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sailingbrisa · 7 years

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Friendly sharks, crocodiles, jaguars, whales... and incredible waves. Kiwis, Venezuelan and Cuban crew!

We had a few more guests. Mark VanAdelberg, one of the guys I used to work with at Red Bull showed up and scored a great week worth of waves with us. His surfing had improved a lot since the last time I saw him and he was loving the un-crowded waves and long rights. We had the place pretty much to ourselves again, at least early and late in the day…. Words really don’t express what it was like. Just seems a dream looking back at it now. I guess the two highlights with Mark onboard. 1/ he gets an amazing barrel and tons of great rides and then looses my go pro with all the footage on it as he wiped out in the beach break. OUCH! Second was a crocodile swimming through the lineup.. and not a little one. Everyone got out of the water pretty fast. Marks time came and went and again we found ourselves dropping of our guest in Playa Del Coco as he headed back to Panama.

The next week Elwin and I were on it .. alone again and again as good as it gets. Just the two of us surfing our asses off every day! Our next guests were very important people. Tania, my girlfriend, left her job at Red Bull and was becoming full time crew or should that read full time captain? OMG. Also, all the way from New Zealand I have the daughter and boyfriend of one of my closest family friends growing up, neither of whom I had met or really talked to before, but I was certain that they would be of the same grain as the rest of their awesome family!

Emma and Nick had already spent time living on a little boat, living and sailing around the east coast of NZ and now they were on a surf adventure through Central America after graduating college in NZ.

The 28th arrives and Elwin and I surfed the morning hard, motored back to Playa Del Coco ( about 18 miles ) and hit the supermarket, bumping into Emma and Nick at the beach. Strong kiwi accents and tanned young, happy people jumped aboard Brisa and filled the pantry and surfboard storage rooms to capacity. We waited a little while and Tania shows up from the Liberia airport and we had our reunion on the beach in front of the tourists.

Cummon Tani, lets go before that huge thunder storm gets us!

I have to take another second or two here and say that we are in the rainy season ( the Hurricane zone this time of year, is from 10.5 North lat) which is just literally 100 yards into the beach in Ollies Point Bay, but means for the most part we don’t have to worry about tropical storms or hurricanes, however almost daily there are massive, massive, localized thunder storms. It is hard to describe exactly what it is like to be sitting on a boat in the middle of one of these things and basically if you take a hit from lightening on a boat, all your electronics are possibly fried….We had met very few cruisers on this trip and the ones we did meet were basically stuck in a marina looking for spare parts after being hit by lightening…. SCARY.

We pulled anchor and zoomed off towards Ollies again at about 4pm, just in front of another MASSIVE thunderstorm. It is only 18 miles more or less up there, so we expected to pull into the bay as night fell. The storm was indeed impressive with fork lightening from cloud to cloud and to the ocean within two or three miles of us… we had full sail and both motors pushing us at 10 knots + and we were literally just in front of this thing the whole way. The darkness following us was ominous and the wind picked up in front of it to about 25 knots…however, as was often the case, we pulled into Ollie’s Bay just in front of the beast behind us and it was beautiful… calm and protected. We anchored, ate, repaired surfboards and went to bed nice and early in preparation for our big surf day.

The forecast looked awesome, however when we got there it was small. Maybe waist to shoulder in the biggest sets, but it was clean and offshore and nice shape, so we jumped on it. Nick and Emma getting tons of waves and Elwin and I praying for bigger sets! Even when its bad its good and we had a great time until the charter boats showed up. We pulled anchor on the dingy and went back to Brisa for breakfast and to see if Tania had woken up yet.

Emma was an amazing cook, banana pancakes, crispy pizza, smoothies etc. We felt spoiled to have her onboard with us. We passed the days hiking and looking for crocodiles… the only one we found swam past us and chassed Nick and Emma into the dingy one morning.. of course leaving Elwin and I alone to enjoy the sets… We both figuring that if we hadn’t been eaten after the hundreds of hours surfing there before, that we probably wouldn’t get chomped now… After half an hour or so Emma and nick came back. Hehehheheh.

We surfed a lot, even though it wasn’t as good as it gets, or really big enough to get off of my grovelers, but it was super fun. We had to go back to Playa Del Coco in the middle of the week to get our park passes and on the way back we saw humpback whales and they put on an amazing show for us. Baby whales jumping a couple of hundred yards away from the beach while big momma supervised and flapped her tail. We saw dolphins and tons of turtles ( most of them happily making love.. slowly, they are turtles ) and fortunately this time no thunder-storms racing us back. The next days passed pretty uneventfully with happy surfers, card games, great food and the odd animal passing by. One of the highlights was all the stingrays jumping just outside the surf… they looked like they were trying to learn to fly.. not too sure why the do that.. anyone have any ideas?

