Monthly Archives: July 2014

Just a few miles from San Vito is the beautiful Wilson Botanical Garden. We spent a morning there with Douglas and took our time exploring the pathways. It’s been more than a year since we visited such a place; the last time was in Guadaloupe, a smaller and more manicured park.

This is just barely cultivated enough to make it easy to visit, but wild enough to still feel like the jungle in parts.

There weren’t too many plants in bloom, which is funny for the “green” season but we did see a couple of agoutis. This one’s bigger than he looks in the photo, about the size of a small pig.

Our favorite plants were the stands of giant bamboo, taller than we’ve ever seen.

There’s an observation tower much like the fire towers all over the mountains where we come from and of course we had to go up for the view. It was scary high (for me) but when we came down and read the information plaque we saw that it wasn’t even as tall as our mast. Well, if we had one.

My cousin Douglas is visiting from Colorado; he’s part of the Costa Rican contingent here to visit family and attend a conference in Panama. He offered us space in his luggage which we took full advantage of and now have plastic screw covers on our headliners and USB 12v outlets, among other things.

Douglas invited us to join him for the weekend in a drive over the mountains behind us to a town called San Vito. He didn’t have to twist our arms.

The drive was beautiful as we climbed from sea level to about 3900 feet, a glorious break from the suffocating heat in Golfito.

San Vito was settled in the 1950s by Italian immigrants and Douglas says the inhabitants speak with a decidedly Italian-tinged Spanish, not that we could notice. There are several Italian restaurants and, interesting to us, more grocery shopping opportunities than we have in Golfito.

The much-anticipated World Cup match between Costa Rica and the Netherlands took place while we were there and we gathered in the hotel lobby along with other guests and staff to watch. Even after Costa Rica’s disappointing loss on a penalty kick, the town still celebrated the team’s unlikely run. Tico pride runs deep, even here in the hinterlands.

Have we mentioned our ant problem? Oy. After two years living aboard absolutely bug free we were infested at the marina in Panama when teeny tiny ants crawled up our docklines, across the deck, around the cabin top and took up residence in all sorts of hidden places in the boat.

Since then we’ve seen the critters in ones and twos but never in a big swarm. They didn’t migrate into the food cupboards, thank goodness, but show up in all sorts of weird illogical locations, like right in the middle of a just-cleaned dining table, or along the dashboard in the cockpit. With only one or two at a time it’s impossible to find where they’re nesting, and besides, Google University tells me these ants have multiple queens and the colonies spread out and multiply when a queen and some workers head out on their own for new horizons. Great.

In the Galapagos and here in Costa Rica the only pest eradication products available in the stores target cockroaches and rats, neither of which we have, knock on wood. My Costa Rican family recommended rice and cinnamon. Ground-up rice sprinkled in the most likely places is supposed to be tasty to the ants but when they take it back to the nest it eventually develops a fungus that kills them. The cinnamon is supposedly distasteful to them so we’re to sprinkle it in all the places we don’t want ants.

We dutifully ground rice in the coffee grinder and sprinkled it everywhere inside and out. I sprinkled cinnamon in the kitchen cupboards even though the ants really never went there. After a few days the rice grit everywhere started to annoy us and the ants never seemed to pay any attention to it. We need to take serious action.

Every source I consult for pest control advice recommends boric acid. I don’t know exactly what it is except that boric acid ointment was my pre-depression-era mother’s go-to remedy for what ails you. We are desperate and decided to give it a try. On our produce run yesterday we stopped at a pharmacy and bought two 50 gram bags of boric acid powder and consulted the Google for procedure.

We learned that some ants are attracted to sugar, some to fat. We suspected ours are not the ones with the sweet tooth because they didn’t go for the pantry but we are determined to lick this problem once and for all. We made two kinds of ant traps. For the sweet ones we mixed boric acid and sugar and water, soaked little cotton pads and set them on foil squares. As I prepared the traps Jack set them out all over the boat in the places we remember regularly seeing an ant or two. He reported no takers, which was no surprise.

