After a rather whirlwind 4 days in Panama City, we decided to head to the nearest decent surf town which happened to be Santa Catalina – About 6 hour total trip which we were lucky enough to share the 40 degree bus ride with a box of tiny chicks (That’s baby chickens not young women!)
Santa Catalina is a super laid back surfer town on the Pacific coast of Panama, unfortunately the beach is also about a 30 minute walk from the town itself which we didn’t realise until 20 minutes into an extremely hot walk with all our luggage and backpacks… But all good, we got to the beach and found some accommodation right on the beach at a place called “Oasis Surf Camp” – The name says it all really!
About 30 meters from our bungalow door was the ocean, with waves… finally some waves!!! We were also very pleasantly surprised at the 29 degree’ water temperatures – To be honest, at that point I was utterly stoked at this amazing place that we had found that we bargained a good price on the room to stay for 5 nights, it all seemed perfect.
We were aware that it was still the rainy season however this hadn’t really caused us any issues thus far and it only really seemed to rain later on in the afternoon or at night which didn’t phase us to much. Santa Catalina had a slight difference whereby in the late afternoon it would cloud over (I mean REALLY cloud over) and continue to have some of the biggest tropical lightning storms we have ever witnessed, which was amazing to see from the beach and outside our bungalow. The issue however was that as soon as there was any lightning of an sort in the vicinity, all the electricity would go off to the entire town and surrounding areas – It almost felt like the lighting would trip a switch at the main power station and the person who needed to flip the switch back up was comfortable at home for the day and instead would flip the switch when he got to work (at some stage) the next day!
This meant that from about 5pm every day we wouldn’t have electricity for the next 12 to 18 hours, which then meant that we couldn’t walk into town after dark, and would be stuck eating at the very overpriced restaurant at our accommodation. I think by the end of the week I had every variety of pasta they had on their menu (and they only had Pasta on the menu!!!) I managed to take a few time-lapse video’s in order to catch the amount of lightning we were having, to the point whereby we would not need our torches while walking to the restaurant as there was a consistent lightning source somewhere in the sky lighting our path
Luckily between the dramatic thunderstorms and power cuts, we still managed to get out on a day trip to Coiba National Park where we heard stories of some of the best snorkelling in Central America. The rumours were true and the snorkelling waters were warm and teaming with fish, however I still believe the San Blas had a wider variety of fish and snorkelling locations. We saw our first turtle which I’d never seen before, and I managed to get a couple of shots of him too 🙂
As per every other day we got caught by the torrential storm while motoring back on the 1.5 hour journey on the boat. We got soaked from head to toe, I’m still not sure how my camera was working after the trip.
One of the main reasons for us to head to Santa Catalina was the surf, as I’d heard there was a point break not far off shore called La Punta (The Point) which was meant to be epic. I was lucky enough to hire a surfboard from an extremely friendly Brazilian local who showed me the way to the break and even offered for me to head out with him that afternoon.
The next morning I headed out before sunrise, made my way across the rock bottom and out to the 5-6ft break… It was truly Epic!!! A really really long left hander that broke over a rock ledge and formed perfectly for a ride of about 200 meters, and if you got a good one it would be 300 – 400m… I have never surfed a wave so perfect – Massive tick in the Box!!
After 5 days of surfing, snorkelling, sunning and storming we were officially over the small town of Santa Catalina and ready for our next adventure…
Enjoy the Pictures below
