From July 10 to 13, 1997 a group of Venezuelan Radio-Amateurs arranged a DX-pedition to Tortuga Island in the Caribbean Sea. (IOTA SA-44)
Tortuga (Isla Tortuga) is located west of the Island of Margarita. The island is the second largest of Venezuela, but has no population because it has no sweet-water-resources. Anyhow, Venezuelan fishermen use it as base while they are on Sea with their small boats.

Here a GOOGLE EARTH placemark of our QTH.

We left the port of La Guaira (Port, located North of Caracas) on the evening of July 9. Our departure was delayed for several hours, because of an earthquake which just occurred while we were loading our equipments to the ship. The epicenter of the strong quake was in northeastern Venezuela where it caused a lot of victims.
We already were mentally prepared to return home, but finally the authorities gave us permission to start our trip.

Not always it's so easy to load all the stuff for a DX-Pedition.

About 10 hours after leaving La Guaira, we arrived at our destiny. Our large ship anchored a few miles in front of the island in deep waters. We left our carrier with smaller boats.

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