Manuel
Antonio National Park
Grace uses email as a primary means of communication. We are parked at a rather rolly anchorage in Manuel Antonio National Park, a beautiful spot right off from a postcard. Jay and Erin came down to sail with us and Gracie pulled another of her don't want to do it today that lasted almost their whole vacation, but what a wonderful spot we were stuck in. Punta Leona, Costa Rica. We had access to the swimming pools and the beach, but it's lots different from being stuck on a boat in San Diego when you are out in the middle of the bay rolling around on the anchor.
Jay brought his surfboard so he and Erin paddled it in one time but it's difficult when you have to anchor so far out because the tides run between 10 and 12 feet on the Pacific side of Central America. The minute we discovered we had no tachometer Jay said it sounds like the regulator. It was the regulator, but also the alternator which we had just put on new in Acapulco. Jerry worked for a week under the assumption that we had only one problem. The day before Jay and Erin had to fly home we finally found the problem. We thought we could just day sail but there were too many things that had to be taken care of.
This morning when we left Punta Leona, it took us 3 hours to get the 2 anchors up. They were covered with barnacles and little crabs were running all over them so we had to clean every inch as we took them up so that nothing would be growing in our through hulls. I'm not too crazy about little crabs all over the boat either.
We visited the Volcan Arenal which spits and sputters on a daily basis. We ate at a roadside palapa and watched her fireworks as the lava and rocks rolled down her sides. in the evening. In the afternoon, we rode horses up the mountain through the rain forest, through the spider webs, looked spiders the size of our hand right in the eye, with our horses stepping from one mud hole between huge tree roots into the next mudhole, between tree roots, slipping and sliding up the mountain, but what goes up must come down.
Once we got high enough on the mountain , we could watch the volcanic ash which is really huge boulders which are spit out and which bound down the mountain making jumps 100's of feet into the air as the mountain puffsand rumbles and sang Jimmy Buffet's "I Don't Know Where I'm A Gonna' Go." Fascinating and scary!
Every place you go in Costa Rica is beautiful. I guess I said that about El Salvador and Guatemala. We are headed for Golfito from where we may fly home or check out and sail to Manta, Ecuador to fly home. We will do the Galapagos when we get back because Jerry doesn't feel comfortable with the charts we have. So many wonderful places-so little time.
We made 3 stops on the way to Golfito; I wanted to do it in one sail because I love to sail at night but we had read all this good stuff so we stopped at Manuel Antonio, a National Park. It has 150" of rainfall a year and most of it feel right after we anchored. We could see 2 storms on our radar; we sailed in between them-then thunder-lightning and lots of rain. We were anchored in the lee of a beautiful jungle covered hill which we thought would protect us from the sea but did not. We were the only boat rocking and rolling to the sound of the surf, the monkeys, the jungle bird calls; scarily dark, awesomely great. Legend says that Spanish priests fleeing from pirates buried 2 galleons of treasure at the Naranja mission, but we couldn't get off the boat in the huge surf to get it; bringing it through customs was also an obstacle.
The next night we anchored at Drake's Bay, named for the great, depends on to whom you are talking, navigator, Sir Francis Drake. This is a big tourist area for Costa Rica with many beautiful lodges and tours. Costa Rica has traditionally been a destination for naturalists because of its early conservation laws and many national parks and its diverse multitudinous plants and animals. The sight of a coatimundi , a giant inchworm-a suitable candidate for a Lucas character, makes me want to spend my days exploring Costa Rica and they tell us Panama is even better. How much better can it get?
- 14 july 2000