For the others I mixed boric acid powder into peanut butter, then stuffed it into half-inch long pieces of plastic drinking straws. Almost as soon as Jack set them out the ants came swarming from places we never suspected they could be hiding. As we watched we could finally follow their trail back and forth and got an inkling of where the nests might be, although they are completely inaccessible, as you can imagine on a boat. These ants are so tiny they crawl behind the teak trim around the cabinetry and disappear; they’re not inside or outside the cabinet, just inside the trim. No wonder we couldn’t find them.

After an hour or so the parades slowed, then stopped altogether. The sugar traps remain untouched. We’re holding our breath and we’ll see where we are in a day or two. We’ll keep you posted.

It’s a strange holiday to try to celebrate in a foreign land. I mean to them it’s just Friday, it’s nothing to them and it’s just not the same to us without fireworks so for U.S. Yachts, the 4th of July is out-of-date flare rocket test day. It would be a bad day to have something go wrong, but then, any day is a bad day to have something go wrong out on the water.

Last year in Grenada, we had to explain to our Brit friends on Macushla that we would be expending a few expired alarm rockets to celebrate our country opening up an industrial-size can of whoop-ass on their country…it was a quiet 4th.

This year we felt we could do better in spite of being the only US boat out in the harbor…well, we’re the only boat out in the harbor but that’s when Katie & Tim called with their 4th of July barbecue out on the clubhouse deck. . .

. . . and might we have any expired 12 gauge Aerial shells for Tim’s deck cannon?
Why yes we do.

This is Tim showing Marce the fine points of deck cannon firing.

I know I’ve written a lot about the family history research that’s occupied me for twenty-five years or so, and that what compels me is not just learning the names and dates of great-great grandparents, but meeting the people who share the same ancestors but different histories. Jack and I have looked forward to meeting my fifth cousin Arturo’s family for a long time. We met Arturo first and spent a couple of long lunches getting to know him on his weekly work trips to Golfito, and the other day we got to meet a few more of the clan on a uniquely Costa Rican outing.

Costa Rica has high customs duty on most things and many people make it a practice to duck over the border to Panama to make big purchases and avoid some of the tariffs. To stem the revenue drain the government set up a free zone here in Golfito where Ticos and tourists can shop for imported goods once every six months up to a specific dollar value. You can’t just show up and shop though. Oh no. You have to go to the customs office and get a permit which isn’t effective until the next day. Apparently this is so people have to stay overnight in Golfito, infusing the tiny town with tourist dollars at hotels and restaurants.

Another cousin Douglas from Colorado is visiting Arturo and his family so the San Jose clan took this opportunity for a road trip to Golfito to combine visiting us with a little duty-free shopping. When they arrived on Tuesday we had a diver busy scraping EV’s bottom so Jack ferried everyone out to the boat where we all talked at once while the diver finished up.

Back ashore we piled into the car and went to the free zone to get our permits. This involved standing in line at the back end of the customs office where Jack and I checked in a month ago, handing over a passport or identity card, and getting an authorization.

That done, we drove to a local restaurant where we could watch USA lose to Belgium in the World Cup. Everyone dutifully cheered for our team, even though the success of the Costa Rican team has been one of the exciting surprises of the Cup.

Later on the deck of our marina we continued the gabfest and Arturo shared some photos and archives he brought for me to see.

Wednesday was shopping day. Roberto and Grettel bought a washing machine for her mother and a couple of cases of wine and scotch. Jack and I got permits but didn’t really need to buy anything here. If they’d had a marine store, I’m sure we’d have exhausted our spending limit. As it was, we just wandered from store to store, reveling in the first world abundance and variety of goods.

In the end Jack found some inexpensive reading glasses and picked up four pair to replace the ones he keeps losing overboard. We spent all of $4 but some people acquired quite a pile of goods.

Our duty-free permits are good until the end of the year; if we decide later we need a food processor or weed whacker we’re good to go.

Back to lunch we went. This family likes to eat so I know I’m related to them. We lingered for hours laughing, eating, making plans for next week in San Jose and for some touring later.

Arturo mined the dock and marina area for photographic subjects until the rest of the family got him back in the car and it was goodbye for now.

We truly feel a part of this clan. They are exactly like my branch of the family tree, loving, inclusive, welcoming. From the moment we met them we felt a part of them. At one point, Roberto said to us emphatically, “You. Are. Ours.”

I wish everyone could have a family as wonderful as this.