Recently we had the good fortune of sailing across the entire expanse of the Caribbean Sea - east to west – some 1200 NM - in our Norseman 447. We left The British Virgin Islands on a Saturday morning arriving in Panama some 7 days later. A 1200 NM odyssey across ancient, uniquely blue water, following ages old trade winds, and 16th century European trade routes.
Prior to this trip, I, like most people, looked upon the Caribbean as being constrained to the touristy islands of the Lesser and Greater Antilles, and the Bahamas. And I, like so many visitors, had always conjured up romantic ideals of Spanish galleons, pirates, and their fierce individualism, set amidst a background of reggae and 1970’s Jimmy Buffet music. For me it was a playground, a place for wild times relatively unencumbered by the rules of home. And when not partying, I expected a slowed down pace of island life, world class beaches, and Ya-Man, with a tendency to reduce it all to two-dimensional fantasy and cliché.
Even to modern sailors, myself included, the Caribbean has been more about its touristy destinations and myths than about its 1 million square miles of blue ocean, its ancient trades, its 7000 islands, and its many shorelines that include South and Central America. It is a huge area of incredible diversity, rich history, and beauty. The Caribbean is immense, diverse, alive, and relatively unknown – and I would argue, worth a fresh look.
As we sailed along downwind day after day in following seas - as have countless sailing vessels before us – we foolishly joked that gentleman (and gentlewomen) never need tack (while we secretly jumped up and down as children in our excitement as to the ease of our point of sail, speed and comfort). Yes, it can be quite active sailing, especially off the Colombian coast, with huge following seas and high winds, but other than adjusting reef points we never changed our tack, point of sail, or sail plan.
But despite near perfect conditions night watch alone on a boat a sea can still be a soul-searching experience – in fact it’s one of the reasons I sail. And somewhere out in all that immensity I began to realize how narrow my thinking had been all these years as to how I thought of the Caribbean, and parts of my life.
The Caribbean Sea formed 130 million years ago as the supercontinent Pangea broke apart to the north and south forming a basin overlying the newly formed Caribbean tectonic plate. Beginning 80 million years ago this plate began to be pushed in a north-easterly direction by the thick, massive South American plate, smashing it into the North American plate to the north and east. These collisions resulted in volcanic activity that formed most of the Lessor and Greater Antilles islands and many of the mountains and volcanoes of Central America and northern South America – a process still going on today.
Humans first arrived in the area around 8000 years ago making the region one of the last to be settled on the planet. The indigenous people came from Central and South America by boat and then spread throughout the entire region south to north in waves until they were widely dispersed by about 5000 years ago. The Bahamas were probably the last lands on earth to be populated as recently as 800 AD. European explorers arrived in 1492 with their disease, violence, and exploitation, wiping out most of the indigenous peoples in less than 100 years.
Piracy in the area began almost immediately after the Europeans arrival in the 1500s, coming to a violent end by the 1830s - mirroring the slave trade – a massive and brutal kidnapping campaign and subsequent enslavement that brought nearly 5 million Africans to the region beginning in 1517 and not ending until the mid 1800’s.
It is interesting that Caribbean history includes South and Central America as playing such vital roles: for millions of years geologically, and for millennia regarding its human history. And yet is not considered part of the Caribbean by most. Colombia and Panama, in particular, were some of the original sources of its indigenous people. Both areas were vital to Spanish trade and plunder and as such its ships prime targets of piracy. And yet when so many of us say the Caribbean we mean to speak of the Antilles and Bahamas - tropical islands, rum, Reggae and Buffett.
For seven days and nights we sailed on. The Southern Cross beckoned in the south-western sky - a constellation not visible to most of us in the US and thus symbolic of exotic southern seas and shores. As I saw it the iconic Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song came to mind – and I knew intimately for what they said.
‘When you see the Southern Cross for the first time
You understand now why you came this way
Cause the truth you might be running from is so small
But it's as big as the promise
The promise of a coming day’
On the fourth night with winds to 35 knots in 10-12 foot seas, cruising along at 7.5 knots, it hit me. Three AM on watch, alone in the darkness, surrounded by hundreds of miles of empty ocean in all directions, hearing the night’s wind and ships noises in response – the immensity and true nature of the Caribbean hit me. To port lie Colombia and its incredible mountainous jungles, beautiful beaches, and historic ports, to starboard Cuba and the Greater Antilles, ahead lay Panama and Central America and aft the Lesser Antilles – all with shorelines bounding this immense, ancient, Caribbean Sea.
My thinking until that moment had been quite cliché. But the only thing cliché in all of this was my limited imagination. So many of us try to reduce the excitement of each coming day to the mundane and familiar in an unconscious attempt at feeling safer. But once again the sea reached out and taught me in the darkness of a late night watch the utter folly of such limited thinking, replacing it instead with the danger, beauty, and truth, of a coming day.
From the mountains and rainforests of Central and Northern South America, to the coral atolls of the Bahamas, to the volcanoes of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Caribbean Sea touches them all and all of it I would argue is the Caribbean. Alive, fresh, rich, verdant, diverse, and so much more than I had ever realized.
Upon making landfall in Bocas Del Toro, Panama – itself originally settled by African immigrants and built in the Caribbean style - I felt I had tied east and west together as one in my mind. The Caribbean is a beautiful ancient sea – and its shores – all of them – Caribbean.
And as I sat back in my cockpit at the Red Frog Marina in Bocas, beer in hand, reflecting on the trip, I realized we all tend to get into ruts in our outlook, in our lives. We narrow our thinking and repeat patterns because it feels easier, safer. But in doing so we rob ourselves of so much of life experiences, and limit our possibilities. Going to sea in a sailboat with the inevitable 3am watches is the best way I know to deliver oneself from a tendency to the mundane, from our self-made traps and narrowness of mind, opening our minds to new experience and perspective and enriching our lives.
With my new-found perspective on the Caribbean I have opened myself up to greater possibilities and experiences both in my approach to the Caribbean and in my life. Now full of energy tinged with an edge of fear I am determined to explore all of the Caribbean – most of it neglected in my mind’s eye all these years. I plan to begin by exploring the San Blas islands. From there on to Caribbean coastline of Colombia – not as separate countries but as a part of the greater whole – the Caribbean. I hope to explore Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana as less travelled Caribbean sailing destinations – sailing to weather because I must from Bocas Del Toro and perhaps partly as penance for my years of narrow-minded cliché. From there who knows. But one thing I do know – being at sea in a sailboat is inevitably a soul-searching experience, painful at times, but nearly always results in a fresh, wider, and more truthful perspective, beautifully restoring the promise of a coming day.
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