Magdalena that flows through Barranquilla and the four rivers that end up in Cartagena bay. It is all carried away to the sea and that discolors the water. It gives it a sort of greenish hue when the sun shines upon it. What was so unusual today was that the boundary was so clearly defined.   One moment we were in deep blue water and the next moment we were in very muddy water. I was just on time to catch it with the camera although I missed the magical moment when we cut through it.

A shot from the radar. The circle around the ship denotes a distance of 12 miles.  

The even more amazing thing was the fact that it was so far off shore, more than 20 miles north of the Colombian coast. In the past days, the current really must have kept the outflow limited to the coastline to get such a clear boundary with such an undiluted density. Very peculiar but very interesting. The poor crew in the Lido Restaurant who did not have a clue of course got questioned by all the guests and none had the answer. One steward volunteered that it must be the outflow from the Amazon but that was a bit too far out.

Still the comparison was not incorrect, as it looked exactly the same as the “Meeting of the Waters” outside Manaus, where the river Solimous meets the Rio Negra to from the Amazon.

An AIS display, showing all the information we can get out of this system. most radars, like ours on board can display the same information without the need for a separate display.

For the remainder of the day we stayed in this slightly discolored water but the intensity decreased as it kept going farther away from the Colombian mainland. When crossing the Colombian basin, as this area is called, we start to get more and more traffic.

We are on the route to and from the Panama Canal and thus we see a lot of Panama Canal traffic but also the ports in north Colombia such as Santa Marta, Barranquilla and Cartagena produce a fair amount of traffic. I still find it amazing that with the vastness of the open sea that you can still run into close quarters with ships if you do not pay attention.  The navigators do and that gave them the interesting puzzle of a chemical tanker which was going somewhere else than it was advertising on his AIS.  

Now it happens quite often that a ship’s crew forgets to update the AIS after leaving port but it then normally still displays the port where the ship had been going to before departing. This time we were looking at a ship that was on its way to Manila and supposed to arrive there two days from now. At the same time it was on an easterly course, which is away from the Panama Canal and thus the long way around to Manila. Maybe it was a home sick seaman on the bridge there, who thought that he should share his misery with the rest of the world.  As explained before all ships over 300 tons have to have such an AIS. The nice thing is that everybody can follow the ships over the world. There is a website, called www.marinetraffic.com where you can follow your favorite ship if you want to.

My favorite ship will be arriving tomorrow morning at 05.00 at the Cristobal breakwaters to start the next transit of the Panama Canal. The latest weather forecast is for overcast and wind still and that is exactly what I like. No burning sun for the guests, and no wind for me to worry about.