Passage notes: Playa Tamarindo to Bahia Ballena, Costa Rica

It’s been awhile since either of us saw a sunrise since it rises at 5:30 these days.

What’s up blog? Long time. I’m hijacking a passage notes entry after I complained to Harmony that she gets the “easy posts” and I couldn’t think up any clever thematic ties to bind the mishmash of experiences we’ve had lately. So, she threw me a bone. Let’s all go around a peninsula together!

Starting point: Playa Tamarindo, Costa Rica
Destination: Bahia Ballena, CR
Distance: 85ish miles
Expected time to complete: 20ish hours
Actual time to complete: around two days and nights
Number of additional statistics prepared: none.

Okay, here we go. We’d been in Tamarindo a few days, and this morning we had to decide whether to stay an extra day and surf or move on toward our December 18th visa deadline to be out of the country.

In favor of staying was the consideration that we’d had a really fun time during our first surf lessons a couple days prior, and this beach has very forgiving waves for falsely confident beginners. I say falsely confident because our instructors had not only pointed our boards at the correct angle as a favorable wave approached, but they gave us a boosting push right as the wave caught up with us to offset the probable fact that we had not been paddling fast enough. Nonetheless, we both managed to stand up and impress one another as we pretended to look like surfers, and were looking forward to another run at it. Other points in favor of staying were the local craft beers, which alleviated some of the homebrewsickness we’d been feeling amongst the monoculture of national beers found along this coastline, as well as the ample opportunities for people watching (“trolling”, as my Dad used to call it) and general leisure on the wide soft beach. Tamarindo is pretty Gringo-fied, but for once we didn’t mind because there were options for most every budget and the vibe seemed to be about having a good time.

In favor of leaving were the following considerations:

— Papagayo winds were blowing and were scheduled to die off tomorrow and stay dead for the rest of the week. If we wanted a sleighride with strong winds at our back, it was either today or nothing.

— Those same Papagayos were churning the anchorage into choppy slop, our anchor spot was probably a quarter mile from shore, and our outboard motor was behaving erratically. As we sat with our coffee and surveyed our options, the thought of [Harmony] rowing to shore didn’t sound appealing.

— The fact that this is a great beach for surfing correspondingly means that it is a terrifying beach for landing your dinghy in that selfsame surf with a nonfunctioning motor. Going to shore is a commitment.

— My solar plexus was still bruised and sore from our last bout of surfing (are you not supposed to belly flop onto the board or something?), so if anything I was probably only going to rent a boogie board. I must be about three more years from thinking the kiddie rides at the fair look quite exciting enough for me, thankyouverymuch.

All tallied, we bid farewell to Tamarindo and hauled anchor. The wind was blowing in the 20-knot range with occasional stronger gusts as we motored around the reef in the bay, and once we got out we raised our working jib and let it pull us south at a brisk 5 knots. The sky was overcast for a change and provided welcome relief from the everpresent sun.

Rather than tear down the porta-bote, we tied it in the center tight to our aft end and strung a fender across the transom to protect against bumps under following seas. We probably lost a little speed this way, but we’ve been doing it the whole way down Costa Rica so far and it’s saved us a ton of hassle as we’ve tended toward more day-hops than long passages.

The wind stayed strong for most of the afternoon, but once we rounded the first point we struck a 2-knot counter current that our guide had warned us about. Our progress slowed to about 2.5-3 knots, and as the day wore on the wind gradually flipped around be about 5 knots on our nose. Looking at our GPS, we discovered that we were making backwards progress under full sail. Our sleighride had just turned into a slog. We turned on the motor and our speed recovered to a whopping 2.5 knots again, which we kept up until evening when the wind freshened enough to kill the engine and still make at least that much speed.

Through the night we tacked back and forth about 12 miles offshore in front of the next headland, taking until morning to get all the way around. Without the current we would have been sliding into Bahia Ballena around now, but as it was we’d just passed the halfway mark. Did you know that they used to call these the “horse latitudes” because sailors of old would get becalmed at sea for so long that they had to eat their horses? True story.

I won’t bore you further with the boring parts of the trip, except to relay one interesting experience from that second day. We were sailing along the aforementioned 12 miles offshore right where the undersea shelf drops from 300 feet to 3,000 feet (this is where I’m told all that elusive good fishing is), when out in the middle of nowhere I saw a black flag sticking up out of the water directly in our path. I relieved the Doc and hand-steered to skate us around the flag, but then I noticed another black flag about a half-mile on, with 20 or 30 little white balls floating in a line between them. Looking behind us, I saw that there was another line of little white balls connected to yet another black flag we’d passed unnoticed, and undoubtedly another flag somewhere beyond that in either direction. The ocean to our right had effectively been fenced-off by a miles-long net. I performed a quick tack toward shore just in time to avoid passing over it and catching the float line with our keel, marveling at how the term “open sea” is a bit of a misnomer.

We continued to make slow tacking progress toward the end of the Nicoya peninsula throughout the second day. The lighthouse rock on the point mocked us from a perpetual 10 miles away. Harmony finally turned on the motor during her evening shift, and when I woke up night had fallen, the sails were up, the wind was 10 knots at our side, the counter current was gone, and we were magically around the point with only 20ish miles to go. It was too good to last.

Almost immediately after Harmony went to bed, the wind started to fluctuate and laden rainclouds filled the air with a constant drizzle. Unlike the squalls off Guatemala, the rain in Costa Rica comes as a solo act, leaving the gusts of wind and lightning behind. The sailing was still manageable, but once your butt is wet it becomes thereafter uncomfortable.

As I listened to my podcasts I became inceasingly aware of a repeated Tug-BANG! Tug-BANG! behind us. Rain had collected in the dinghy until it was half full and had turned it into a heavy battering ram. With the Doc steering, I grabbed the bailing pump and climbed into the dinghy to empty it out. There’s something eerie about sitting in a tiny boat, towed by another boat, driven by a machine in the dark.

At some point in the night a sudden gust caught the full genoa and we tipped to the side. We probably only went over 20-25 degrees, but my head was filled with the story of friends of ours who had suffered a knockdown and got water up to their knees in their cabin, so it got my heart racing. I quickly let the genoa sheet fly and woke Harmony up to come help me take it down. We continued on under main alone for a while, and after the wind settled a bit we exchanged the genoa for the working jib and continued on at 3-4 knots.

We finally reached the big bay at sunrise on the third day and dropped our hook near the fishing pier in a small village off the little town of Tambor. Then we went to sleep. I don’t know how to end this entry.

As for the fishing, we caught one jack (the kind with the red meat), which thrilled the cat and provided two dinners for Harmony and me. Later that night, we got another bite from a monster so big I could see its bioluminescent mass under the water from 50 feet away. By the time I’d collected my knife, spear, and net, he’d managed to bend the barb of my hook and escape. When we took the dinghy to the fishing pier at Ballena, the fishermen were cleaning at least a hundred big blue Dorado.

That’s about all I have to say about that.