Songline, Isla Jesusita, Golfo de Nicoya, Costa Rica. 21 May 2005
Dear Friends
No, we haven’t sailed off the edge of the world and we haven’t lost our address book - we just haven’t had a great deal to write about, especially for those of you who like to read about wild winds and stormy passages! A lot of water has, however, gone under Songline’s keel since we wrote from La Paz, Mexico, last November - a distance of more than 2,500 miles, in fact. We crossed over from the Baja California peninsular to Mexico’s mainland at the end of November, stopping on the way at Isla Isabela, a small island which is home to a few hardy fisherman and thousands of nesting birds. The frigate birds gather on the tops of the low bushes which occupy more than half of the island - virtually every bush had its nest with a pair of birds clacking their beaks and falling over their own huge wings as they vied for egg-hatching duty. The bare spaces on the higher reaches of the island are booby territory. The boobies (both yellow-footed and blue-footed) make a very crude twig nest on the ground, and there were families in every stage of development, from eggs to ungainly still-flightless chicks already as large as their parents. Tropic birds occupy the inaccessible cliff faces, only emerging late in the afternoon to do a garrulous fly-past - a lovely sight, with their white plumage, red beak and single long tail feather. And any remaining spaces around the edges of the island are occupied by pelicans who look down their long beaks at all their rowdy neighbours with the haughty disdain of those who have been forced to settle among lesser beings.
December and the early part of January saw us in opulent civilisation at the somewhat inaptly-named Paradise Village - a huge resort development near Puerto Vallarta, comprising multi-storey hotels and apartment blocks, condominiums, a golf course, even a mini-zoo with its own tigers and (the attraction for us) a very secure and comfortable marina. For the first week we found ourselves in mega-yacht row, dwarfed by the professionally-crewed 80 -140 foot luxury yachts of the super-rich - who only seem to come and play with their floating toys for a few weeks of the year. We felt more at home when we were able to move to a dock occupied by other Songline-sized boats! Paradise Village was, however, an ideal place to leave the boat while we paid a quick visit to England and to friends in Houston, and it provided a very comfortable base for Christmas, when Barbara’s Mum and partner, Gordon, came out to stay on board with us for a couple of weeks. We were also delighted to find an excellent canvas shop which was able to make a fine job of our new cockpit enclosure, giving us the ability to live out of doors, but under cover from the elements.
Our journey from Puerto Vallarta took us down the Mexican coast with several stops on the way. We were rather disappointed at how little wind there was, rarely more than 8 knots, and we spent far more of our time motoring or motor-sailing than we did just sailing. This does, of course, have its benefits - calm seas and fully-charged batteries! We reached Zihuatanejo on 24 January and it was there that Songline’s southbound path crossed our northbound route on Island Way when, in April 2002, we had set off for Hawaii. A poignant moment, and a reminder of how lucky we are to have been able to restart our travels afloat. Friends from Prague joined us in Acapulco, 100 miles further on, and stayed with us for the next 250 miles of sunny days, starry nights and calm seas in (once again!) almost wind-less conditions. In Huatulco we were able to leave the boat in the newly-built Chahue Marina, while the four of us went off to Oaxaca City, a six-hour drive away, along a very picturesque, twisting mountain road which took us over an 8000 ft pass. Oaxaca (the centre of it, at least) is a lovely old Spanish colonial town and we enjoyed our four days exploring both the town and some of the ancient Zapotec ruins which surround it.
The next challenge was the Gulf of Tehuantepec - a 200-mile passage at the southern end of Mexico notorious for its fierce offshore winds and ferocious seas. Fortunately the art of forecasting a Tehuantepec storm has improved over the years and we were able to set off feeling reasonably confident of the weather window we had been promised. We also followed the advice of many Tehuantepec veterans to ‘keep one foot on the beach’ - staying within a mile or so of the shore and in depths of no more than 30 to 50 feet. If you are caught unawares, the wind may be strong, but the seas do not have the space to build up and you end up with a very exciting fast sail in almost flat water conditions. In the event, we never saw more than 25 knots of wind - enough for a really good sail - but that only for a few hours. The rest of the crossing was made with the engine on!
