SV Yohelah – Pacific Loop

We’re still in Bahia del Coco in Northern Costa Rica after three weeks of visitors and big winds. Coco is at the southern end of the Gulf of Papagayo where it blows all winter long. Hard. Nearly every day. Without fail. But the weather is beautiful and warm and sunny and when it’s not howling it’s perfect here.

Teresa Lennstrom (T2) came down with her family for a week of vacation during the kid’s school break. They rented a condo here in Coco for 5 days and we spent a couple of days hanging out on the boat doing some swimming and watching Kevin do a dive course with the local dive shop. One day we went up into the mountains nearby and did a zip line trip through a beautiful canyon. Even though it wasn’t in the jungle canopy it was still very cool to zip line down through the canyon. And one day I got to go have lunch alone with T2 and get some girl time in. It was great to see T2 and her kids and remember that the phrase “polite teenager” does apply outside immediate family members.

We spent the next week hanging out in Bahia Huevos hiding from the winds and visiting with a couple of other cruising boats that were heading north. Then Leslie & Fred came down last week and we had another awesome week visiting with my sister and brother-in-law. Sadly the water got cold and we didn’t get much swimming in, but we spent a lovely day exploring a picture perfect private beach in Huevos. And I got to have a day in town with my sister having lunch and spending more quality girl time.

One day I checked the weather forecast and it looked like it was going to be relatively calm (for the Gulf of Papagayo, that is), so I had this brilliant idea to go for a day sail. We were going to head north into the breeze and turn south if it kicked up. But somehow we forgot that plan. We were screaming south and decided to tack and turn around and the jib sheet hung up on the flag halyard on the standing rigging. Once that was straightened out I heard Rob tell us we needed to roll up the jib quick. What he had seen and I hadn’t was 40 knots of wind coming straight at us. And of course we had up a full jib and full main. It took three people to get the jib rolled up and then we dropped the mainsail because we had to head straight back up into it. We were making 1.5 knots and water was coming over the bow all the way back into the cockpit. Needless to say it was a long hard trip clawing back into the bay and back onto our little anchor.

The next day we rented a car to drive up to the lake and see some jungle and do some zip lining. Sadly it was pouring in the mountains so we had to forego the zip lines this time. But we had a nice drive and saw some of the beautiful interior of Costa Rica.

Now it’s Sunday and we’ve been up to the marina this morning at the head of Bahia Culebra to fuel up the boat and wash off all the salt we took on during our little 3 hour tour earlier in the week. Tomorrow morning we’ll go get our zarpe and stock up on veggies one last time. We’re 2 days from meeting Brit & Axel (from Hello World) at Isla Cocos, where we’ll stay and dive for 3 days. Then we’re about a week from the Galapagos, where we’ll stay for the 20 days they’ll allow. I’ll update the passage blog until we get to the Galapagos.

Today on Yohelah we’re rested up and heading to Cocos to dive with hammerhead sharks for some unknown reason…..

The Gulf of Papagayo is here

We’re finally on our way to the South Pacific! We rounded the corner out of the Gulf of Papagayo about a half an hour ago and are on a heading nearly due south towards Isla Cocos. It’s about 300 miles so we should be there Thursday morning some time. We’ve got some good wind right now, but expect it to die by tonight or tomorrow.

We’ll be sailing into the ITCZ (inter tropical convergence zone) again, which means no wind and rain squalls. Unfortunately we’re traveling towards the Galapagos at a time of year when there is very little wind between here and there. We need to conserve our fuel as best we can so we’ve got enough to get to the Galapagos, so we’ll keep the sails up as much as possible. The winds off of Costa Rica are very gusty, though, so it makes the seas very rolly and the sails hard to keep full.

Teresa

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We’ll write more later about the stop here at Cocos, but let’s just say for starters that this is an amazing place. The island is absolutely beautiful lush jungle. We even have our own little private waterfall pouring right into our anchorage. And the diving is spectacular. Just for the record, though, it is very scary seeing the hammerhead sharks because it’s not you checking them out – it’s them checking you out. And they’re big and terrifying to me.

