Playa del Coco
23 May 2008 | Costa Rica
Heather
We had fantastic sailing from Nicaragua into Costa Rica and buddy boated with 3 other boats, all which were participants in this year's Baja Ha Ha race. We have each traveled over 3,000 miles from the race start in San Diego back in October! As dark approached and the wind died the thunderstorms started to appear again on the radar. Again we found ourselves getting nervous as bright bolts of lightning lit up the sky - something I don't think we will ever get used to.
We spent our first 2 nights in Costa Rica anchored in Bahia Santa Elena which is part of a National Park and absolutely pristine. Picture above is of Santa Elena when we had thunderstorms roll in at sunset one evening. Although our cruising guides promised macaw sightings and howler monkeys at dusk we didn't experience either. Oh well, it was a beautiful bay and one of our favorite secluded anchorages since being in the Sea of Cortez.
Glenn has been keeping busy with our refrigeration system (it is a long story). He has also been keeping us in good spirits as in 2 days we had our solenoid on our propane tank go out, found fuel leaking from a fuel injector on the generator and somehow managed to have a short in the wiring for all of our main cabin overhead lights. Ahh, the "joy" of owning a boat.
Glenn also had the opportunity to experience the health care system in Costa Rica and we all agreed that it pretty much rocks! He walked into an 'urgent care pharmacy' in the town of Playa del Coco and spoke to the pharmacist about his condition (a bothersome earache). The local physician (a young, pretty bilingual woman) was phoned and within 1o minutes she had arrived, taken his medical history, diagnosed his ailment and started on a treatment. Within 20 minutes of arrival the problem was solved, we were out the door and Glenn had a prescription for some special eardrops - all this for less than the cost of our lunch!
The weekend will be spent exploring some of the bays around the Gulf of Papagallo. There are so many anchorages that one could easily spend months here and not even visit them all.