Jurassic Park

Bahia Drake, Costa Rica

We are making steady progress down the Costa Rica coast.

Bahia Ballena was a very nice spot, although we used it only as a place to rest for a day before moving on south.  We will most likely have to come back this way in the near future and will hopefully be able to spend more time here then.  We found it interesting that, even though the foliage is quite dense, there is a lot of brown showing - it is the dry season in northern Costa Rica.  With that in mind, we elected to make a largish hop down the coast to southern Costa Rica, which is reported to be one of the wettest places on earth and should be very green.  BTW: We did get the company of two other sailboats that stopped here overnight, one on their way north and one on their way to Puntarenas.

Yesterday (Saturday) we left Bahia Ballena around 11AM, in an attempt to catch the afternoon thermal winds that blow on shore.  It sort of worked, as we were actually able to sail for 2-1/2 hours before the winds totally died.  The remainder of our 101 mile, 22 hour, overnight passage was done with the engine running - we never saw over 5 knots of wind for the rest of the night.  For the last half of the trip, we saw a series of rain squalls on the radar, none of which actually caught us, so it would appear that we are heading for much damper climes.

Our current location is in a bay called Bahia Drake, famous as a place that Francis Drake may or may not have landed in 1579.  Regardless, this is a very easy bay to anchor in, with lots of room for lots of boats.  It is a bit exposed to wind and waves from the NW, but these are not supposed to amount to much this time of year.

Looking around the bay, it does look very lush (think Jurassic Park).  We are sharing the anchorage with 6 other sailboats at the moment.  Including us, three of them are from Canada.  We will probably just spend the rest of the day making up for lost sleep from the overnight passage.  What wind, waves and general weather conditions develop will help us decide if this is just another brief stopover or a place to spend a couple of days.  What we know right now is that it is hot (32 degrees C), very humid and, although the sun it shining, it looks like it could rain at any moment.
NOTE: Rain would not necessarily be a bad thing - the boat is currently a real mess - covered in a combination of volcanic ash, cane-burning ash, and salt residue.

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