Two Counts of Near Miss

Tamarindo has been having its swell of the year. Eight to ten foot surf has been pounding the Costa Rican coast for four days. We’ve also been having Papagayos, fierce offshore winds that can blow up to thirty knots in the mornings. Combine the big surf with strong offshore winds and you have the recipe for perfect surf, hollow monsters tubing down the beaches in all directions. The whole town has gone surf crazy and the broken boards are piling up on the beaches.

To backtrack a bit, on my first night here I was invited aboard an expedition catamaran for a party. The Costa Rican crew became fast friends and changed my whole opinion of Costa Ricans, which was not so hot after my experiences eight years ago. Our two boats are about a hundred yards apart in the anchorage.

One great surf break, Langosta, lies about a mile south of Tamarindo Bay, where the boats are anchored. One morning Larry and I took my little dinghy with the 3.3 horsepower motor, putted around the point down to Langosta, anchored the dinghy just outside the surf, and went surfing. No problem.

Yesterday I did the same thing on my own, but with ten foot surf pounding everywhere. I had to go way out to sea to get around the outside reefs, which only break in these huge swells. I anchored the dinghy and went surfing, but the surf kept building and breaking further and further out, so I kept thinking the dinghy was going to get nailed.

I paddled back out to the dinghy and pulled the anchor, but the Papagayos had kicked in with violence and it was howling about thirty offshore. Again I had to go way out to sea to get around the outside reefs—which had twenty foot walls breaking on them—and once out there found myself battling against a fierce, steep chop. I could barely hold onto my board, which wanted to fly away, as my little 8-foot inflatable pounded into wave after wave, making slow and painful progress. With all the spray the boat was slowly filling with water as the little 3.3 horsepower struggled.

And then it died. I was suddenly in a very dangerous situation, being blown out to sea by thirty knot winds. I was already about a mile offshore, and a good mile and a half from Condesa.

I wrote recently in an article entitled Inflatable Nirvana that rowing is not one of these small boat’s strong points. I didn’t have oars anyway, not that it would make any difference against a thirty-knot headwind. You need a motor to make these boats move. Time for triage:

Plan A: Try with all due haste to get the engine running again. Yes, there was gas in the tank.

Plan B: Tie the dinghy’s bow line around my ankle and try towing it while paddling on the surfboard. No, I didn’t have any faith whatsoever in making any headway in this manner, but I figured I had to try it before jettisoning $2500 worth of dinghy, motor, and associated gear.

Plan C: Jettison $2500 worth of dinghy, motor, and associated gear, and paddle back to Condesa on the surfboard to save my life. This would have taken many hours, but I would have been able to make headway, even in the rough conditions. I would have let out all the anchor rode and left the anchor dragging to slow the drift with the outside chance that I’d be able to get someone with a fast boat to charge out to sea and try to find the dinghy, but it would drift pretty quickly.

Luckily plan A worked, but it wasn’t easy disassembling the motor while bucking around, all the while losing ground at 2-3 knots. The motor didn’t run well, but it ran if I kept choking it and restarting it when it died, all the while sounding like a dying cow.

I made it home, exhausted, having learned my lesson about long sea journeys in small boats.

As if that wasn’t enough adventure, the next day I was making my way along the road, back to check on Condesa, when I noticed some activity around her. I’d slept in a spare apartment that Larry the real estate shark had in town, since the conditions made it so rough to sleep on Condesa. After pushing through the trees to where I had a clear view, I could see that Condesa was the subject of a full-blown salvage operation. She’d dragged her anchor toward the rocks, and there were no less than four boats involved in towing her out and putting her on a spare mooring. I ran down the beach, unlocked my Windsurfer board from its tree, and paddled out as fast as my arms could take me. Disaster had already been averted, but I streamlined matters in getting the engine started, the anchor winch running, and generally turning Condesa into an active salvage victim, rather than a passive one.

I gave out whatever bottles of booze I had onboard, but I can’t really do enough to thank the guys who made this heroic effort to save, well, everything I am and everything I own. I’ve been on the giving end of many such operations, and also recieved many such bottles of booze and cases of beer. Such is the law of the sea.

I had 200 feet of chain out in twenty feet of water, so ten-to-one scope, and Condesa had been holding in strong winds in that same spot for days, but these Papagayos can be scary.