Huanchaco is much like San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua – a quaint surfer town, full of tourists, ex-pats and beach bums. It was a very nice and relaxing holiday for us, and we spent the time enjoying the beach, doing a little surfing and bodyboarding and generally chilling out.

The indigenous peoples of the region used incredible reed boats, now called Caballitos de Totoro (little horses), to surf the waves while fishing. Today, you can hitch a ride on one of these boats for a wet trip out and back. However, they are still used by the local fishermen, and we often saw teams of them bobbing on the waves in the mornings.

Our friend Andrew happened to be traveling in Peru at the same time, and we were lucky to get to meet up for a couple of days. The three of us visited the ruins of Huacas del Sol y de la Luna and Chan Chan for a day, which were much more impressive than I’d imagined. Huaca de la Luna, which is actually a temple to a nature god rather than a celestial one, is remarkably well preserved in parts, due to its Moche builders habit of burying old versions and rebuilding bigger, better ones over top. The painted walls were most impressive.

Chan Chan, a site of the later Chimu culture, was equally impressive in its huge size and intricately carved walls.

The Malecon has an IMAX theatre, a couple of playgrounds, restaurants and many statues along its path, both the typical ones of political leaders and more modern artistic types. There is also a large tropical garden with a duck pond and many beautiful plants.

Guayaquil also has the most impressive bus terminal we’ve ever seen. A large, three storey affair, the terminal houses the ticketing agents for all the bus lines that travel to and from Guayaquil, making transfers extremely easy. The terminal is also a good-sized shopping mall and has many eateries. We were able to kill 6 hours of waiting time between window shopping, eating and finding free wifi on the top floor.

We visited old town and new town by ourselves. They are quite pretty and remind us more of Vancouver than of other Latin American cities. We strolled through many parks and browsed little markets of paintings and crafts. Cabs in Quito are somewhat difficult in that many of them do not know where anything is, one even couldn’t help us after we provided the address. Luckily trams run through town down the major arteries and cost only $0.25.

We visited the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana where we toured their museum. Their collection of pre Columbian artifacts is impressive, while the remainder of their collection is underwhelming.

We very much enjoyed the Museo Guayasamin and the Capilla del Hombre, both of which are galleries of Oswaldo Guayasamin’s art. The architecture of the Capilla del Hombre is wonderful, and we enjoyed Guayasamin’s art. Both of these are on top of a hill north of downtown. Due to errors in reading the our tourist map, we got off the tram at the Canadian Embassy and walked the rest of the way to the Capilla del Hombre. This was about 3 km, with probably 300 meters of vertical, most of which came in the second half. Needless to say at 3 km altitude above sea level this walk took a lot out of us. We highly recommend taking a cab.

We also took the gondola up to the Teleferiqo, which is a simple lookout at 4100 m or about 1 km above the city. This was fantastic.

Scream applied for a cruising permit for the Galapagos island by email. We sent scanned images of our passport and boat registrations to Bolivar Pesantes (naugala at hotmail dot com) along with the following information:

Name of Boat / Nombre del barco:
Ship’s Flag / Buques de bandera:
Registration Number /Número de Registro:
Length in meters / Longitud en metros:
Width in meters / Ancho en metros:
Depth in meters / Profundidad en metros:
Gross Tonnage /Tonelaje Bruto:
Color:
Propulsion / De propulsión, motor o vela:
Captain’s Name / Nombre Capitanes:
Crew Names / Los nombres de la tripulación:
Arrival Port / Puerto de llegada:
Arrival Date / Fecha de llegada:
Departure Date / Fecha de salida:
Length of stay in days / Duración de la estancia, número de días:
Type of Visit / Tipo de visita: Tourist-Only ports or Populated Centers

We were informed by email about one week after we sent our information that our permit has been approved!

The fees will be:

1. Cruising Permit / Autografo $300 (includes agent’s fee)
2. Immigration $30 per person (may not apply as we’re arriving from Ecuador)
3. Quarantine Inspection $30
4. National Parks Fee $100 per person

So not quite $600 for the two of us, all of which is to be paid in cash upon arrival.