Tania and I went looking for crocodiles in the estuary one day… and found three sets of jaguar footprints on the beach.. very fresh footprints I might add and four new turtle nests laid overnight. Parrots squawked at us and I thought it would be a great idea to go look for the jaguars…so Tania walking a bit behind me just in case I did actually manage to find them and not too sure why, but she didn’t think it was such a good idea to go following them, at least not without an automatic weapon, an over watch and a garrison of Ollies troops, possibly with air support… Anyways, the tracks disappeared into the jungle by the beach. I did pick up a stick just in case they wanted to play fetch.. but eventually the jungle was too dense and we couldn’t chase them further. We pulled the dingy back into the water and went back to Brisa.

After four or five days of great, but small surf, we decided to head back to civilization, but not before visiting the rangers station and doing some snorkeling.

It was about an hour motor over and right when we anchored we saw what we thought were dolphins right by the boat. We jumped in Noisy Taco ( that’s the name of the dingy ) and zoomed over to them… but when we got there we discovered they were a bit too big for dolphins.. we are not too sure what they were, possibly pilot whales, but they were big and loved to play right by us and the dingy. Literally splashing us as the jumped and frolicked beside us. I wanted to go swim with them… but they looked a but hungry… I am a wuss!

Elwin, Nick and Emma went for a hike to the very top of the island.. a bit further than they thought it would be I think and on a very hot and humid day in bare feet…. I picked them up at the beach after with a cold jug of water and they looked very happy to see that as they lounged in the water by the beach.

Later we grabbed our snorkels and went around a little corner and jumped in to see what we could see. This area is heavily protected and fishing is not permitted at all, so needless to say there were tons and tons and tons of fish. We saw schools and schools of them.

I have big free diving flippers and was towing the dingy and Emma was swimming beside me about three feet to my left, both of us just in front of the dingy…. I looked over my shoulder to see how she is doing and I see a very large, very friendly nurse shark swimming right at her leg about 5 feet way…. I’m glad Emma didn’t see my eyes… she might have had a heart attack. I have swum with many sharks… played with some.. been terrified by a couple…. but I had never seen a nurse shark looking like it wanted to eat someone…. I grabbed her arm and pulled past her to push the shark away with my hand… the thing had to be at least 8 or 9 feet long and very round. It took off towards the shallows to munch on some poor little fish and I was stunned by both how close it was to Emma and how quickly it took off… incredibly fast!

I couldn’t believe it had been that close to us. I was wondering if it used us a camouflage to hunt the other fish, if it was just curious, or maybe it really was a bit hungry and thought Emma looked tasty and wanted to give Nick a run for his money. Anyways.. definitely woke me up very fast!!!! Glad to say we did not see him again. After I grabbed her, Emma launched into the dingy and stuck her masked face back in the water off the side. It took her about ten minutes to get back in the water… after which she was glued to my arm.

We made it back to Playa del Coco after a little stop off in Witches Rock. Anchored and fell fast asleep.

The following day Nick and Emma wanted to go paddle boarding. We loaded up the dingy and we left to drop them about 4 miles away at a beautiful beach. On the way there we nearly ran into a humpback and her calf. We stopped and they sat there about thirty feet away from the dingy and looked at us looking at them. The little one came right beside us, within ten feet or so and popped up to breathe scaring the daylights out of all of us I think. Nick got in the water with the gopro, but visibility was almost 0 so no good in the water photos. He then jumped on the paddleboard and got super close to them. We stayed with them for half an hour or so, right in the bay in about 40 feet of water. They were the friendliest most chilled whales I have seen yet.

We went to Zi for food that night and to watch Costa Rica win a football game against the USA. Was great food and very cold beer. We staggered back to Brisa tired little campers.

The next morning Emma and Nick were leaving. Nick back to NZ and Emma to meet her friends in Mexico to go diving. Elwin wanted to go up north to Mexico to look around and with absolutely no surf in the forecast on the way south… I think he made the right decision, jumping a bus to Puerto Escondido, where he promptly broke his favorite board in half. OHHH NOOOOO! And got some barrels so I guess it’s a payoff.

Next episode, Tania and I head back down the coast of Costa Rica to get ourselves back to Panama.

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