Costa Rica’s Gulfo Dulce

During our time at Golfito, we traveled to Rincon, a lovely bay up in the far end of the gulf. Here are a few views of the bay and Finisterre anchored there. We hiked, swam and dodged rain squalls which happened every day. The wildlife here was a delight due to mangroves meeting jungle along the shore. We were delighted to see scarlet macaws up in a tree, but they quickly went into their hole and even though they are very large birds, they were all the way into the tree before Mike could get a good picture. We also saw this snake curled up, warming up in the morning sunshine atop the shrubbery along the road.




Boca Chica, Panama
In our travels from Costa Rica toward Panama City included the lovely island group of Isla Parida and then, Boca Chica. Here in Boca Chica, we have met the owners of a hotel/fishing/restaurant place called Gone Fishing Panama Resort. The owners are eager to continue helping the local school with their needs to support literacy in the community. Currently they are working with Rotary to get textbooks for the school and also want to support student reading through collecting children’s literature in Spanish, English and bilingual. Cruisers who travel down the coast of Panama, will find a great opportunity here to contribute to a local effort already underway to help the school children of Panama. If you are planning to come to Boca Chica, drop off donations of books and school supplies to Donna at Gone Fishing, right up from the sailboat anchorage. You may also donate funds to help with the project at Gone Fishing Panama (gonefishingpanama.com) The resort will be holding a fishing tournament this coming spring to benefit the local school as well.

We have found Boca Chica to be a great place to get some of the supplies we need for our month in Western Panama. Everyone has been very helpful here and we found that both Panama cruising guides were helpful to us in getting into the Isla Ventana anchorage, and from there we checked depths during high tide all the way in to the Boca Chica anchorage. Everything was as pictured and written in the guides. There is sometimes surf running at Playa Grande just south of the anchorage and we sampled restaurants here as well, an amenity not often found in anchorages along the way to Panama City.