ready for GREEN season

It really sucks when you feel sick. There have been waves all week long but I haven't surfed, which gives me an uneasy feeling even if I wasn't sick. I've been meaning to take a break and write down some inner thoughts on the old blogditty but to be honest I haven't been able to get any alone time, probably adding to the fact that I haven't been feeling good. Today I can tell I'm getting closer to feeling better, perhaps I'll drink a shot of pirate juice to kill off any of the germs that are holding on for dear life. I'm going to win this, I can tell.

All is good at WRSC. My parents just left after being here for a two week visit. Its always nice to have my parents come down. Holly's mom Suzanne is here too. We all celebrated Otis' third birthday last Sunday with a pretty dope pirate party. We took the old WRSC panga off of the beach and painted it like a pirate ship. There was a treasure hunt with buried treasure. The adults had as much fun as the kids. Tomorrow is Holly's birthday and I'm taking her, the boys and Suzanne up to Arenal to stay at a couple of off-grid hotels for two nights. It will be good to escape the surf camp for a little bit, sometimes it gets really old when everyone knows that you live right upstairs. It will also be inspiring I hope, as I am in the design phase of building an eco lodge on my own (zephyrecoproject.com)

We are completely full this week. There have been tons of waves. Only the onshore winds have been coming up early, which have made the mid-days pretty sloppy for surf. There have been some pretty good waves in the early mornings before the winds though.

The surf was like this all week, so I guess you could say it was pretty good.

WRSC website updates:
The surf report page has been broken down into two separate pages, a Surf Report + Forecast page and a Daily Surf Photo page. We set it up this way so we could allow for guest reporters in the area to report the surf at their local breaks. Let me know if you want to help out with this.

Holly has been running the Pura Vida Health organic market every weekend for over a month now with her friend Andrea, the town of Tamarindo seems to be really stoked on it. Every week has been busier than the week before.

Holly has talked about doing a market for a really long time. I am really happy for her to finally see it through. Isn't she so cute, showing off her tomatoes and lettuce heads :-)

The surf camp is purchasing produce from Holly's market for our restaurant, paying the same price or less than we were paying from our previous suppliers and having it be all organic, so that is awesome! Any local restaurants wanting to organic product can contact me through the blog and I will pass the word along.

For me, the focus on organic produce dates back to the start of the Zephyr project. Holly put me in contact with her produce supplier Alvin, a local farmer in charge of a co-op of organic farmers in the local Guancaste region. We brought Alvin to the Zephyr farm earlier this past week to show him where we have space for our organic farm and nursery. I have already learned a ton about soil such as how to properly machete the existing growth, how to retain the cuttings as organic matter for the seeds we are planting, tilling the earth to recoup the organic matter quickly, and following the contours of the land when planting so as to prevent erosion.

Alvin is the guy on the left. He is working for Zephyr as a consultant, overseeing the start of our organic farm and nursery on the farm. Berny is on the right. He is my right-hand man on-site at Zephyr. He was born and raised at the base of the Zephyr mountain (where he still lives). Berny can operate our backhoe and dump truck, and he knows the property better than anyone else.

We have a great spring on the property that is still flowing considerably right now, even though it is the end of the dry season and most water reserves are all but gone in Guanacaste.

This spring is located about mid-way up the Zephyr mountain. We are building a simple retaining wall to allow for the water to pool up. A simple plastic section of pvc piping is placed within the wall to allow water to flow through while the wall is being built. Then a long section (1500 meters) of soft water hose is connected to the end of the pvc pipe, along with a valve that allows the water to be shut off if needed. Then, far across the Zephyr finca where it is lower in elevation, the water hose is placed, allowing for the water to be gravity fed to a giant plastic tank above where the hotel and the residential lots are located. Water piping is connected from the tank to the individual lots and all of a sudden we've got water. Its pretty cool to construct a system that relies on gravity and not electricity.
Driving to Zephyr is like driving back in time, back to an earlier version of Costa Rica.

Another random cow shot. Notice the lack of steroids? thats what a normal cow looks like.

A few days back we fired the old WRSC school bus up and took it on a pub crawl. Here is what happened (you should wear headphones so you can hear all of the dialogue):

Well, there was more, but the video camera was misplaced as the beers really started to flow. Its pretty funny when you cruise through the Tamarindo circle in the WRSC school bus with no headlights (because they don't work). We pulled the Austin Powers 17-point turn in front of Nibanna when we decided to hit Pasatiempo for a second time. Everyone was rowdy as hell. The cops just looked up and saw the bus and didn't give it a second thought. There are plenty of good reasons to live in a small town, this is one of them.

