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Isla Palma is a very small islet in the Archipelago San Bernardo, just a mile long and 300 yards wide, located about two powerboat hours
southwest of Cartagena off the Colombian coast.
There is an architectural very interesting All-Inclusive-Hotel, the “Decameron”, with 42 rooms, some small houses for the staff, a Museum, a Dive Center, an Aquarium and
a Delphinarium.
The islet can only be reached by boatand is private property.
The former owners have colonized a whole lot of exotic animals.
Colourful big perrots, flamingos and herons belong to
the scene as well as monkeys, deers, turtles and lizards, you can meet wherever you go.
The absolute tourist attraction is the daily feeding of the dolphins.
I would recommend Isla Palma for a side trip of about
three or four days, a longer stay could be (in my opinion!) be a little boring due to the relatively narrow freedom, though there is a good amount of leisure activities like snorkelling and diving, guided tours over the island,
boat trips to the neighbour islands, beach volleyball, windsurfing and disco dancing.
Relaxing your soul is also possible without additional expenses.
The most important to me is - of course - the ham
radio stuff.
We have a nice room at the corner of the hotel with an openair bathroom on the roof.
Beside the hotel on the edge of the mangrove wood is enough space for my vertical antenna.
My Butternut
HF9V is erected in an instant, the staff helps me to lay the cable into our room.
The wet ground in the mangroves is excellent for a good radiation. I renounce any radials, because I can’t install them in the morass.
After a few minutes I have the first QSOs in my log. Though the condx are not even breathtaking it runs good. The bands are absolutely clean, no electrical smog, just the usual temporary “Police-QRM”.
I
can’t get a table for my rig that evening. So I assemble all things on the sofa in front of me. To get up the next morning was really hard. I thought I was stiff all over. I need a whole eternity to leave my position. The
friendly staff brings me a big table and I rearrange the rig on it - a much better way to work the pileups.
The next morning my XYL Erika tells me, that my HF9VX is “under water”. The antenna stands in the middle of a
big, about 15 cm deep “lake”. I had not reflected, that at high tide the water rises in the mangroves. But luckily the feeding point lays about an inch over the surface.
Despite the “poor” rig - IC-706 barefoot into
a HF9VX vertical - and rather poor conditions the guys I ask for a real report give me throughout good reports. The mangroves do a good job.
I had long lasting pileups during the whole time, maybe because this was the
second activity from SA-078 (so far I know).
After three days I have 3877 QSOs in my log, 400 of them on 80m.
Via Cartagena, where we meet Pedro, HK1HHX, the same evening and a short stopover in San Andrés
the next morning, where we meet our good old friend Abel, HK0VGJ, at the airport we arrive Providencia Island in the late afternoon. Here starts the next stage of our trip ...
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