Return Of The Patrõn

How one of Central America’s premier surf destinations became the object of a bitter, decades-long land dispute

- Ashton Goggans

I first heard the name Danny Fowlie in 1999, on my maiden trip to Pavones, the fabled left-hand point in the jungles of southwestern Costa Rica.

Just two years before, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory for the area, following the killing of a 79-year-old American man, Max Dalton, at the hands of a group of squatters. For almost 20 years, Pavones had been plagued by drugs and violent crime, Communist agitators, shady ex-pat land deals, and mobs taking large swaths of prime Pacific real estate by force and intimidation.

But that wasn’t always the case. In the early 1970s, before Indonesian surf camps, Pavones was the tropical surf paradise. Located on Costa Rica’s southernmost fringe, and accessible only by boat or chartered plane, the little jungle town wrapped around a humble soccer field built at the mouth of the Rio Claro, with a winding cobblestone shoreline littered with giant knuckles of driftwood, tall coconut palms rising up from black sand, and an almost mile-long left peeling out front. The wave ran fast from the top of the point to the river mouth, bending and growing thick and hollow as it approached the seawall before tapering slightly at The Cantina and turning ruler-straight for a hundred yards, eventually dying on the shores against a fleet of small fishing boats resting in the sand at low tide.

Mike Hynson, Eddie Rothman, Herbie Fletcher, Mickey Muñoz, Pat Curren, and others traveled to the jungle left and returned hypnotized. Buttons Kaluhiokalani and Rory Russell tore the place to pieces without another soul in the water. Pavones appeared in magazines referred to only as “Central America.” Spyder Wills and Greg Weaver documented the whole thing, but the footage would go unseen for nearly three decades.