We had planned to revisit Guatemala, but with the anchorage in the naval port which we had used in 2002 now closed and with no other place to leave the boat there, apart from one rather expensive marina, we continued on to El Salvador. Bahia del Sol provides a very secure anchorage in a wide, long river estuary - the principal drawback being that its access to the ocean is across a narrow, shallow sand-bar. The bar is only safe to cross just before high tide, and not always then, as there are times when the Pacific swell produces large breakers right across the entrance. We were fortunate enough to arrive at exactly the right stage of the tide, and on a day when the swell was fairly mild. With the help of a Canadian/American couple who very generously provide assistance to all arriving and departing boats, we were guided in without incident. We spent five lazy days at Bahia del Sol, enjoying the flatness of the anchorage and the luxury of the nearby hotel’s swimming pool, but then it was time to stir ourselves into action and go land-travelling. An overnight stay in the capital, San Salvador and a series of long-distance (ie comfortable!) buses took us to Quetzaltenango in Guatemala’s western highlands. The area round Quetzaltenango is very mountainous and picturesque - all the more so because of the indigenous Quiche Maya people who form the majority of the population. The women and some of the men still wear traditional dress - very colourful hand woven skirt and heavily embroidered top for the women - and for the men a comical outfit of embroidered trousers (sometimes only three-quarter length!), waistcoat and cowboy hat! From Quetzaltenango we took local ‘chicken’ buses for a couple of day trips out to nearby villages (we never established whether they are so-named because of the livestock often carried aboard or because of the propensity of drivers to overtake directly into the path of their oncoming counterparts - sometimes chickening out too late, with tragic results). One trip we had particularly looked forward to was the hot springs, which from the Lonely Planet guide book's description sounded wonderful. However, when we got there, in heavy cloud, we found a rather dirty pool, full of people all huddling round the edge. Worst of all, the temperature of the water was somewhere between tepid and cold, with no sign of any hot water coming out of the mountain at all! We have since heard that an earthquake earlier in the year seems to have realigned some of the volcanic springs that used to feed the pool, but the land owners are keeping quiet about it as they don’t want to kill their golden goose! So we sat and shivered for all of two minutes before packing up and heading back to Quetzaltenango! We set off down the mountain on foot, but were soon picked up by a very friendly Guatemalan family who had evidently enjoyed being frozen in the chilly waters! They dropped us off in Zunil, a small market town on the way and our earlier disappointment was more than made up for. Market day was in full swing, with truckloads of vegetables being brought in, to be haggled for by the local traders. The Zunil valley is very fertile, with the luxury of year-round river water to irrigate it, and we have never seen such wonderful-looking vegetables - radishes the size of apples, sacksful of huge, delicious carrots, onions and spring onions, bunches of mint and parsley as long as your arm and all vying with the brilliant colours of the womens’ blouses and the mens’ jackets. A wonderful spectacle and worth every second of the earlier ‘hot’ springs fiasco.
Our trip the next day to Huehuetenango and then on to Santa Cruz del Quiche took us across some spectacularly rugged country, with some spectacularly rugged conveyances to speed us on our way, including the first of several open-backed pick-up trucks where the passengers all stand like vertical sardines (no seat belt laws in Guatemala!). Lake Atitlan was our next destination. The lake, which is almost 1000 feet deep in places, covers an area of about 50 square miles, with three volcanoes along its southern shore. There are several little towns dotted around the lake, all linked by a system of ferries and smaller high-speed pangas, and we wished we had more time to explore the whole area. We did a lot of walking, visiting a couple of local markets and even spent a day horse-riding (in John’s case an almost-forgotten skill, not practised for more than 20 years!). At San Pedro, on the western shore, we found a super little hotel - clean, comfortable, with balcony and lake view and even a kitchen for brewing up tea, all for less than $10 a night! Ideal Gayford travel conditions!
