On Sunday I packed up my things once again. I said goodbye to Maurice the Macaw (whose picture has been my FB photo these past few months) and the goats. I have completed my house sit at the “Goat Farm”, the name I gave the place up in the hills near Samara where I have been for the last month. The owners Audrey and Michele returned from their visit with relatives in Nice, France on Saturday. I rented a small SUV and picked them up at the Liberia airport and kept it for the move on Monday. (The Jeep is in government mandated storage at a yard in San Jose for 90 days).
Yesterday, (the summer solstice and a full moon) I moved into a rented house. The pictures are of my new front yard and the Samara Bay it looks out on. The last one is of the house as seen from the beach. It is an 800m walk (or a bike ride at low tide) from the center of Samara, in Guanacaste Province, in Costa Rica. It is in a Tico populated residential area that I am told is the original village. It is home to the fishermen who go out most days in their small boats and fish with hand lines and nets. The catch is mostly red snapper, with tuna second. They sell it at a market a block away. That and the mini super located out the back and across the street will make shopping trips to Samara less frequent. My front yard looks to the Samara Bay, a circular shaped bay protected to some degree by reefs on either side of the center entrance. There are headlands at both ends. It is roughly 4 km’s (2.5 miles) end to end, a nice easy walk. It faces to the south, and that fact combined with the northern headland means sunsets on the ocean horizon line only take place for about 2 months out of 12.
The water is warm year round, avg. of 27 to 30 degrees C (82 to 88 F). Air temps run 23 to 35 degrees C (70’s/90’s F).
The reefs keep the swells small and they typically break at .3 to .6m (1 to 2 ft) in height, with the occasional 1 to 1.5m (3-4 ft). The bottom is sandy with some gravel and shells, and slopes very gently. When the tide is out it is about 60 meters (180 ft) from high tide line to the break. There is a smaller bay a the east end where a shrimp trawler is moored. I have yet to see a sailboat here on this part of the coast, probably because recreational boating in general is a tourist attraction and not an activity most average Costa Ricans engage in. There are some sport-fishing and diving boats in the area but very few.
In general Samara is fairly sleepy, even in the “high season” Dec-April. My first stay at Audrey’s was back in February. Now at this time of year (called the green season due to the rains), it is almost empty of tourists. I met my next door neighbor yesterday, he helped me offload my boat. He is Mike, from Long Beach, CA, and he has been living here year round for about 4 years, like me, retired, and like me, a motorcyclist in a former life. He says there is a poker game that meets on Sunday nights, a $10 buy in. I will probably go check it out. We spent last evening drinking rum (mixed with fresh coco juice and fresh lime and packaged mango juice) and trading motorcycle stories. He says I will have plenty of fresh coco’s, they fall off the trees in our yard all the time. Sounds good to me.