Arenal Kayaks Tours on Lake Arenal, Costa Rica

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.

First of all our friend, Jim, brought a rain gauge over. Just back from his last trip up north he'd found a couple of them and knew that we'd been wanting one over here for a while. He's had a rain gauge over at his place for a long time and has been telling us the numbers from his. But since we're separated by about 8Km our rainfall could be significantly different, the micro-climates thing. And this has been shown on a map of the area I saw over at the Tilawa Hotel one time. It showed the average rainfall around the lake and bore out some of our assumptions here.

So, what's the gauge say? Here's the last 3 readings;

• 10/10/08 -1"
• 10/11/08 - 1.5"
• 10/12/08 - 5.5" (yesterday)

We're going to keep records (unless we forget, like sometimes the lakecam photo doesn't get taken) daily and occasionally put the numbers up here on the site somewhere. We'll see if we really reach our average annual rainfall of 168". And, yes, we'll be mounting the gauge on a pole instead of buried in the grass for easier reading. It was just too easy to stick it in the ground for now...

According to some of the locals, this rainy season is supposed to dump an above average amount. Based on the rapidly rising lake level I would have to agree that we're getting a lot of rain.

Which brings us to the kayaking situation. The photo there shows where my Great Auk has been "resting" for many days. Too many. Thought we'd get out yesterday, Sunday, a fairly regular kayak day for us but did you see that 5.5" of rain in the list above? Close to 4.5" of it dropped out of the sky between 9am and 4pm which didn't motivate us to load up boats and hit the lake.


As you can see here, we've been kayaking in the rain before. For this particular trip we'd taken off from shore in bright sunshine headed out to the small island in the middle of the lake. Not too long after leaving the clouds blew in and I guessed that it'd be raining by the time we got to the island. Sure enough, just after arriving there the sprinkles began. This photo is on the way back when the skies opened up on us.


If you looked at the Arenal Lake Cam today you saw that we're clouded over again today. Not much rain yet but it looks like we'll be getting some before too long.

As you can see by this photo taken directly across the lake from here, the cloud ceiling is pretty low obscuring the tops of the continental divide. Sometimes the ceiling drops enough that we're in the clouds much like Monteverde's cloud forests. But mostly it's just rain forest here and stays a vibrant green almost year round.