October 23, 2009

Our three fall semester courses, Tri-Country, Water & Wave, and Leadership, are all daring Costa Rica’s world-renowned clean waterways this week. Rivers, estuaries, surf breaks, oceans, waterfalls… they’re experiencing it all!

Water & Wave and Tri-Country students have combined courses this week on the Pacific coast. The first day of their “combo course” was on Tuesday on our Manuel Antonio base (Click here for a satellite map; the arrow is about one inch west of where our base is located) when surf instructors Carlos “Diablos” Castro Montero and Alex Cook immediately began teaching surf basics to the Tri-Country students who just arrived that day with their primary instructors, Donna White and Santiago Lopez Salazar.

And since then, they’ve been even more active. All four CRROBS instructors have led the students north to a peninsula called Isla de Damas where they kayaked down an estuary in duckies (a.k.a. inflatable kayaks or IKs; see picture on right) into the ocean. It is there where they will camp and surf. One of the most important reasons for going through all of this trouble to get to a new beach? Uncrowded waters. Leave it to CRROBS’ surf instructors to know the best beaches for enjoying the “barrel” experience. Carlos reported yesterday “all of the students are doing really well.”

In other areas of Costa Rica, the Leadership students spent Day Number Two busing to Taos, their “put in” (rafting term for where a rafting trip begins) at Río Pejibaye. Whitewater rafting experts – and CRROBS instructors – Felipe Lopez Salazar, Joe Ewing, and Carlos Granados Flores will guide these new leaders for nine days down the river to their “take out” (rafting vernacular for the point at which rafters exit the river) in Puente de Oriente. Río Pejibaye is a Class II-III river here in Costa Rica, which is no sweat for our rafting guides who frequent the class IV-V rivers. Leadership students will have no problem following instructions; from what we’ve heard from their instructors: “This is a great group of students.”