"Dan Fowlie: Renaissance Man"

Dan Fowlie: Renaissance Man
By Karl Block

Daniel Fowlie has mastered a wider range of fields than many renowned Renaissance men of ages past: fields including commercial fishing, diving, surfboard design, military operations and intelligence, petroleum investment, leather-goods production and retail, painting in diverse mediums, agriculture, winegrowing, Peruvian-Paso breeding, and national and international real-estate investment/development. The varied talent of historical Renaissance men was also expected to include a physical athleticism and reflect a historical rebirth of masteries. Fowlie more than fulfills these criteria as well. He contributed not to the rebirth but to the birth of California surfing, light-surfboard design, and region of Pavones, Costa Rica. A successful diver and one of the few Californians who surfed in the fifties, Fowlie was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated (18 October 1954) surfing shore break at Makaha. Fowlie also contributed to the advent of light-surfboard shaping with fiberglass and balsa. Fowlie is most known, however, for how he brought to life the place and early prosperity of Pavones during the mid seventies to mid eighties.    

Fowlie’s family noticed his knack for accomplishment when Dan was very young. His sister well remembers his entrepreneurial childhood:

Danny arrived in Pacific Beach, CA, from Minneapolis, MN, in 1941 [at age eight] [. . .]. What stands out the most in my mind is that he was constantly working. He was always resourceful about making money and creative at making his efforts result in the highest financial return from a very young age.[. . .] He was a true entrepreneur long before the word was in common usage.ⁱ

After visiting his logger relatives in Minnesota, where Dan learned how to trap animals, Dan returned to San Diego and began trapping rabbits, raccoons, possums, bobcats, coyotes, and frogs in Mission Valley. He skinned them, stretched and dried the skins, and started a business selling pelts to department stores—all before age ten. His friends and family remember enjoying frog legs at least once a week.

The youthful Fowlie discovered his most profitable proficiencies, however, in the Pacific Ocean, where he learned to free dive for abalone, to spearfish, and to trap lobster.

Dan with a 32-pound lobster

Every morning before school started, Dan would free dive in La Jolla and Bird Rock for abalone (a mollusk pried off the rocky ocean bottom) and sell sacks of them to local restaurants in La Jolla and Pacific Beach for fifty cents a pound (today abalone sells for about eighty dollars a pound). He’d also collect daily from his lobster-infested barrels under Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach. His sister enviously remembers when “he bought a car at thirteen with his earnings and had to wait for his fourteenth birthday to get a license to drive it! He was the only student in junior high school with a car, and, as you may know, cars were very scarce after World War II [1939-1945].”ⁱⁱ Dan was one of the youngest and most successful sport divers in San Diego during the forties. He also liked to paint the ocean subjects that he became so familiar with. In ’48, ’49, ’50, he took first place for his paintings in the high school division of San Diego’s annual art competitions between the county’s schools, a contest which features school winners at the Del Mar Fair. 

Fowlie once made a makeshift scuba tank for his diving ventures before Rene invented the Aqualung. Dan simply rigged an oxygen tank to his back and ran the air into a gasmask. The system actually worked, and Dan used to experiment with it in La Jolla Cove—until he almost died using the tank. Dan would weight himself down by putting rocks in his sweatshirt and wiring them in, but he would lose air quickly because the air flowed constantly into the gasmask. One time when the air ran out, Dan could not remove the wire from his sweatshirt, and the rock’s weight prevented him from reaching the surface. So he began racing along the bottom toward shallower water and jumping for the surface. He took in water just as he reached the surface but luckily survived the incident. Two years later, all the proper diving equipment hit the market.

Fowlie was also one of the few Californians in the early fifties to surf before the explosion of surfing during the advent of fiberglass

Peter Parkin on one of Dan's boards in California early fifties

balsa boards and polyurethane foam boards. Dan was actually one of the first to apply fiberglass to light balsa boards: Bob Simmons had begun applying fiberglass to balsa in California, and Mat Kivlin and Dave Rockland had begun making fiberglass Malibu Boards in Hawaii. Fowlie found a wood supplier in LA where he handpicked light balsa wood and then found the only company in CA that sold the new fiberglass material. In 1951, Fowlie shipped all the materials to Hawaii, moved there for the summer, and started his board business. With no power equipment available, Fowlie shaped all the boards by hand, using “a hand saw, draw knives, and hand planes, as well as a few occasional strokes of an ax.”ⁱⁱⁱ He shaped boards for Walt Hoffman and Dave Mogges’s board rental business in Waikiki and shaped famous board shaper Mike Diffendefer’s first board, on which Fowlie had chalked a large tiki. Recalling Dan’s innovative combination of artistic and shaping talents, his sister writes:

Danny was one of the first to draw pictures, names, and designs on boards and then glass in the colors. [. . .] I well remember the boards he had shaped in our PB garage with the most elaborate and colorful tikis or octopuses that ran the length of the board. I often wonder if any of those surfboards are still in existence. They were so creative and unique; I have never seen their match.^iv

After living the fifties-California surfer’s dream of surfing and shaping in Hawaii, Fowlie returned to the ocean in California.

In 1952, Fowlie began diving commercially in Santa Barbara and selling his catches to the Pierce brothers, some of the biggest abalone processors on the West Coast at the time. Fowlie dove with four men on the Commander, and the crew sold their abalone for five-to-six dollars a dozen (today abalone sells for about eighty dollars a dozen). Dan always prided himself in having his first hundred

Dan exiting water in dry suit after abalone diving on his boat in the fifties

dollars worth of abalone or lobster on the deck before anyone else has risen for work. Earning up to six hundred dollars a day on those occasional hundred-dozen abalone days, Fowlie recalls the glory he experienced when he and the Pierce Fisheries’ other two boats outproduced the entire Black Fleet (comprised of over fifteen boats) in the late fifties. Pierce Fisheries became fishing legends that season.