More information about cruising the Galapagos is available at Yachtpals.

Boaters will be accustomed to the invaluable descriptions provided by the US Coast Pilots or the Canadian Sailing Directions. In the rest of the world, the US government provides Sailing Directions. This publication is intentionally not to the standard of the guides for domestic waters. Fortunately, Sailing Directions is still being updated, so it is accurate if a bit low on detail at times.

The end result is that the navigator is far more dependent on his cruising guides in Latin American than she is in her home waters. Unfortunately the most popular cruising guides are also riddled with inaccuracies and out of date information, even in their recent editions.

To the rescue comes a new generation of cruising guides, made with GPS, computers, and satellite imagery. We wholeheartedly recommend Sarana’s two volume guide book Explore Central America!  These guides are filled with precise GPS locations plotted on satellite photographs, and depict all of the anchorages in Central America, even the ones that the authors recommend bypassing. We found and greatly enjoyed several anchorages that were listed in this guide but not in the other guides we have for the region. We also easily saved the purchase price of this guide in Diesel fuel alone by making passages with waypoints this guide provided where other guides indicated no passage was possible.

Similarly valuable are the descriptions of facilities available for the cruising yacht. This guide lists all of the facilities, the good and the bad, the inexpensive and the outrageously overpriced. Add shopping information for dozens of coastal towns and advice on handling government bureaucracy. No cruising yacht should be without this helpful guide.

Boats transiting Central America will also want to pay close attention to the free resources at the bottom of Sarana’s web page.

We planned this trip excessively. The passage profile is uninviting, even at the ideal time of year, November through March. The trades here blow consistently out of the SW, shifting closer to S as the coast of South America is approached. This means that you’re close hauled against the wind and waves for the whole 600 mile trip. Add the Humboldt current pushing you NE as you near shore, and the whole trip can be a nightmare.

We left from Costa Rica in order to be able to sail without having to beat. Boats leaving from Panama need to beat against the wind and current. However, this means that we missed Panama entirely.

In practice the trip was better than we expected if still uncomfortable. We made the passage in one hour less than 7 days. We had 15 knots SSW to WSW for the entire trip, with 1-2m wind wave at 5-6 seconds. We stayed close hauled on starboard tack for the first 6 1/2 days. We found that the motion of the boat crashing into the waves was uncomfortable when we were at speed (say 6 knots), so we backed off to 3.5 knots by reducing sail and found the motion much more comfortable. We think that we had favourable current near the beginning and we did have opposing current on the last day, but all of the currents were one knot or less.

We checked into the Panama Pacific SSB Net every morning, except for one day when the radio propagation was poor. They run on 8143 USB at 14:00 UTC. They use 6130 USB as an alternate frequency when 8143 has poor propagation, which was most days of our passage.

We saw almost no vessels during the days. On the night we left Costa Rica we saw several ships going to or leaving Panama. The next night we saw one vessel approaching Panama. We then saw no vessels for two solid days. We saw Isla Malpello during the day, and were honestly shocked to discover later that it has a 25 nm range lighthouse working on it. That night we passed very close to Eva, who were on the reciprocal course from Ecuador to western Panama. We chatted with them on the VHF.

The next morning, we were approached by a pair of pangas at dawn. These are 25 foot open boats with outboards. They were engaged in fishing operations perhaps 150 miles from shore in over 2km of depth. They came alongside and asked us about “Cigaros”. We thought they were asking about radios, and confusion ensued. We eventually gave them a few cookies and they went on their way, with a promise in English to “See you tomorrow”, which we eventually determined was a poor translation of the Spanish “Hasta Luego”.

That night, still over 100 miles from shore we stumbled into a traffic jam just after dark. Two large power yachts were north bound along with a freighter. Two other freighters were southbound, all of us within 10 miles of each other. One power yacht approached fairly close to us: the wind was shifting and going from 15 to 20 knots so we were not keeping a steady course. In response they were swinging side to side like a slalom skier trying to avoid us, showing us red then green and steadily approaching. We ended up calling them on the VHF, and they thankfully spoke English. We sorted the situation out but they did pass just a couple hundred meters away and swung along behind us to take a look before continuing north.

