Memories of Golfito
25 November 2018
Mike

Anchoring off of the little town of Golfito here in southern Costa Rica, brings back a lot of memories. I first came here 28 years ago when a couple of friends and I drove down from Santa Barbara in a '64 VW van on a surf trip. I left them on the east coast of Costa Rica and made my way to Golfito by bus as I really wanted to surf the famous wave at nearby Pavones, possibly the second longest left in the world.
I boarded the bus for Pavones from Golfito and that evening was dropped off in Pilon, some miles short of Pavones, where I was told the bus was going no further. A local passenger, who was similarly headed for Pavones, explained that certain local elements had threatened to beat the bus driver and burn his bus if he ever went past Pilon. This seemed an odd turn of events but there was nothing else for it so the two of us started walking and, sometime around 11:00pm I found myself at the little cantina on the beach in front of the break at Pavones.
There was another gringo at the bar and we got to talking. I mentioned the thing about the bus and he explained that there was a bit of a shooting war going on in the area. Some years earlier a gringo had come in and bought 60,000 acres or so in the area. He set up a landing strip and set about flying in cocaine from south and moving it north, using Pavones as a staging area. He was eventually caught and, while he was in prison, his lawyer started selling off parcels of land to other gringos. Some of them surfers, some of them smugglers in their own right. About the same time the area became popular with squatters, many of them from Nicaragua. In Costa Rica, if someone moves onto private property and maintains possession for one year, they cannot be removed without compensation. This had become a problem, not only for the often absentee gringo land owners, but for local Costa Ricans as well. There is not much local law and disputes are often settled the old fashioned way. By the time I got there there had been multiple shootouts, most recently involving a former Marine who had bought a small ranch just up the hill.
The mention of a Marine jogged my memory. I recalled seeing a 30' wooden sailboat stranded on the riverbank on the long bus ride in. It looked just like the one that belonged to my buddy, Owen, who had shared the anchorage with me in Santa Barbara 7 years earlier. He was a disabled Marine, with a Costa Rican wife and a 5 year old daughter. They had left Santa Barbara some years ago, bound for Costa Rica after an incident in which they had unwittingly harbored an accused serial killer for several weeks. (A story for another day).
I asked my new friend at the bar what this troublesome Marine's name was. It was, indeed, Owen.
Some days later, I was surfing when I noticed a figure on the beach, sitting on a horse and waving at me. I came in and, sure enough, it was Owen. He invited me up to his ranch and I accepted, stashing my surfboard at the cantina and following Owen up the steep trail through the jungle with a steadying hand on his saddle. I couldn't help but notice he had a pistol tucked under the blanket and asked him about it. He told me a bit about the troubles he was involved in with the squatters and how he had been ambushed from a building while in Pilon for groceries some weeks before. He had dismounted, pulled his 22 revolver and fired back as he walked towards the building. His attackers lost interest and ran out the back, but not before Owen had shot one in the backside.
Apparently, there were still some hard feelings, because, as we came to Owen's land, we passed by the nice farmhouse and climbed a hill, on the top of which Owen had built a dugout with a thatched roof in which he and his family slept.
I spent the next week with them on the hilltop. In the morning, I would awaken to the cries of howler monkeys and macaws. If I could hear waves pounding on the beach down the ravine I would saddle up one of the horses and ride down through the jungle, down to the point where I would surf all day, returning in the evening. On the days when there was no surf, Owen and I would go on long hikes into the jungle, his wife, Angelica, giving us each a fist-sized wad of ground cacao, milk and sugar, wrapped in a banana leaf. Owen's daughter, Carol, and I had been close when we all lived in the anchorage in Santa Barbara and she spoiled me rotten in Costa Rica, climbing mango trees to get fruit for green mango salad that she would bring to me in my hammock (I had quit the dugout against advise after the first night as it was jumping with fleas).
Now, nearly 30 years later, not much has changed in Golfito. It still has a bit of a wild west feel and, while things have calmed down quite a bit in Pavones, we are told that people are still shooting at each other from time to time over grazing rights and the police are content to let them do so. Our inquiries about Owen indicate he is still in Pavones although no one seems to know where. There are now surf camps and yoga classes where the cantina used to be, but, while it's quite a bit more populated, the wave remains the same.
PS: We have added a gallery called “Costa Rica” showing some of the critters we've encountered while here.