But we’re so glad to be here and although the $100 per day fees seemed exorbitant, the folks on the live-aboard dive boats are paying $1,000 per day so we’re actually getting quite a bargain! There are plenty of fishes and coral right here in the anchorage, so if we didn’t want to load up the dinghy and go out to a dive site we could just jump off the boat and have a terrific dive.

As luck would have it there is a big boat in here who was willing to sell us fuel so Rob’s been busy loading fuel in case the winds don’t reappear between here and the Galapagos. Apparently there is a huge low pressure system between New Zealand and South America sucking the wind out of the area we’re heading towards. Hopefully it’ll finish up and some winds will reappear by the time we’re ready to leave on Tuesday or Wednesday.

We did two dives yesterday and two the day before. Today we may just limit it to one, but it’s hard to pass this up even if we are getting tired. Brit and Axel (our friends from Germany on the boat Hello World) are here with us, so we take turns diving and waiting on the surface with the dinghies. There is lots of current and no place to anchor the dinks, so we have to tend to them during each dive and go pick up the divers when they surface. It becomes a pretty long day when you add in dinners together every night afterwards.

But it’s as incredible as we had hoped it would be and although we’ll be tuckered out when we finally go we’re so glad we got the opportunity to stop here.

Teresa

Cocos Island is here

This is day two of the passage between Isla Cocos and the Galapagos. And unfortunately but not unexpectedly there is no wind. We’ve been motoring for 24 hours and likely will the rest of the way south.

The good news is there was a huge pleasure boat at Cocos that was selling fuel to the sport fishing boats and when we asked to buy fuel the crew member said they were selling it for $6 a gallon. We figured out the minimum we needed to motor all the way and asked for that much. They gave us much more than that in one of their containers and just said they would “take care of it”. When Rob bought the containers back the owner said it was free! Apparently he had some sympathy for the little sailboat in an area with no wind. So we’ll get there just fine now.

And the better news is (actually I shouldn’t say this and jinx us) that I think we’re through the ITCZ now. I need to download the weather forecast this morning, but it was really far north when we left and hopefully it’ll stay there. We motored around a bunch of rain squalls yesterday, but when I woke Rob up at 8:00 for his watch last night we were leaving the last cloud behind and motoring into a starry sky. This morning there are scattered puffy clouds around (I should know what kind of clouds those are!), but no indication of huge thunderheads.

The sad news is I have two ear infections. But I guess the good news is they didn’t get infected until after we were done diving. And I have drops onboard and one is feeling better already. Needless to say, it sucks to be sick while on passage.

The worst news, though, is that Rob didn’t get to bring his camera on our last dive Tuesday morning. We went out and dove on a site called Dirty Rock, which is a rock about 1/2 mile off the north side of the island that we had dove on Monday morning. The dive guides from the liveaboard boats call it “the reason divers return year after year to Cocos”. And for very good reason. It was a spectacular dive and I’ll describe it more in detail when we get to the Galapagos and I have time to write a more detailed log. But our darling little kitten hasn’t quite learned what she can and cannot chew on and one of his cords for a flash had a short in it. Suffice it to say that when the eight to ten foot long hammerhead swam within five feet of us Rob & I both were very very sad that only Axel’s camera was flashing.

Teresa

First and most important – Happy Birthday Leslie! OK, now an update. We arrived at San Cristobal Island in the Galapagos mid day on the 21st. We got checked in and are allowed to keep our boat here only 20 days, so we have much to do and as always not enough time. There aren’t too many boat chores, but a few important ones like refueling and changing the engine oil.

Sadly we motored the entire trip down from Costa Rica, so today Rob & Axel are going around finding enough jerry cans to borrow to get the refueling done in a reasonable amount of time. We have a permit that allows us to buy fuel tomorrow for $2.00 a gallon. If we have our agent provide the fuel he’ll charge $3.45 and won’t refuel us until the day before we leave. So Brit & I will spend a day shuttling the boys and jugs back and forth and collectively we’ll save about $400 refueling Yohelah and Hello World.

