"A First Step to Rebutting Internet Rumors"

A First Step to Rebutting Internet Rumors
By Farah Oshun

As a personal friend and biographer of Danny “Mack” Fowlie, I feel obliged to clear the air of rumors about him on the World Wide Web. As many have discovered by watching the surf documentary Chasing the Lotus, Danny Mack is much different than how he’s depicted on the Internet. Danny Mack founded and then managed Pavones for eleven years, and he kept Pavones’s waves pristine and available only to friends, family, and locals. Unless people know Dan from the Internet or from Allan Weisbecker’s rants, most people either don’t know of Dan, as he likes to keep a low profile, or have only heard the mysterious whisperings circulating in the surf community today. Those who do know him are old-school friends, part of the privileged few who literally knew him from school growing up or who were invited to experience Pavones before the surfing world knew about its world-class left point break. Most of these friends are now legends themselves, and it is only by their stories that knowledge of Danny Mack has been passed down. Yet, information about Danny has often been glamorized into tall tales.

Fowlie was never involved with cocaine; he was convicted of a marijuana conspiracy charge. Simply put, Fowlie didn’t get a good deal. It was a dry conspiracy, meaning that the prosecution had minimal hard evidence—in this case, less than one ounce of marijuana on his California property, which was seized from the homes of tenants when Fowlie lived in Costa Rica. During that time, the drug war had just begun under the tutelage of Nancy Regan. Now, dry conspiracy cases are never tried in many countries and are not tired in US courts when testimonies come from people who are paid by the prosecution—as was the case with Dan’s trial. Yet for just one ounce found on his property, Fowlie spent eighteen years of a thirty-year sentence in jail! He was released early for good behavior.

I must applaud all the Internet sites for their entertaining stories, but there were no drug dealings on the beaches of Pavones, and Dan never knew Noriega, although he did know the fugitive financier Robert Vesco, from whom Fowlie bought a house. Through this association, Dan started to take heat from the FBI and Customs, who were the agencies involved in his arrest, not the DEA as typically written. Dan, by the way, would like anyone who believes false rumors about him to know that he thinks they are “kooks.” Gotta’ love Dan.

"Fowlie Banned Again"

Fowlie Banned Again
By Farah Oshun

Costa Rica’s current Director General de Migración y Extranjería has concurred with the previous administration’s (i.e., Marco Badillia’s) decision: Daniel Fowlie is not allowed in Costa Rica.

Fowlie was banned in 2005 because of complaints that he allegedly caused violence during a trip he took there that fall, the first time Fowlie had been back to Pavones since his extradition to the United States in 1985. Fowlie had waited twenty long years to return to Pavones. Worrying that those who had stolen his land may attempt to plant illegal substances on him to keep him out of Costa Rica, Fowlie hired a Costa Rican police officer to accompany him 24 hours a day during the visit. Fowlie speculates that the land thieves fabricated claims of violence out of fear of losing their illegally acquired land holdings, which legally belong to Fowlie. Fowlie muses that it must be quite frightening to own land with Fowlie’s cloud on the title and wonder if the original owner will appear one day for his land.

The complaints center on claims that Fowlie threatened one of Fransisco (Chico) Gomez’s children; however, Fowlie has a video of the entire trip, including this incident. In the film, Gomez’s son stopped in his car and invited Fowlie back to his father’s house. Gomez, however, had profited extensively over the years off of Fowlie’s properties by selling them and keeping the cantina’s profits during Fowlie’s absence. Not surprisingly, the film shows Fowlie politely declining the offer. Instead of showing a confrontation, the video clearly depicts a peaceful encounter in which Gomez’s son smiles congenially before getting back into the expensive car, which Fowlie suspects was afforded by selling Danny Land illegally.

Another portion of the video shows Fowlie in his cantina, pointing to two police officers sitting outside. He had noticed them following him discretely for several days. The video shows Fowlie’s son exiting the cantina and striking a peaceful conversation with the officers. According to Fowlie’s son, they told him that they received complaints from local gringos and a couple of ticos but had yet to witness any disturbances. Fowlie’s son attests that the police stated that what they observed was peaceful and that they saw only the joy of people excited to see Fowlie return. Fowlie has begun to fight his exile in an international court using the video evidence, police reports of his peaceful stay, and historical facts about his past improvement of Pavones, Costa Rica.