Let me take this opportunity to tell you that I am not a role model at all. I live in Tamarindo and run a surf camp instead of filing TPS Reports in my cubicle. I want to have a good time with my friends, get some good waves. I just want to enjoy my family, enjoy my job, and overall just enjoy my life. I smoke weed and I drink beer, I use bad words and I don't always take the time to correc tmy spelling when I type. Sorry if I let you down. Please don't send me an email complaining because you don't have to read my blog or visit WRSC or sign up for the newsletters. I got the lamest email from a guy last week complaining about me being a bad role model and how the surf camp was such a ripoff (maybe he didn't know we have 60 employees here), then he corrected my grammar while talking shit about how the owner of the surf camp should know how to use spell-check and shouldn't use the fuck-word. The kicker was that then after all of that he asked me to mail him some WRSC stickers if you can believe it. I already emailed him back and told him he wouldn't like it at the surf camp so don't bother coming. I think if I went to business school they would have taught me that the customer is always right but that just isn't true. Some people are poison and as soon as you can tell you should show them their way to the Diria or some all-inclusive pig roast full of fat Euros in speedos. Sue me for not being perfect, I never said I was. Don't complain because I chose the path less traveled.

I am so happy that after this week its going to be considered green season or low season or whatever. The surf camp is full the entire month of April, but the rest of town is going to be pretty slow, which means that the vibe will have slowed down even more. This recession has hit Costa Rica as hard as everywhere else, we are so lucky for so many return guests here at the surf camp, people telling their friends, just the whole buzz that everyone has created. We feel really lucky for this and we will continue to try our hardest to make this place the best we can. I really feel for the newer businesses that will be going out of business due to the recession, its much harder for them because they aren't as established. Not that anyone gave us a break when we opened WRSC 8 years ago because nobody did. Holly and I are making sure not to carry on the lame ex-pat tradition of "OK I'm here now, shut the door!" mind frame. Instead, a good community seems like a great idea and we are all about it. Everyone can pitch in a little. We plan on living here for a long time, and why not? Tamarindo is awesome. Now that the real estate boom has died all of the prospectors have skipped town and only those that want to live here are still here. You can see it at the Saturday organic markets. I'm meeting tons of people who have taken the opportunity to move to Tamarindo, because of a lay-off in the US or simply because its cheaper to live down here and you get to surf every day. We are stoked to have you. The only thing that sucks is when you take the time to really get to know someone, when you open yourself up to someone in ways you can only do to a few people at any given time, and then that person leaves six months later after having their Costa Rica experience. Its hard to make long-term friends down here, but hopefully thats seeming to be changing now that the town has grown in recent years.

Getting back to that pirate birthday party for Otis, please note that the pirate theme was 100% his idea I swear, seriously.
First there was the treasure map leading to buried treasure.

Yeah, it was a little confusing for a three year old birthday party but the kids still had a ton of fun. So did all of us.

We're going to look back on this photo years in the future and pick out all of the local tico/gringo rippers from out in the surf. Jen and Marcel's fleet of kids, as well as Terri and Herbie's girls (all from Avellanas), little Kalani with the pirate hat, Shawna's son Lucas in there as well, and then Otis weighing in at 6 foot 8. Its so cool to have normal life events like little kid's birthdays here in CR. It takes a village to raise a child.

My pirate wife, who must have been exhausted after spending the week with my dad and the interns turning the old panga into a pirate ship.

By the way, if you live in the Tamarindo area and have kids, feel free to bring them by to play on the pirate ship. We put it there for everyone and we plan to add a swing set shortly.



I'm also really happy that Otis' birthday has come and gone. I'm kindof bummed for Happy only because he suffers from what every second child suffers from: not being the first child. I've been making it a point to get a lot of time with him, but to be honest he doesn't need it at all. He is so chill, just lets me hold him for as long as I want where as Otis wouldn't want to be held for very long at all. Happy is a total daredevil, every time he sees a surfboard he tries to stand on it. Happy has been my homie a little bit more too because Otis is going through a 3-year-old "I want mom" phase. Not always, but often enough for me to have to learn to be fine with it. I think Otis and Holly are alike in a lot of ways too, which makes it kindof natural that he might want to hang out with Holly and bake cookies. No matter what it is all very good. I am spoiled to have such a good family :-)

I am off to order Chinese food. Yes, we have Chinese food here in Tamarindo. We also have iguanas living in our ceiling, which is why after this next week Holly and I are moving the family out of the surf camp and into a condo nearby while we gut the entire place, insulate it (even though I might just miss the Tico Hendrix dreams), and remodel our 1,000 square foot house above the restaurant.