Rob & I returned late yesterday from a 4 day boat tour around to the other islands. Why we get off our boat and take a boat tour I’m not sure, but that’s just how it happens. We were part of a group of 15 on a tour that included a guide, all transportation, hotels and meals. For 4 days it was $440 each, which in our opinion was worth it completely. The group consisted of one additional pair of yachties and 11 other folks that all knew each other. There were 7 young people from a volunteer bio-reserve station that were here doing work to help clean out invasive plant species that have been introduced to the Galapagos from other areas, along with some relatives of one of the volunteers. They were all really nice and we enjoyed the group as much as the tour.

The first day we left early in the morning and made a bird watching and snorkeling stop at a couple of small uninhabited islands on the way to Floreana Island. Then at Floreana we had lunch at the home of a local family and took a truck up to the highlands to a tortoise reserve and some springs and caves. Then back onto the boat for a quick passage to Isla Isabella where we spent the night. The next morning we went to a tortoise breeding center and then up to Volcan Sierra Negra, where we had a 5 hour hike in the hot Galapagos sun. We hiked up to the edge of the volcano, which has the second largest caldera in the world, nearly 10 kilometers across. We went around the caldera a bit and down across some volcanic formations to a fissure where I think you could see right into the middle of the earth. Then back up to the caldera rim for lunch and a 1.5 hour hike back down to the bus after lunch. Needless to say, we were completely exhausted. But after the hike we went back out to see marine iguanas and snorkel with penguins. We saw lots of the swimming iguanas, which are endemic to the Galapagos (meaning they only exist here in the Galapagos and nowhere else on the planet). Sadly, the only penguins we saw were ashore and they weren’t in the mood to snorkel with us, which was unfortunate because Rob was dying to see what their little snorkels looked like.

Day three took us back to the boat for a a snorkeling stop and then to Isla Santa Cruz, the island with the biggest town. There we had an awesome lunch, a tour of some lava caves and then to the park to see the giant tortoises “in the wild”. That was followed by a stop at the Charles Darwin Research Center where we saw Lonesome George. George is lonesome because he’s the very last of his species and was rescued and brought to Santa Cruz many years ago. Given that these tortoises live well over 100 years he’s been lonesome for a long time and his species will be extinct once he’s gone. Attempts to produce offspring have been unsuccesful as different species are not fertile together. Three species of tortoise are extinct from three islands because of a volcano on one, invasive introduced species like rats and cats eating eggs on the other islands, and primarily from sailing ships taking live tortoises for meat.

Day four was a trip to a beach that Rob & I skipped so we could get some shopping done. I had accidentally dropped my scuba weight belt off the back of the dinghy in Cocos and needed to find a new belt and weights, along with some other miscellaneous and very difficult to find items. After one last lunch it was back on the boat and back to Isla San Cristobal. Neither Rob nor I have ever done multi day guided tours before and we have to say we totally enjoyed it. Anyone coming this way should look up Manolo at Sharksky Tours for a very busy but fun four days.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the winds between here and the Marquesas and it’s been pretty ugly. Before we left on our trip we heard about a boat that had been 5 days from the Marquesas for 10 days. There are just huge holes out there with nearly no wind. The forecast file I got today looks much better and is showing about 10 knots of wind just 300 miles south of here. Hopefully it’ll keep filling in between now and the 9th when we have to leave. With good tradewinds it’s a 20+ day passage for us. With really light and flaky winds it’ll be a lot longer than that.

Hopefully before then we’ll get all the pictures and videos uploaded from our stop here and at Cocos. We’re busy with chores and friends and scrambling to find some insurance since the broker we’ve been working with completely screwed up and dropped the ball and has left us uninsured at the very last minute. Anyone considering Anchor Marine in Seattle should find another broker.

Today on Yohelah we are a combined 100 years old and still recovering from our volcano hike 3 days ago…..