"How Fowlie Made the Money He Invested in Pavones"

How Fowlie Made the Money He Invested in Pavones
By Karl Block

The rumor that Danny “Mack” Fowlie bought and developed Pavones with “ill-gotten” drug profits, a rumor popularized by

Dan's Father

Allan Weisbecker,ⁱ has gained widespread circulation despite its irrationality. Fowlie has always had money. He inherited a great deal from his multi-millionaire father, also named Daniel Fowlie, who (after WWII) created Executive Transport Corporation by buying several airfields and their planes, converting the aircrafts into executive planes, and selling them to corporations and airlines. Dan Senior sold Braniff Airlines their very first twenty-one DC3s. When Dan Senior died in 1949 (when Danny still was a teenager), Danny invested part the inherited money offshore and into lucrative California real-estate deals. At age sixteen, Danny bought property in La Jolla, and after he got back from the Korean War in 1954 (at age twenty-one), he subdivided the property, sold the first lot for more than he had paid for the entire property, and profited hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Dan with over 3,000 pounds of big lobster

          Fowlie also had a very lucrative career diving for abalone and trapping lobster. By sports diving as a boy in Pacific Beach and La Jolla and selling his catches to local restaurants, “[a]t age thirteen (1946) Dan bought his own car, although cars were still rare just after WWII (1939-1945).”ⁱⁱ At age seventeen, 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). Earning up to six hundred dollars a day on those occasional hundred-dozen 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.

Fowlie’s Leather Gypsy Inc., however, 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. Fowlie then invested much of his profits into buying and developing Pavones, Costa Rica. He also bought fugitive financier Robert Vesco’s house in San Jose when Vesco was ousted from Costa Rica; Fowlie then sold the estate for millions of profit and reinvested that money into Pavones as well.

In fact, the Costa Rican government clearly recognizes that Fowlie acquired all of his property in Pavones apart from and long before his marijuana-conspiracy charges in 1985, charges leveled against Fowlie eleven years after Fowlie began developing Pavones. Had the government found any link between Fowlie’s land purchases and these charges, it would have confiscated all of Fowlie’s property in Pavones.

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                i. Weisbecker, Allan. “The Investigation.” [Internet]. [Cited 1 February 2008]. Available at  <http://www.banditobooks.com/ezine/investigation-begins>.

                ii. Jenkins, Dylan. “Allan Weisbecker, Can’t You Get along with Anyone?” The Facts about Dan Fowlie and Pavones. [Internet]. [Cited 21 April 2008]. Available at < http://www.thefactsaboutdanfowlieandpavones.com/Articles/Allan_Weisbecker_Can_t.html>.

"Allan Weisbecker, Can't You Get along with Anyone?"

Allan Weisbecker, Can’t You Get along with Anyone?
By Dylan Jenkins

Primary builder of Pavones, Costa Rica, Daniel Fowlie and popular writer about Pavones Allan Weisbecker, formally friends, recently had a falling-out. When I interviewed Fowlie, he provided me with all the e-mail correspondences between Weisbecker and him. Upon reading them, I quickly learned that a dispute between them over some Pavones land precipitated their falling-out, a split which also reveals a stark contrast between their histories in Pavones. On the one hand, Dan Fowlie longs to return to Pavones and reclaim its land, which he principally owns and built (called “Danny Land” by many)—the same land that was stolen from him and sold repeatedly with bogus titles during his exile from Costa Rica. On the other hand, Weisbecker curses Pavones on his way out of Costa Rica after selling property that originally belonged to “Danny Land.”ⁱ To unravel this fateful divergence between Pavones’s star-crossed pioneer and profiteer story teller, you should start where the story began. 