    Later in 1952, Fowlie (nineteen at the time) was drafted for the Korean War and shipped straight to the frontlines in Korea—all the way to a bunker the soldiers called “Coffin Corner” because the Chinese had destroyed it twice, killing many. As soon as he arrived, Fowlie built the bunker as deep and strong as possible, fortification which some soldiers even criticized as excessive. In the bunker, Fowlie manned a fifty-caliber machine gun with tracer ammunition to cover a Chinese transport road. None of the soldiers criticized Fowlie when the bunker survived two direct mortar blasts, which resulted only in partial hearing loss of the attending soldiers. By the time of the truce talks in late 1953, Fowlie had become Operations and Intelligence Sergeant. 

When Fowlie returned to San Diego in 1954 (at age twenty-one), he subdivided a lot he had bought in La Jolla in 1949 (at age sixteen) and sold the first lot for more than he paid for the entire property. Fowlie then continued diving commercially in Santa Barbara and attending college, but a year later (1955) he transferred to Orange Coast College in Newport Beach, where he studied Petroleum technology, married Miss Newport Beach beauty queen, and had three children. “He was feeling prosperous from his success in his diving and subdivision ventures.”^v During his senior year, Dan began a partnership with one of his petroleum teachers, and they profited together by purchasing and selling oil leases in Orange County.^vi

In the sixties, Fowlie started several companies in wrought-iron sales and leather-goods production and distribution. Leather Gypsy Inc. brought Fowlie some of his greatest financial success. Fowlie’s business grossed millions each year selling leather handbags and clothing to over three thousand stores and high-end boutiques nationally and abroad—including stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and JC Penney.

Advised to close his leather business before an oncoming recession in 1974, Dan shut down operations and decided to invest his profits in beachfront property in Costa Rica. At this time, he wanted to move his family out of Laguna Beach because he felt that the area had become a dangerous party scene: “Since one his sons loved surfing, another motorcycling, and his daughter loved horses, Fowlie knew that all of his children would find something to love in Costa Rica.”^vii One of Fowlie’s childhood surfing and fishing buddies in Pacific Beach had worked in southern Costa Rica for a time as a coconut harvester and later told Fowlie about his discovery of a perfect, un-ridden wave at the southern-most tip of Costa Rica. So Fowlie took one of his sons, Dan Junior, and some of his son’s friends to find the wave on a surf vacation. As it turned out, Fowlie not only found the paradise Kenny Easton spoke of but never came back from that vacation.

From 1974-1985, Fowlie bought over eighty percent of the Pavones region and employed almost every locals to cultivate and develop the area. (Somehow Fowlie also managed to become an expert

John Akin on one of Dan's Peruvian Pasos at Rancho Del Mar

builder and farmer). “By the summer of 1974, Dan had moved

Penny (Dan's ex-wife) in cocoa plants, one hundred thousand planted in two years

his entire family into huts on the beach. Within ninety days of Dan’s original arrival, he had built four houses, converted one house into a kitchen, dug a well, and constructed a water

Cocoa Dan planted in Pavones

tower and power plant.”^viii In the next decade, Fowlie, with the help of the local he employed, would build all of the region’s roads, bridges, schools, medical centers, airports, churches, and more. “Virtually nothing was there before Dan built it.”^ix He also raised Peruvian Pasos and began a large-scale agricultural project, which included cultivating myriads of assorted crops, developing experimental balsa wood (for surfboards) and other tropical plants, planting many nurseries (which each contained hundreds of thousands of experimental plants), and hiring several full-time agronomists to oversea all the agricultural projects and teach the people how to farm.^x 

Fowlie’s accomplishments also continued when he was imprisoned in 1987. He studied the law to do everything possible to protect his land investments in Pavones and elsewhere. He taught art in prison and became a true master of many painting styles (including wildlife, impressionism, and landscapes) and mediums (including pastel, water color, oil, andacrylic). He also created many sculptures, including soap-and-wood carvings and ceramic sculptures.

    When asked what he would like to do in the future, Fowlie says that—though he still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up—he wants to return to Pavones to finish what he started for his family and the original residents of Costa Rica. When asked what the key to financial success is, Fowlie says that the key is simple: “be reliable, dependable, honest, and perceptive.”^xi

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i. My Brother’s Early Days: A Portrait of a Precocious Entrepreneur.” The Facts about Dan Fowlie and Pavones. [Internet]. [Cited 21 April 2008]. Available at < http://www.thefactsaboutdanfowlieandpavones.com/
Articles/My_Brother_s_Early_Days.html>.

ii. Ibid.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Ibid.

v. Ibid.

vi. Ibid.

vii. Mendez, Justice. “How Daniel Fowlie Discovered, Procured, and Developed Pavones.” The Facts about Dan Fowlie and Pavones. [Internet]. [Cited 21 April 2008]. Available at< http://www.thefactsaboutdanfowlieandpavones.com/
articles/How_Daniel_Fowlie_Discovered_Procured_and_Developed_Pavones.archive>.

viii. Ibid.

ix. Ibid.

x. Ibid.

xi. Daniel Fowlie, “Daniel Fowlie Interview.” Interview by Karl Block. San Diego, California. March 2008.