On the next night, still about 100 miles from we ran into a field of fishing boats with long lines. They had weak flashing lights on the end of their poles, and I had great trouble identifying them until they cam quite close. We also almost ran over a small panga. It had a pair of weak orange side lights, mounted less than a meter above the water. When I first saw them I thought that they were a freighter more than 20 miles away, falling in and out of sight with the waves. Actually they were probably only 200m away. I might never have figured it out if the two lights hadn’t started to move in opposite directions when the panga crested a nearby wave. With them just meters away and us close hauled under wind steering and the engine off and them just to leeward, all that I could do was shine my pen light on their hull as it passed.

The last day we started to get pushed by the Humboldt current and fell off of our desired course. We saw a pod of short finned pilot whales, but failed to get a good photo. We ended up motoring overnight to Bahia Caraquez in order to make the high water slack entrance over the bar on November 11 at 10am EST.

Our track is online at http://www.pangolin.co.nz/yotreps/tracker.php?ident=VA7WHM

After our passage we met with other cruisers who made almost equally comfortable passages from western Panama. While officialdom in western Panama is a pain, this route has a lot of merit and should not be dismissed lightly as western Panama is supposedly quote pretty. Practically, your options for checking in and out of western Panama are the open roadstead at sometimes open Puerto Armuelles or going up the shallow, poorly marked channel to Pedregal at high water.

Be cautious as you approach as Punta Rincon has a shoal less than 2 m extending perhaps a 1/4 km ENE from its tip that is not depicted on the charts that we have. The bay itself is mostly 20-25m depth. In the extreme SW corner anchorage can be taken in 10m about 25m from shore. I wonder if there enough depth in our entire swinging circle at low tide, but as we haven’t had wind to speak of in a long time we took our chances. More prudent vessels would anchor further from shore in 15-20m. The bottom is mud, and the anchorage is perfectly flat, troubled by neither swell nor wind.

The road to Puerto Jimenez runs along shore, but it is hidden from view by the jungle and has little traffic. The town of Rincon isn’t visible from the anchorage, nor is it clear in which direction it lies. There is some settlement along the road, but the area is rural. We stayed five days but did not go to shore as there didn’t seem to be any attraction.

Our tour went to a privately owned observatory, where we and seven other folks walked through the rainy forest to a very pretty waterfall. We then hiked back and hung out at the hotel on the property, watching the cloud-shrouded volcano carefully for signs of lava flows. We did see a few bright sparks that were molten rocks bouncing down the sides, but the sound of the lava flow was much more spectacular than the views. It was like listening to popcorn popping right next to you, and we were several miles away. Very impressive.

We were then taken to Baldi hot springs, which is a hotel and resort with several pools ranging in temperature from hot to way too hot. We had a nice buffet dinner there, then spent a few hours mincing around between the pools trying not to get lost or cooked. It was a great way to wind down after a couple of days of hiking, though there was very little of nature visible at that facility.

We started and ended the trip with the 7 hour ride on the Tracopa Bus to San Jose ($10 per person each way). We tried to leave on Monday but the bus was booked solid, so we went Tuesday instead. The bus is comfortable but it is still a long trip.

Our first night in San Jose we got off the bus intending to walk a couple blocks to our hotel. After walking a couple blocks through the red light district, we determined that our bus had stopped at a different station than our guide book had indicated it would. We hailed a cab to our intended hotel, Posada de Don Tobias. Tobias was cheap and priced accordingly ($25 for double occupancy with private bath). We tried to wander around town but discovered that Tobias is in a poor neighbourhood; almost everything closed by dark and there were homeless people sleeping on the street.

Luckily Tobias is literally next door to the bus station for Monteverde. We caught that bus at 7am ($4 per person) and enjoyed the 4 hour ride through the mountains. In Santa Elena, the town at Monteverde, we stayed at Monteverde backpackers, which was comfortable ($20 for double occupancy with private bath).

We caught the minivan-boat-minivan to Fortuna from Monteverde, which is described as jeep-boat-jeep. We paid $25 per person for this trip, better shoppers might pay half. Or there is a 6 hour bus for $5.

