surf tours video blog 3

Surf Blog video 2

We've been busy!!  The waves in Jaco and Hermosa have been super fun, so that eats up quite a bit of our free time.  Two or three hour sessions three times a day keep the doctor away!  Get down here, dry season is upon us- and we are back to perfect peeling head high clean blue waves :)  here's some back logged footage:

Surf Tour Costa Rica- videoblog part 1

A few Photos of Playa Jaco and Playa Hermosa Costa Rica

Paradise served Daily…

It is 9:24am on another beautiful day  down here. The waves are still a fun chest to head high out front as they have been all week and you know Hermosa is overhead right now.  The way the tide is right now, it was surfable early and now the tide is going low so it gives a nice break for second breakfast, a little bit of work, and surfing again at 11:00am as the tide starts to fill back in a bit.  the nice thing about this tide window is that it stays good the rest of the day on days like this. Three surfs a day is never a bad thing. The weather has been amazing for the past week offering partly cloudy skys making for not too hot days and beautiful sunsets. Last night had one of the best sunsets I have ever witnessed. Both Danielle and I were surfing at the time and when you looked out to the horizon It glowed yellow and gold with a yellow sun sending pale cream colored rays through all the surrounding clouds which had hues of dark purples and grays with lavender and pink accents.  The water was amazing too. Between the sets it had a unique dark blue with the yellow gold shimmer and when the waves came they turned green with golden lips throwing little tubes.  There was an ecstasy  in just duckdiving. You'd purposely wait to have it barrel over your head and take it all in.  As I'd look over to Danielle she'd be glowing too from the lighting. To cap it off, when you looked back toward the beach there was a rainbow coming down from the lavender mist over the mountains and extending down to end on our place.  it was a cool moment.  The whole time I was wishing for a camera, but didn't want to get out of the water to miss any of the actual experience. Bill had a camera on it, but in the evening as he was trying to get them onto the computer it asked him if he wanted to reformat the camera and he accidentally did. That deleted anything on the camera,  which was tough, but some experiences like that are illusive and  are better left as experiences and mental memories. i'll do my best to paint my impression of it for you and I will try to get it up on this blog or the next one.  One of the nice things about down here is that they get in the Holiday spirit early. They don't do Thanksgiving so they start marketing Xmas now. Trees are up in places and the poles and pillars of the grocery stores are wrapped in ribbons and bows and their is holiday music playing. Danielle and I have been getting into the spirit drinking hot cocoa in the evenings and watching holiday movies on youtube.  It's been nice.  Groups of Americans down here are always doing a thanksgiving too so we will probably celebrate that as well with some friends in a few days. For Danielle and I we will make homemade stuffing, coconut rice with black beans, yummy salad, and pumpkin pie. Never a bad day. For those wondering how to make really yummy coconut rice use the same ration of two cups rice to four cups water, but then add 3/4 of a can of unsweetened coconut milk. and leave it uncovered and just boil it down until almost no liquid remains then stir it, take it off the heat and leave it covered until the rest of the liquid has been absorbed by the rice. At the same time you were doing that  stirfry up lot's of garlic, onion, and red bell pepper in olive oil until the onions caramelize.  Dice up a tomato into small chunks and add it to the caramelized onions and let that all cook down. You had already put 1/3 of a  bag of black beans in a crock pot in the morning with a diced onion and some whole cloves of garlic to taste. So once the tomatoes have cooked down dump scoops of your black beans (strained) and your onion/garlic/red pepper/tomatoe mixture into the rice. Add the remaining 1/4 can of coconut milk, hot sauce, curry powder, black pepper, and a tad bit of raw sugar to taste. and complement it with a simple home made salsa (tomato, cilantro, onion, jalepeno) Delicious.!!!!!  Vegan stuffing is really easy too. Peparidge farm bagged stuffing is vegan and then chop up an apple and some celery and steam them for a few minutes with a handful of chopped walnuts that you throw in the bottom of the pot of boiling water to soften them. Dump those into your stuffing mixture and bake for a bit and your vegan thanksgiving is almost ready. Most pie shells are vegan so is the pumpkin filling. Throw the pie in when you stuffing is done and don't forget to take it out.

Pics from this week

Sunday Funday in Costa Rica

Whats up guys, how is everybody doing, just another killer day in Costa Rica, dry season is finally here and the waves were really fun all day. Woke up this morning, a little hung over from last night, we had our open house party for our new Yoga Studio. Anyways, it was a awesome party, right on the beach here at our Surf Kingdom, great night - good vibes all around, you never seem to find any negativity when you are hanging around people who do Yoga, thats awesome. loving it. woke up this morning went next door to Best Western - had the all you can eat breakfast looking over the beautiful ocean and palm trees. hung out all day, surfed, saw one of the most beautiful sunsets i have ever seen, taught a beautiful girl how to surf,  and now we are about to make a huge healthy dinner for all the team here at Jaco Surf Academy..

Hope all is well for everyone -

Talk soon

Bill

p.s. - here is a picture from last nights party at the house- good times all around...

Pura Vida

Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun it's alright!!!!

(11/11/10)- I'm writing this blog at noon on a just starting to get sunny thursday morning. We finally woke up to sunny skys but Danielle and I surfed a really fun little wave by the house by ourselves all morning. Nothing really exceptional, just fun chest high rippable little wedges with the occasional head high set. Right now, we're just chillen. We ate lunch, now we're having ice coffees and the tide will be right to surf again in two hours and we will surf till dark again. We've been doing that for the past few days. The evening rounds being really fun as more and more people get out and you can keep surfing until the shadows start to mess up your timing. Lately, we've walked down to the middle of Jaco, for the afternoon surf so we could have a chance to film with the local pro kids as they got out of school. The surfing going down by them is always inspiring. Last night it was a packed house with Louis Vindas, the Taskon brothers, Orlando Sourez, Josie Mar Fuentes,  Michael Torres, Gilbert Brown, and Jairo Perez.  It made it fun because every time you looked down the beach one of them was getting a good one.

they don't call it a rain forest for nothing

The way rainy season usually works down here is October is one of the heaviest months of rain and then November goes back to being beautiful and sunny all day with the occasional evening rain. This year was a little different though. October stayed relatively dry and right when November came around we were bombarded by five straight days of all day and all night rain. We haven't seen a rain like that in two years! The first days of the rain were manageable because you could walk down and surf near the south end of Jaco in relatively clear and clean water.  But after that it got pretty brown and dirty looking everywhere. The rivers were washing out houses, concrete foundations, billboards, massive bamboo thickets, trees, you name it.  So for three days it was un-surfable. We kept busy doing lots of yoga, watching lot's of slow motioned surf videos, watching movies on youtube, painting, and taking walks in the rain. All the bars did really well during this period and the happy hours were filled with people. It was a great chance to get to meet new friends because everyone had at least something in common with the weather. After the massive rains the rains didn't really stop. It just stopped raining all day and all night. So the water cleared up a bit and there were little pockets of non rain. Not sunny, but after so much rain, even cloudy skys are reason for rejoicing. On one of those days a group of Argentinian models wanted to learn to surf so that was nice. Although conditions weren't perfect by any means, rainy gray weather here is still pleasant enough and warm enough to be out in and they had a great time. For us, all that rain, meant the rivers pumped out sand and created really good sandbars.  We've been surfing great head high waves for the past few days. No complaints here and when we finally woke up to a sunny morning it made you appreciate it even that much more.

Surf Playa Hermosa - pros come to town Sept

A few photos hermosa jaco

Waves Playa Hermosa and Jaco July

Pura Alma Trailer