Showing His Son the Ropes

A father tows in his teenager at Puerto Viejo de Limón

Benita Hussain

On many days between October and March, Paul Whitman, 17, stands on the coral heads at Salsa Brava, one of the heaviest waves on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, and waits, arms crossed, for it to go off. Whitman, who lives nearby, usually smears his face with so much zinc oxide that he looks like a Caribbean warrior. He is one of the “Salsa heads,” what the locals in Puerto Viejo de Limón call the wave’s most ardent fans, and he likes it in the overhead to double-overhead range — days that it attracts adrenaline seekers from far and wide, especially those with more than one surfboard to crack. And though he remains the youngest to have surfed it at its biggest, Whitman won’t brag about his feats, including the fact that with his father’s help, he has pioneered tow surfing into still bigger waves that break on the shoals located a few miles from shore.

In all, Paul and his father, Chris, 55, account for half the people who have towed into the offshore bombs. They break along a 10-mile stretch, where pockets of gravel and coral run from Cahuita to the north down to the Panamanian border town of Manzanillo. The shoals’ three dozen cloudbreaks only come to life during solid winter swells, and the breaks known as “Little Shoal” and “Long Shoal” hold up to 35-foot faces. When Paul was 13, Chris towed his son into a 12-foot Hawaiian at Little Shoal.

If 13 seems a tender age to start towing into cloudbreaks, Chris introduced his son to the world of aqua bombs right here at Salsa Brava when he was a mere 8 years old. It began when Paul told his father he “wanted it so badly.” Chris decided that before he would let his son surf Salsa Brava, Paul should first understand the contours of the sea floor, so he drew the caves and coral heads in the sand, and then, on flat days, took his young son diving so he could see it with his own eyes. Paul realized he wasn’t as fearless as he thought, but before his ninth birthday, he screwed up his courage and had a taste of Salsa.

Chris Whitman, one of the first to have surfed Salsa Brava in the 1970s, thought Paul could handle the challenge after watching his youngest son paddle out at the surrounding beach breaks of Playa Cocles and Playa Negra on days when his older brothers and peers stayed on the sand. But Chris eased his son into the break, building Paul’s tolerance for Salsa’s size one foot at a time. The more seasoned surfers questioned his parenting skills and wondered why he gave in to his son’s cravings for bigger waves. Their cause was only helped when, during one of those first sessions, Paul got caught on the inside. Paul still doesn’t remember what happened next, but Chris can fill in the blanks, timing his son’s three-wave hold down at around 40 seconds. Paul did not paddle out at Salsa for another four years. Today, big days thrill him for the simplest of reasons. “I just think it’s fun,” Paul says.

Training Paul to ride big waves is part of a family tradition. Chris’s father was East Coast Surfing Hall of Famer Bill Whitman, a pioneering Florida surfer, shaper and underwater cameraman. Chris and his brothers grew up in Miami, Florida, spending several winters surfing the Bahamas and Hawaii’s North Shore, which is where Chris first gained a penchant for riding guns. Chris stumbled into Costa Rica in 1972 following a stint as first mate on a Central America-bound boat.

In 1977, Puerto Viejo was an undeveloped Afro-Caribbean village with an economy built around fishing and chocolate plantations, and Chris’s then-girlfriend had family there. On his first visit, he watched a glassy overhead tube from the same spot his son now frequents and “dropped Hawaii like a hot potato.” He quickly made friends with the village’s only three surfers, including Alberto Jiménez, who had already coined the name Salsa Brava, or “Wild Sauce.”

With his Oahu experience, Chris often was the only one at Salsa Brava during bigger swells until news of the wave traveled to Central and South America, leading to increasingly clogged lineups. By that point, Chris had already begun to retreat towards the far-off breaks, hiring indigenous fishermen in dugout canoes to help him explore the potential of the deeper sea.

Paul, whose mother, Maria, also surfs, first went big on the outer shoals in 2006 after Ivan Mejia, a Costa Rican friend of Chris’s, returned from Pico Alto, Peru, “red hot” about the Brazilian tow team he saw on an endless number of waves. “The possibility of catching the biggest bomb of your life was out there, and we were not taking advantage of it by puttering around on boats with guns,” says Mejia, who’s known Chris for 20 years. Mejia convinced Chris to use his earnings from an agricultural business he still had in Florida to purchase a jet ski, boards and a boat. Within a few months, Puerto Viejo had its own tow team, and Paul, then 13, wanted in.

Paul still had the same desire for big waves that he’d showed as a preteen, but now he had the strength. While the others took off, Paul sat on the ski and watched five or six roll through, his father explaining the break the way he had prepared him at Salsa. He showed Paul how the ski worked, the way to drop, and how to take a deep dive if he lost his footing. “And then after all that he just went, ‘Dad, I’m ready to go for it,” Chris recalls.

The others, including some who had scolded Chris a few years before, cheered Paul on as he dropped in on a 20-foot face, catching the biggest bomb of his life and out-surfing the other men on the trip.

In his time towing, Paul has never had an accident and says the fact that he hasn’t wiped out at the outer shoals has helped him overcome his fears at Salsa Brava. Paul’s energy pushes Chris and helps him ignore his aging body, but he’s still a dad at every turn. “When we get home, he tells me what I did wrong,” says Paul. Chris says his son now goes harder than he does, but he knows that Paul still has many things to learn, like how to drive the ski.

While big waves are an integral part of their lives, Chris enjoys the relatively minimal exposure of their tow team. “Fortunately for us, we’re not Laird Hamilton with helicopters and eight photographers and six boats and four skis,” Chris laughs. “We’re just guys doing it by our bootstraps. We really are just doing it for fun.”