Fortuna is a beautiful little town that is exists solely for the tourists coming to see Volcano Arenal. We stayed at the lovely La Roca Virgen, which was only $16 for double occupancy with private bath, and was easily our favourite of the trip.

From Fortuna we caught the bus back to San Jose. We bought advanced tickets ($2 per person), which gave us first pick of the seats but I believe cost more than the locals paid. This was well worth it as people we standing in the aisle for almost the entire 4 hour trip.

We decided to try somewhere in San Jose closer to the center of town, and ended up at Principe. Principe charges by the hour and its clientelle mostly doesn’t stay the whole night. We knew it was bad as soon as we walked in, but we were too tired to do the right thing and walk out. Particularly as we had just been swindled by our cab driver. Principe was $20, but it was uncomfortable and unsanitary. We hated it so much that we took out our frustrations on each other both that night and the next day. The centre of San Jose, while busy, wasn’t anything interesting either. There were lots of fast food restaurants and sketchy-looking bars, but we failed to find a single restaurant with tables and waiters on our walk.

For anyone following in our footsteps, taking this trip from Puntarenas while leaving your boat at the Costa Rica Yacht Club would be a much better plan. There are buses to Monteverde and Fortuna from Puntarenas, which is closer than San Jose. So you save two days on the bus and two nights in San Jose.

However, most boats in transit use the facilities at Land Sea, which has a handful of moorings, as well as a dinghy dock and clubhouse for boats on the hook. We kept Scream on one of their moorings and had Tim, the owner, keep an eye on the boat when we traveled inland. Tim also has a great book exchange, wifi, and a work area that cruisers can use for mucky jobs (we painted our oars there).

The town of Golfito is mostly laid out along one road that follows the shore. From Land Sea, it’s a bit of a walk to “downtown,” where a couple of supermarkets can be found, along with the inevitable hardware stores, shoe shops, restaurants and the post office. Further along is the port captain, coast guard facility, some hotels and then the very odd new raison d’être of Golfito: the Deposito Libre.

The story goes that when the banana exportation business died, Golfito was on the ropes as a town. So to bring some economic life back, it was allowed to build a duty-free zone, that is a large area of warehouse sized stores, selling cheap appliances, booze, imported food, electronics, kitchen goods and clothes. It’s free to shop there, but you need a permit which becomes valid 24 hours after you get it, necessitating an overnight stay in town. You can see how the economic stimulus works, considering that many of the products available at the Deposito are much less expensive than at local stores in Costa Rica. There were many people shopping when we visited.

As a stop for cruisers, Golfito is a classic meeting point. Between the marinas, economical services at Land Sea, great anchorage and full shopping, it would be a cruisers’ paradise even if it weren’t almost right on the Costa Rica/Panama border and a Port of Entry.

We skipped the butterfly gardens, the guided hikes in the national park, the Sepentarium and insect zoo, bungee jumping and a couple of zipline canopy tours. We did visit the Ranario (frog sanctuary) and the SkyTrek facility.

The Ranario was a great find, and for a small fee you get multiple entry to their many frog terrariums, so you can visit at different times of day. We went in the afternoon, and got a guided tour by a fluent English speaker who was very knowledgeable about the frogs as well as funny and entertaining. It was raining pretty hard when the tour was done, so we hung out for a while while our guide showed us videos of frogs and toads on YouTube until his laptop’s battery died. We returned the following evening to look at the frogs in their night habitats, which was really cool. The frogs are almost all very small, so visiting a facility like this is a must if you actually want to see them up close and personal.

We spent the majority of our time and budget on a visit to SkyTrek, a zipline and suspension bridge facility in the cloudforest. I was worried that it would be overly developed, and the whole zipline canopy tour seemed just plain cheesy. As it turned out, most of the facility is a well groomed but wild trail though the forest, with several suspension bridges over valleys along the trail. We spent most of the morning walking this path, having many amazing birds, plants and insects pointed out for us by our guide. It was a fabulous hike, and was well worth the price of admission.