When Daniel Fowlie found surfing’s Eden, he had worked his whole life in and on the sea, so he was able to fulfill his greatest

Dan and Chuck

dreams by obtaining a stretch of Pavones’s heaven on earth. He had loved the ocean most of his life and known its ways and life forms as much as anyone—being a historic pioneer of California surfing, surfboard design, diving, and fishing. When Dan was just thirteen, he’d set out before dawn to skin-dive beneath Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach, collect from his bonanza of lobster-brimming barrels beneath, and sell a wealth of them to local restaurants before school started each morning. Through this practice, he earned more money than his airplane-engineer stepfather earned, and at thirteen (1946) Dan bought his own car, although cars were still rare just after WWII (1939-1945). This young entrepreneur, no doubt the envy of his classmates, continued to work as a fisherman for many years and later as a successful leather-business owner.Fowlie heard about Pavones as a fisherman from his surf-and-dive buddy Kenny Easton, who never quit talking about the waves in Pavones after he found them while harvesting copra along the southeast shorelines of Golfo Dulce and selling the coconuts in Golfito. Kenny Easton likely body surfed Pavones as a virgin wave.

When Dan, the successful water-and-business man, found the place of Kenny’s dreams in 1974, he did more than just buy Pavones and save it as his little vacation surf spot. He moved his whole family there and

Dan Fowlie at cantina luau

devoted his life to his love for the place and its culture. Not surprisingly, the kid who had a knack for accomplishing so much also succeeded as an adult to build Pavones into a flourishing region for all its people. For over five years, he employed almost every Pavones local and built nearly every public amenity found in Pavones today. Locals await the day Fowlie returns to finish his improvements of the land.

 When the hard-working Fowlie became the envy of the world by sapiently acquiring Pavones’s emerald shores, he never quit working to make them a prosperous place for his family and Pavones natives. Though some of this paradise has been unjustly taken away from him by illegal land sales during his exile from Eden, he has no intentions of discarding his desire to benefit Pavones through hard work once more. He has already begun to win back all of his Pavones land in court, to secure his immanent return to the land and people he loves, and to implement his plan for restoring Pavones’s environment, economy, and public health and safety.ⁱⁱ

Contrast this Pavones pioneer with a man who became what he formally detested: another one of the “[. . .] many examples down here [in Pavones] of people selling land that is morally and ethically (and probably legally) Fowlie’s [. . .].”ⁱⁱⁱ That is, Allan Weisbecker unscrupulously bought and sold a piece of Danny Land with illegal title, bragged to Fowlie about the profit,^iv and shared nothing with its rightful owner—all just to say in an e-mail to Fowlie, “good fucking riddance” to Pavones.^v

Though Weisbecker sold his land, Fowlie was willing to absolve Weisbecker of future lawsuits by surrendering future pursuits of the 3.1 hectares in court if Weisbecker wrote a series of articles that cleared up misinformation about Dan in Costa Rican newspapers and in Weisbecker’s own writing. In simple terms, this deal ensured that Dan got something for his property and that the people who bought the property from Allan for $550,000 after a long line of illegal sales would not have to reacquire their money from Allan when Fowlie reacquires the 3.1 hectares in court (just as he has been winning back many other properties in Pavones). Though Weisbecker denies that he verbally agreed to write articles for Dan in exchange for Fowlie’s cooperation, he also admits in an e-mail to Dan that the Tico Times refused to “[. . .] print a letter [he] wrote to them defending [Dan] [. . .]”^vi—a fact which exhibits that Weisbecker agreed to write for Fowlie in some capacity. As for Dan, he has simply maintained what he considers their verbal agreement. All he ever wanted for the little piece of land taken rom him was a series of articles, and he continued to believe that Allan would live up to his word and help him by writing them; he writes to Weisbecker, “[. . .] although we have not sat down and discussed the text of how many articles and to whom, I’m sure it will be forthcoming.”^vii

