The nautical competition will be at the beginning of November.
The competition of 50 sailboats will cross the Atlantic in 12 days to get to Limon. There will be a construction of a floating harbor for the boats to dock. This year, Puerto Limon was chosen as the arrival point of the Transat Jacques Vabre, the third most important regatta in the world, which will start in the same point of every year, Le Havre; northeast France.
The journey of crossing the Atlantic, with a 5,000 nautical miles in distance, is expected to be completed with about fifty boats. This event will be held at the end of the year. The starting day is programmed for November 7th and 8th and it’s expected to finish within 12 days in the Costa Rican Caribbean.
The competition will have two different categories: the one-hull sailboat (just one piece) and multi-hull boats (sailboats with a main hull and other two to stabilize it).
Each sailboat will have a crew of 2 members and they will represent countries such as France, Italy, England, Finland, United States and Germany. Golden Grain. This year, the edition of the Transat is been called “Route of the Coffee”, because the organizer if a brand of that drink. Pierre Bojic, representative of Pen Duik, the French enterprise that produces the regatta, explained the choice of Costa Rica because of the traditional production of coffee.
He commented, that over the past years, Transat has arrived to Brazil and Ecuador, other producers of the grain.
There were other nominated countries (Mexico and Panama, e.g.), but due to the sustainable environment and the coffee, we decided to choose Costa Rica,” said Bojic.
To bring the Transat to the country, the province had to make a commitment to host the boats. Between the Limon City Hall, Japdeva and the Costa Rican Tourism Institute there has been created a plan to build the marina and to decorate the main Caribbean streets.
Carlos Ricardo Benavides, Tourism Minister, commented that the floating harbor will be built with an approximately of 400 million colones, which after the regatta will be useful for other ship that want to arrive to that port. 50 million colones is the cost of each sailboat that will duck in Puerto Limon.
