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Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

Panama: All Aboard The Black Dragonfly

The Black Dragonfly in the Cayos Holandeses
The Black Dragonfly in the Cayos Holandeses

For travellers heading south through Central America and into South America, there is one big obstacle: the Panama-Colombia border. If you keep on driving south through Panama down the Pan-American Highway, then you'll eventually get stopped by a very big man with a very big gun, and trust me, you don't want that to happen.

The cockpit
The cockpit

Not All Plain Sailing

Looking back from the bow
Looking back from the bow

The first people we'd talked to about the crossing to Colombia were Neil and Bronwyn when we first met them in Playa Esteron back in El Salvador. Bronwyn did this very trip a couple of years ago with their daughter Stephanie, though Neil had flown, as he's really prone to seasickness. This would turn out to be an excellent decision on his part, as Bronwyn's tales of the crossing to Colombia were horrific. The ocean passage east from the San Blas to Cartagena is against the direction of the prevailing wind, and as any sailor will tell you, this means a pretty bumpy ride, and although Bronwyn wasn't seasick herself, she was pretty much the only person who pulled through unscathed. Everyone was sick, the sea was scarily rough, and the passage was a complete nightmare; and as if the terrible weather wasn't enough, it turned out that the last time the captain had done this trip was the previous year, when her husband had been in charge. He'd died of a heart attack during that voyage and she'd had to finish the trip in sole charge of the yacht, and after a period of grieving, she'd decided to continue the family business on her own. This was her first full voyage in charge, and she'd filled the boat to bursting with hard-drinking backpackers, only to have them all turn green around the gills once they'd passed through the San Blas and turned east, directly into the ocean swell of the Caribbean Sea.

Looking towards the aft cabin through the bathroom
Looking towards the aft cabin through the bathroom

The Black Dragonfly

The control panel, with switches (in Norwegian) for all the electrical equipment on board
The control panel, with switches (in Norwegian) for all the electrical equipment on board

There are quite a few websites selling places on the so-called 'backpacker boats' that sail between Panama and Colombia. Some of them are better than others, but the good ones let you search by date for boats that are heading in the right direction at the right time, so that's exactly what we did.

The main cabin
The main cabin

Science to the Rescue

Holly in the galley
Holly in the galley

Decisions like this are often made easier by research, so we both started hunting round the net for inspiration. What could we do to prevent me getting seasick? Drugs, perhaps, or a special diet? And would the size of the yacht be relevant, seeing as The Black Dragonfly was listed as a 50ft ketch, and my Pacific nightmare had been in a 36ft sloop? And as we searched the web for clues, Peta stumbled across a conversation on a yacht design forum about which types of boat were best for preventing motion sickness, and someone had posted to the conversation, talking about the Motion Comfort Ratio formula.