Yet, Weisbecker never helps himself by writing the articles that Dan demands in exchange for not legally pursuing the land. Instead of reasonably fulfilling his end of the bargain and ethically fulfilling his end of the friendship by doing Dan this favor, Weisbecker brags about how he profited on Danny Land: “i’m netting 350k, with an investment of about 200 total, so not bad. being a writer, i see this as a bit of a cushion [. . .]. having said that:  if you have a problem and need a few bucks here in CR I would be glad to help you. as you know, i’m more than talk [sic].”^viii In retrospect to Weisbecker’s offer, however, he submitted little more than talk. Fowlie was willing to accept Weisbecker’s offer for financial assistance, even though Fowlie never forgot about their verbal agreement. Fowlie asked Weisbecker to assist his land defense by giving Fowlie’s attorney Franklin Morera $40,000. In response, Weisbecker claimed that he already gave Dan $10,000 dollars for Dan, saying that he might at best be able to help Dan with “7,500” more.^ix Regarding the $10,000 in question, Weisbecker actually used it to purchase legal services from Franklin Morera to stop the road being built by Mark Sherman through “Allan’s” property. Morera did his job very effectively, nearly having Sherman’s tractor driver arrested, so Allan got what he paid for.

In fact, Weisbecker’s small offers of assistance turned to threats when he viciously writes in an e-mail to Fowlie, giving the e-mail the subject “back to the clink[,]” that he has “decided to put [Fowlie] back in jail, where [he] belong[s]”^x—what a cruel thing to say to someone, especially to the unjustly banished lover of Pavones who dreams of returning to prosper the land. Given this dramatic shift in Weisbecker’s demeanor, Dan finally grew doubtful that Weisbecker ever had any intentions of writing the articles. Yet, Fowlie graciously continued to exhibit willingness to compromise with Weisbecker: Fowlie writes, “I don’t know why you are in denial about just doing what you agreed to do. It seems it would be so much easier if you would just hold up your end of our verbal agreement and we would have no more ill feelings. The title of your new book should be Why can’t we all just get along? [sic]”^xi But after more of the same e-mail belligerence from Weisbecker, Fowlie grew to consider Weisbecker just another land shark who (like Allen Nelson, Dan’s former attorney) profited on Danny Land under the guise of being Fowlie’s friend.

    If Weisbecker wants to befriend Fowlie, he should at the very least rescind the falsities about Fowlie in his articles, like the claim in “Night at the Cantina” that the DEA was involved in Fowlie’s case, which they were not, and the slanderous suggestion in “The Investigation” that Fowlie bought Pavones land “with his ill-gotten gains”^xii—when, in fact, Fowlie bought the land with money acquired in the profits and sale of his multimillion-dollar leather business, Leather Gypsy Inc. Journalists and land buyers alike should always deal with facts instead of fictions. In the case of the land thieves’ deceptive titles, may Fowlie continue to have success in separating legal facts from fictions. In the case of Daniel Fowlie’s land holdings and legendary history, the facts are simply better than fictions.

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      i. Weisbecker writes, “dan, my house deal is done, i’m out of pavones in every way you can name. good fucking riddance [sic].” Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail]. Subject line: “one thing or another.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 18 February 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

      ii. See Mendez, Justice. “Why the Banished King Should Be Let Back into Pavones.” (Published on this site 1 February 2008).

      iii. Weisbecker, Allan. “Dan Fowlie Returns, Part 1.” [Internet]. [Cited 1 February 2008]. Available at <http://www.aweisbecker.com/dsp/authors-corner/articles/dan-fowlie-returns-part-1 />.

      iv. “i’m netting 350k, with an investment of about 200 total, so not bad. being a writer, i see this as a bit of a cushion [. . .]. having said that: if you have a problem and need a few bucks here in CR I would be glad to help you. as you know, i’m more than talk [sic].” Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail]. Subject line: “still in CR.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 25 January 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

      v. Weisbecker writes, “dan, my house deal is done, i’m out of pavones in every way you can name. good fucking riddance [sic].” Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail]. Subject line: “one thing or another.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 18 February 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

      vi. Weisbecker writes, “Dan [. . .] although i never agreed to specifically do a ‘series of articles’ for CR papers, i tried [. . .] [sic].” Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail]. Subject line: “Fwd: more of the same.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 27 February 2006. [Cited February 1].

