Arenal Kayaks

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.

For those of you who missed seeing the daily updates, thanks for your patience. We're back live again.

Apologies to our friends who have been used to daily lake cam updates. We've flown the coop for a short while. Only a couple of weeks, but the good news is that we'll be shopping for a real webcam so you don't have to depend on one of us remembering to go out and take a shot of the lake. At least that's the plan. We'll see what's available up here in the land of plenty...

Here we are on the last day of semana santa. The entire country has shut down for most of the week while everybody heads off to the beach. We usually get our share of vacationers camping in the city park here as well. Beer sales are prohibited on Thursday and Friday for some unknown reason most likely a result of religious influence which is primarily catholic here. Pretty much a crazy week, lots of traffic, strangers in the area as people are leaving the central valley to visit families located out here in the campo. And I suppose the churches are booming with worshippers today.

Took a tour in Rainbow Bay a few days ago. Beautiful day. Some clouds, no rain, lake level still up, and a little breeze. Not too far from where we put in, there was a tribe of howler monkeys. Quite a large one, at least a dozen with several little ones on their own or riding on mom's back. Was fun to be right below them floating on the lake and watching them slowly cruise through the canopy, some resting, others eating leaves. After watching for a while we finally decided to paddle on.

Yes, there are snapping turtles living around the lake. The first one we ever saw was alongside the road not far from our house. Pretty good sized one. This wasn't that long ago, maybe a month, making one sighting in 4 years.

Been quite a few visitors to the Lake Cam page lately which I find encouraging. Enough that the plan to purchase a webcam could be moved up on the list.

But, no, really, I do update the photo every day. It might not appear that way lately as the photos are looking fairly consistent from day to day. The reality is the weather has been very nice for quite a few days now. Unusual for this time of year, our "summer" doesn't usually arrive until mid to late February.

Hard to believe that we've not been paddling for 10 days. Had some rentals go out (unguided) but after our 4-day trip to the beach (the big lake) there's a lot of catching up to do. Amazing how being gone for 4 days can set you back a week.

Now today, the rain has returned after several days of pretty nice weather. Windy, the lake was rough with whitecaps but plenty of sunshine. Would've been fun to be out there playing in the surf.

Had a backlog of other work to do but it was such an aswesome day out we had to go for a paddle. Sunny but quite windy and some nice big rollers coming from downlake. We decided to take the 2nd half of Island Tour #2 around the small island and a little further towards Rainbow Bay.