As for the zipline, it was surprisingly fun, though you really don’t see a lot while whizzing over the treetops at 40 miles an hour. The views from the takeoff and landing platforms were pretty fantastic, though. The zipline package at SkyTrek comes with a ride up their gondola, which was very pleasant. I’m glad I did the zipline, though if I were going again I’d stick to the walk and maybe a ride up the gondola for the views.

We started out with a quick trip from Punta Leona, where we were comfortable and happy, to Bahia Herradura. Despite the barrier island and deep bay, Herradura is a rolly anchorage. We were not impressed and left after one night.

Our next stop was Quepos, which we knew was a marginal anchorage at the best of times. With an above average swell running 2m, Quepos was horrible. There used to be room to shelter behind a breakwater, but construction of a new marina has taken all of that room. You’re left to anchor wide open to the South and the West. I had to hang on to the boat to avoid being thrown around for the entire five minutes we stayed at anchor.

Luckily, anchorage may be taken just south of Quepos on the North side of Punta Quepos. This is a picturesque anchorage with light swell. If it had access to land I’m confident that no one would ever stop at Quepos proper again. There are two rocks off the north side of the point, and a third east off the mainland. Their positions are listed in Sarana’s Guide. We anchored at 9 24.3N by 84 10.15W. Stay north of 9 24.3N until east of 84 10.17W, then head south into the cove before 84 10.13W.

Without access to land and still bothered by the swell, we headed out to overnight to Golfo Dulce. As we left Quepos we encountered 2-3m swell at 8? seconds, which tossed us a bit. We mostly motored south, with a little sailing and some motor sailing. We managed to avoid any squalls until shortly after nightfall. We had five squalls roll over us that night. The wind would pick up to 20 knots, rain would fall, and the lightning got closer. A hour later the wind would ease and we’d motor through another short calm. This wore us out.

Gulfo Dulce has convinced us that we don’t understand swell at all. The Gulf is open to the south, which is the direction that the swell comes from, but the swell starts to ease as soon as you come through the deep water, 5 mile wide entrance. By the time you’re approaching the anchorages the sea is flat, even though there is no obstacle to the swell that we could detect. Needless to say we are thrilled to be here.

I could be trite and talk about the filthy harbours with oil on the water and garbage floating by. But with overfishing and global pollution having caused fish populations to collapse world wide, I won’t name these places lest I add another blow to their already fragile economies. Unfortunately fleets of derelict fishing vessels and poor fishermen are everywhere, from third world countries to the USA. I see them everywhere.

The other thing that I see everywhere are homes built just above the high tide line. I’m writing this from a nice, new building in Golfito. It, like this whole town and almost every other port town that I have visited, has no chance whatsoever of surviving a 1.3 metre increase in sea level by 2100, which is the current best estimate. So we really ought to be putting serious effort and money into preparations for millions of refugees.

On a more personal and practical note, the act of sailing the world’s oceans relies a lot on past climate data. Ships have maintained logs of their travels for centuries; in the 1840s the United States Naval Observatory undertook a herculean study of the logs in their collection. This led to an understanding of the seasons, winds, and currents of all the world’s waterways. Since then every prudent vessel has consulted past meteorological data before going to sea. While anyone can tell that sailing off Alaska in January is a bad idea, it may not be as apparent that sailing off Mexico in September is a worse one.

Unfortunately we continue to pollute the world, and this pollution is changing our world. I have before me a fourth edition (1998) of Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes (which incidentally should be carried by every yacht planning to cross oceans). The entire entry under the bold heading “Tropical Storms” on page 220 is that “Tropical revolving storms do not occur in the South Atlantic Ocean.” However, in our increasingly polluted world there have now been five such storms in the past decade.

And while the category 4 storm that struck Vancouver, Canada on December 3, 2007 isn’t technically supposed to be called Typhoon Mitag because of some minutia, we should all be concerned that Asian typhoons are causing billions of dollars of damage and loss of life in the Americas, well outside their historical range. A single hurricane straying outside of its usual range could sink the average Central American coastal town far worse that Katrina hurt New Orleans. Everything here is so much flimsier and closer to the water’s edge.

We all know how to pollute less and we all know why to pollute less. So please stop finding excuses to do what is right.