8 February 1811, Gulf of Uraba.

I should keep remembering: thou shalth not travel in a canoe in the dark of a rainy night, however I feel that this will not be the last time.  Trying to navigate into the right branch through a mangrove forest in a canoe in the dark is not an easy task and chances to take the wrong path are quite high so once we get to the sea that morning we had to keep rowing in the sea to check where exactly we had arrived.

Jorge Tadeo could not avoid swearing why he so blindly followed me in this one and me, not being clear and complete in my answers, I am not quite calming him.  At noon finally decide to go on shore and take a breakfast and a lunch.  The great about rain is that the sun is not to hot, but this humid warm is not quite my ideal weather.  Nor Jorge Tadeo's.  How I miss my chilling Bogotá, still little warmer that this downtime Santa Fe.

I could not help remembering Vegard's relations on his encounters with bandits and wreckers.  I do not know if I have been lucky so far as I could imagine that all the places I have been would be more dangerous than USA, well this could also be the perception from uptime where Colombia is quite a dangerous place, but this could well be done by the fact that he is a rich European entrepreneur who openly travels surrounded by wealth and bodyguards while I am the leader of a small rebel army of mix-bloods who moves in the shadows with no more visible wealth than a couple of rifles...

I expect that the Bast is coming in a couple of days.  This should be enough to find the right mouth of the Atrato, I hope so we do not cross each other.  Now it is time to rest for a while.

9 February 1811, Gulf of Uraba

I guess we have reached the right mouth, after rowing to Turbo and back. The landscape is very enjoyable, it is a petty I am not in some holidays at the beach but instead trying to pull up a revolution.  The
mangrove, the beaches, the jellyfish that swim between the rows, the contrasting colors of the sea and river waters.  Today it was sunny. Well, not quite, there was a cloudish layer that not quite protect us from the sun.  Pedro and Juan are surprised on how insolated Jorge Tadeo and I are.

Pedro and Juan are two young guys that have been with us since we departed from Lower Atrato base camp, and they are by far more used to resist the sun than Jorge Tadeo and I.  And Jorge Tadeo is far worse from me.  But rowing in a canoe in the middle of the sea the whole day is not precisely an activity that will protect you from the sun.  Fortunately I hope, there is still enough ozone layer downtime to protect us form UV radiation.

At this moment I cannot resist my clothes over me.  The night is warm fortunately and I expect that tomorrow that ship will show up in the horizon.  If the sailors are expecting a couple of guys well dressed in their uniforms they will be quite disappointed.

10 February 1811, The Blast

As white as Vegard described her, it was a beautiful sight when we woke up this morning and saw this ship.  I have seen some smuggling ships before, sailing boats that had not the majestic of those preserved uptime, like ARC Gloria.  The Bast has that majestic, even if smaller, and with these figure of that Egyptian goddess Bast in the front.

Fortunately it soon started to rain and I guess I had never before being that glad about rain starting, but this made more bearable jumping in the canoe to meet the ship.  I exchange a couple of words with the Captain.  Codewords in Danish with my awful Swedish accent but the Captain seemed to have understood them.  Jorge Tadeo and I were risen up and we said goodbye to Pedro and Juan.

A sailor took my backpack which made me a little nervous and took it to my room.  I hate Danish.  Even if at some times I catched one or two words, I had no idea what these people were talking about.  My room was a small one.  I guess it was enough as the ship is not too big and is manned by some forty men.  I just jumped over the bed to rest my red back.

A little later a sailor knocked at my door with a shirt and telling me in good English that I was invited to take a luch with the Captain.  I was not wearing any shirt when I step up, I had a couple on my backpack but they were quite dirty.  I change my pants and dressed the new shirt and went to the captain's room.

There have been quite a long time since I had anything resembling this kind of meal.  Eating a warm course at dishes with a complete set of spoons, nives and forks.  Captaine Petersen, Jorge Tadeo and I spoke a little, mixing my Swedish with the Captain's Danish with English, French and Spanish.  Well, we could not find a common language as Jorge Tadeo reads but does not speak English and my French is frankly vestigial.

Finally I used this moment to tell Jorge Tadeo the real reasons he was with me in this trip: I need him like some ambassador in the United States of America, where he would meet some important people and draw some kind of support, but mainly to legitimize the cause when it were pertinent.  In the mean time he will be learning, practicing the language, and doing some scientific research.  I even suggested him to begin writing his compendium of the fauna of Cundinamarca, one of the projects he had never actually started beyond his notes.

I spend the evening on the deck watching how the land disappeared beyond the horizon, and how the people worked in the ship.  The trip, would last between twenty days to a month depending the weather and the patrols, Captain Pettersen told us.  Enough I thought to cure from the insolation.

We took dinner at the Captain's that evening, spoke a little and then I retired to my room.  I had seen my notes in my laptop, rereading posts of the other uptimers and planing diferent ways to build my country before I begun to write these lines.  This seem to be a long trip in the guts of a ship, but right now it is time to have some sleep.

-- Carlos E. T. Pinzón G.
   Western Caribbean Sea