Arenal Kayaks Tours on Lake Arenal, Costa Rica

First I'd like to apologize for my earlier post about comments. I thought everything was setup to accept 'em but it turned out the add a comment link wasn't appearing on the page. Thanks to, Don, up in the great white north for setting me straight. Took a bit of digging around to figure out why and even though I didn't really figure out why, they're back on again. So, please feel free to post yer comments here on the blog.

We get a fair number of visitors to the web site that are looking for weather information for Lake Arenal and possibly Costa Rica in general. Well, with the wide variation in micro-climates, it'd be difficult to cover very much of the country so we'll just tell you what's going on here around our end of Lake Arenal.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Seems y'all like to look but not comment. Please feel free to submit comments if you have questions about our tours or just want to discuss something about kayaking, Costa Rica, Nuevo Arenal, or whatever. Comments are enabled but to defeat spammers, your comment will be placed in an approval queue. This queue is checked several times daily so if you're not a spambot, your comment will be normally be posted on the same day.

One of the reasons for the total site makeover undertaken at the first of the year was to provide a comment feedback ability. We'd like to hear from folks who've been kayaking on Lake Arenal or are contemplating a tour, building their own kayak, visiting Costa Rica, moving to Costa Rica, or just interested in something related to the site.

Don't be shy...

Yes, an unusual title and we're likely not the first kayakers who have taken their mascot along for the ride. But, this is a first for us here on Lake Arenal for sure.

Our friend Leann decided to meet us at the lake on Sunday morning. We'd talked about getting out for an "early" paddle the day before when we were visiting her and husband Ron. My wife mentioned that she'd been wanting to get out early sometime. I think she was actually talking about being on the water at dawn, around 0530 here, which would be fun. Watch the wildlife wake up around the lake. But, the consensus was to touch base sometime between 7-8 and see what the weather looked like. Well, the weather was awesome (Sunday's LakeCam photo included) so we were headed down to the lake by 8.

A little tardy in putting this post together and it's been a struggle to decide how to present it. For various reasons, my wife and I were unable to attend the memorial service for my father. The service was being held on Lake Michigan where his cremated remains were to be spread at one of his favorite spots, Holland State Park, Michigan.

If you've been watching the Arenal Lake Cam, you may have noticed the fine weather of late. We've had at least 3 consecutive days of sunshine!

Seems to be that when the hurricanes and tropical storms are brewing over there in the Caribbean, we get some of our best weather up here on the continental divide. Of course, we feel bad about the people who are in the direct path of the storms but for us, the weather is a very nice respite during our rainy season. Just a few days ago, we recorded almost 4 inches of rain in 1 hour. We get our share of the weather here so don't think we're just sitting here in paradise enjoying sunny day after sunny day. There's a reason it's called a rain forest after all. But, if you live in the hurricane belt, come on down here and enjoy some of the best kayaking weather all year.

It's pretty rare that we don't see some of the local wildlife when out paddling. Mostly there are birds, herons, kingfishers, vultures, and lots of smaller birds diving for bugs on the surface of the lake. Once in a while we'll come across a tribe of howler monkeys and twice we've seen whiteface monkeys.

Many people ask if we get much rain here in Nuevo Arenal. Depending on who asks our response can be the serious one, "yes, our annual average is around 14 feet", or we'll use the more flippant version, "there's a reason why it's called a rain forest". But neither of those answers really do the rain justice. In fact, rumor has it that Ticos have 7 different words for rain. These describe anything from "pelo de gato" up to "agua cerro".

The reason for talking about rain is coming up.

An opportunity to make a trip to the beach came up this past weekend. Our visiting daughter made a request to go and our friends were heading over for a night after an airport pickup in Liberia. So, we made the appropriate arrangements to take care of the pets, loaded up the Land Cruiser, and made the trip.

If you've been watching the Lake Cam page lately, you've seen that we went through a wet spell there for several days. Most of this week in fact. The rain started on Monday and stayed pretty steady all week. This morning we woke up to sunny skies.