We headed Southeast toward Golfito Costa Rica to check out of the country. On the way we stopped at several anchorages: Uvita, to hopefully see the whales (we did not), but got practice rounding several reefs and rocks then bounced around all night, not our favorite anchorage. Next we came to beautiful Drake's Bay. This was a calm retreat after such a bouncy night before. The town looked inviting, but we were only there for the night, so we stayed aboard. As we were motoring the next day (no wind) our autopilot suddenly stopped and all of our instruments seemed to hiccup! Oh no…..we need those! We got them back on line, with the exception of the radar. We need that too! Dale spent a good amount of time trying to reattach this important component, but with no luck. Guess we will continue without it. Meanwhile, Ken was working on the watermaker, which didn't seem to want to cooperate. We need water too…..what is this place that all of our equipment is not working?!!
We headed up into Bahia Dulce and were concerned about the rain clouds and lightning all around us. Here's where we spotted our first whales. It was also getting dark, so we opted for the more open and closer Puerto Jimenez. This bay shallows quickly so was a challenge to keep from running aground. With over 10 feet of tide difference, it was extra important that we didn't get in too shallow. We watched the VERY close lightning for the evening as our depth dropped lower and lower. It evened out at 9.5 feet and we draw 6.5….whew!
The next morning we headed into Golfito, our last Costa Rican port, where we would check out of the country. This was a nice calm bay with two tiny and very full marinas. We anchored outside Banana Bay Marina and proceeded to launch the dinghy. We enjoyed the town for two days. We found a grocery store, two restaurants and finally the four entities that would stamp, re-stamp and staple our four copies of every piece of paper we had! These were not close to each other, so we spent a couple of hours getting to know Golfito and several taxi drivers!
As we returned to our dinghy where our 4 empty 5-gallon diesel cans waited to be filled, we noticed that the 10 feet of water that we had started in had disappeared! There sat Tiny in the mud waiting for us! We had to round a dock and certainly couldn't do it loaded down with fuel. What to do??? Well, we had the cans filled, locked them together on the dock and went to enjoy a leisurely lunch! We returned just in time to see Tiny floating in 4-5 feet of water. We loaded 2 cans in and Ken carefully rowed them out to Slow Dancer then returned to get the other two and his ship mate. We got to the mother ship just in time to offload all of the cans and get in before a cloud burst. The rain was so hard, that in an hour or so, Tiny Dancer had several inches of water in her. Not easy to get this out while she was in the water! After bailing for a while, Ken pronounced her ready to get on deck, which we did. After a good night's sleep, we putted out of Golfito at 5:30 a.m. ready for our next adventure…..Panama!
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 Golfito |
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 Last night in Costa Rica |