January 3rd, 2020

MANZANILLO

And our NSR top photographer Brian Scott could not be happier with 2020 so far… for a second day in a row, he went on a boat trip to take water shots, this time it was with this crew: from left to right: Nate “cabo Woods” Wood, Ben “Pipes” Phelan, Mike “Mikey Fresh” Fernandez, Brian Coleman and Chris “Cold Cuts” Kilkuts.

2020 seems very promising for many reasons, I’ll name a few…- after more than two weeks of zero waves, the decade ends and Boom! nice waves appear.- we had a busy holidays during the last week of the year with all our houses rented.- Promising team work between Brian taking the photos and me writing the reports for two days in a row.

As you can apreciate here, the waves had a great size.

A little bit of history… did you know that in 1992 the brand new Tourism Board of Nicaragua brought SURFER magazine to explore and promote the country as a surfing destination?

SURFER brought 2 or 3 famous surfers from back then to surf the Pacific coast and one of the highlights of the 30 minute (or so) surf movie was “Punta Reloj”, which is Manzanilllo.

By pure luck, I have a copy (somewhere) of that movie, I need to find it and probably watch it several times to remember the names of the surfers that came.

The purpose of that movie was to show the world that Nicaragua was safe to travel to (after a decade long civil war) and that we had really good waves with nobody around.

Hot Carl probably saw it back then or at least have seen it, right Carl?

After that movie in 1992, surfers started showing at the airport gates with surfboards by around 1995 or 96… and when I say “surfers”, I mean 4 guys every other month, maybe.

I started surfing in 98 and back then, and for the couple of following years there were around only 20 local surfers in the whole country, plus the super random gringos looking for waves here and there.

Can you imagine having the whole country all for yourself and your 4 friends? I mean, all these breaks that we show every day here were empty… millions and millions of world-class A-frames, beach breaks, and point breaks going unridden, unseen! Nobody knew about this magnificent piece of coastline!

Of course, it was an adventure every weekend we went surfing… where to go? the same spot we when last time? check out a few other spots first? or just flip a coin and go explore for new places along the coast? no internet, no maps, no forecast, not even roads sometimes, or at least not worth it enough to call it a road!

Boats where not an option back then, there were just a few boats to be found and even less fishermen willing to take us to do something they couldn’t understand… they hadn’t seen a surfboard in their life, and of course they didn’t know what it was for and why we wanted to jump on their boats, we didn’t even know where to go!Times have change for sure, and will continue changing!Cheers everyone!