Our last stop before returning to Guatemala City and San Salvador was Chichicastenango, famous for its market on Thursdays and Sundays. It's much more of a tourist market than the others we had been to, but it is incredibly colourful, with miles and miles of stalls full of handicrafts as well as the more traditional vegetables and fruit. We loved our time in Guatemala - friendly people, picturesque scenery, colourful markets, good food and everything very inexpensive - but after ten days we needed to get back to the boat to continue south to Costa Rica, where we had a rendezvous with a friend bringing some spare parts from the USA. We were also very excited about and determined not to miss the solar eclipse which would happen just off the coast of southern Costa Rica at 1608 on 8 April. All went smoothly till the day of the eclipse, when, with just 3 hours sailing to our chosen viewing point, we found ourselves beneath a totally overcast sky with three large black storm cells on the horizon heading in our direction. We decided that discretion was the better part of valour and turned back, hoping that we might still see something of the eclipse from the safety of the nearest anchorage at Bahia Drake. There the still-cloud-darkened sky became even darker for a few minutes, and then the clouds did part briefly, just enough for us to see the crescent of a sun still partially obscured. We are hoping that the next time we find ourselves in the vicinity of a solar eclipse, whenever and wherever that may be, we’ll have clear skies!
We spent two weeks at Bahia Drake (yes, Sir Francis was there several hundred years before us, though it seems that he is not regarded with quite the same respect in this part of the world as in his home country - epithets of ‘plunderer‘, ‘brigand’ and ‘pirate‘ abound!). This gave us time for plenty of walking along the jungle trails which border the Corcovado National Park, with frequent sightings of rare and brilliantly-colored scarlet macaws and numerous other birds, plus, on a trip into the park itself, crocodiles, four varieties of monkey, an anteater so intent on its mobile meal that it didn’t notice John filming until it was practically within touching distance - and, to the delight of Carlos, our guide, a very rarely-seen crested owl.
Our original intention had been to do some more land travelling on the way south, then to continue on to Panama and Ecuador, where we planned to base Songline for the summer months while we went travelling in South America. However, our haste to get to Costa Rica meant that we were not able to stop much on the way, so we have now decided to delay Ecuador until next year and instead, to go north again for the summer months. We have a choice of three secure bases in El Salvador or Nicaragua, safe enough, we hope, to leave Songline while we go travelling again - and we very much look forward to seeing something of Nicaragua, Honduras and perhaps some more of El Salvador and Guatemala as well, before we come south again at the end of the year.
Hurricane season in the Caribbean and East Pacific officially begins on 1 June - and hurricanes generated on the Pacific side rarely, if ever, visit the portion of Central America east of Guatemala. Imagine our surprise (and that of the 100 or so other boats in the anchorages and marinas right in its path 300 miles to our north), when, out of season and in the wrong direction, Hurricane Adrian started to develop last week, south of Guatemala, with a trajectory along the coast of El Salvador and on through Honduras and Nicaragua and into the Caribbean. Here in Costa Rica we were far enough away from the high winds at the centre for our main concerns to be the forecast torrential rain and the heavy swell expected all the way up the Pacific coast. Our anchorage here on the western shore of the Gulf of Nicoya is one of the flattest we have ever experienced (wonderful!), surrounded as it is by islands and by the Nicoya peninsular itself, so the swell never reached us. And rainfall has been hardly more than usual for the time of year, though we did have a couple of very cloudy days. We have not had any first-hand reports so far of how the other boats further north fared during the storm, but we understand that all escaped unscathed, seeing winds no greater than 45 knots.
We expect to start heading back towards the north of Costa Rica in the next few days, and on up the Nicaraguan coast. Meanwhile we are enjoying the peace and tranquillity (!) of central Costa Rica, interrupted only by the rowdy squawking of flocks of green parrots, the haunting cries of the howler monkeys, the regular two-hourly chug-chug of the little ferry to Puntarenas and the putter of the occasional fishing boat or panga motoring past. What a symphony! What a life!
We hope this finds you all in good spirits, and look forward to hearing your news.
With love and best wishes from
John and Barbara