After picking up 'Nana' in Playas del Coco, we spent a few nights anchored off of Playa Panama in Bahia Culebra, before heading back up to Bahia Santa Elena by way of the Murcielagos islands, where we spent the better part of a week before returning to Playas del Coco and Bahia Culebra.  Melissa managed to get a dive in with Roma (video) and Steve from s/v Trinity on the rocks off of Punta Mala (Eric was recovering from an ear infection and so elected to stay out of the water) and took some cool underwater video of some very colorful fish!

It's rainy season here (May-November) so everything is wet, lush, green and growing, but along with the rich rain-forest canopy and all the wildlife that lives there, you also see cactus lining the shores and growing among and alongside the wild teak and mango trees.  The northern part of Costa Rica is known as a "Dry Tropical Forest" and when its not the rainy season here, well, its the dry season and they tell us the area becomes downright arid with more of a dry, desert climate.  You wouldn't know it at the moment though, as it rains inches every afternoon!  At only 9 degrees north of the equator, the sun strikes the ocean here with full force, creating a ton of evaporation and convection.  Super huge (and I mean really, truly, you-don't-see-this-kind-of-thing-in-the-states, 40,000 feet high, big, black and menacing kind of impressive) thunderclouds form during the heat of the day and start to fill the sky in the late afternoon, producing torrential downpours around 4-5pm and huge lightning bolts visible even in the afternoon sunshine.  It rains (inches!) nearly every night and some nights those huge thunder clouds come right over and sit on us in the form of very scary electrical storms.  On several occasions, we've had bolts hitting the water all around us (one-one-thous...crash!) and we now have our nightly lightning preparation routine down to a science.  We've actually become quite respectful and perhaps even a little frightened of lightning down here, which only sounds silly until you realize we are driving around in a vehicle with thousands of dollars of sensitive electronics onboard and a 75 foot tall metal lightning rod called a mast sticking up out of it! 

But all the clouds also provide some relief from the sun and the climate here is actually quite a bit cooler than we experienced farther north.  And the good news is that the clouds seem to dissipate or move on by morning and so the days are generally clear, calm and sunny and very comfortable until the clouds show up again in the afternoon, the lesson being that if you want to do some provisioning, or make a gas run, or walk around a town, you do it early in the day or you get wet!