      vii. Fowlie, Daniel. [E-mail]. Subject line: “In response to your threat.” Message to Allan Weisbecker. 26 June 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

      viii. Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail]. Subject line: “still in CR.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 25 January 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

      ix. Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail]. Subject line: “one thing or another.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 18 February 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

      x. (My alteration of pronouns). Weisbecker writes, “fowlie, I’m [sic] decided to put you back in jail, where you belong. [. . .] how would you like to serve the rest of your term on the RICO conviction for committing a crime while on parole? maybe some of the guys at the FBI would like to see that [sic].” Weisbecker, Allan. [E-mail] Subject line: “back to the clink.” Message to Daniel Fowlie. 25 June 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

     xi. Fowlie, Daniel. [E-mail]. Subject line: “In response to your threat.” Message to Allan Weisbecker. 26 June 2006. [Cited 1 February 2008].

     xii.Weisbecker, Allan. “The Investigation.” [Internet]. [Cited 1 February 2008]. Available at <http://www.banditobooks.com/ezine/investigation-begins>.

"Why the Banished King Should Be Let Back into Pavones"

Why the Banished King Should Be Let Back into Pavones
By Justice Mendez

In June 2005, Costa Rica’s Director General of Immigration Marco Badilla exiled Daniel Fowlie from Costa Rica for purposes of public safety on the basis of reports that Fowlie’s brief return to Pavones after his release from prison caused public fear and disorder in the region.ⁱ However, many Pavones locals strongly disapprove of this ban, public disapproval which leads us to wonder whether Immigration has creditable justification for maintaining Fowlie’s exile despite locals’ cry for his return.

All relevant facts recommend that Immigration should allow the beloved builder of Pavones back into paradise for three incontrovertible reasons: first, the exile has no factual justification on four separate counts; second, Fowlie (therefore) has a right to return in order to defend his land from thievery; and third and most importantly, Fowlie’s return would significantly benefit Pavones and its people by ensuring improvements that the Golfito municipality has proven itself incapable of implementing. In reality, a ban meant to prevent fear and disorder in the region has succeeded merely to protect Pavones land thieves from fearing the disruption of their thievery by Fowlie’s return.

The exile lacks justification because it’s based exclusively on fictions at every level. Even the source of the complaints on which the government bases their exile remains dubious. Written complaints of Fowlie’s return (which claim that the same Fowlie who brought cocaine, prostitutes, and counterfeit money to Costa Rica had returned inciting regional violence) were actually given a fictitious attorney author, one whose name does not appear in records of the law school he purportedly attended. Why, then, do newspapers and government officials continue to trust untrustworthy reports, which were most likely disseminated by the very land thieves interested in keeping out of Pavones Fowlie and his legal right to the land they acquired illegally?

On the second count of the ban’s bogus justification, the caricature of Pavones’s builder king as a kingpin constitutes pure sensationalism because it’s unwarranted by the facts of Fowlie’s marijuana conspiracy charges, particularly the fact that the only hard evidence of marijuana in Fowlie’s case was an ounce found on Dan’s ranch in California, when not he but many other tenants lived on the ranch.

Yet, Costa Rican newspapers, apparently less intenerated in facts that stories, continue to encourage wildly imaginative parodies of Fowlie and ignore what the indigenous people of Pavones know and think about Pavones’s builder. Natives of Pavones, besides insisting that nothing remotely suggested illegal drug or prostitution activities led by Dan at Pavones, will inform you that Fowlie gave them all jobs; built their roads, schools, and hospitals; strongly disapproved of any drug presence on the beach; and greatly improved their land and quality of life. On all accounts, Dan was a real friend to the Costa Rican people.

Third (regarding the ban’s missing justification), contrary to fictional reports, all actual evidence demonstrates that Dan’s visit to Pavones was “muy tranquillo,” as the local police comment in police reports during Dan’s return. Fowlie, convinced that the land thieves would harm his efforts to reacquire his land by planting contraband on him, hired an unarmed Costa Rican drug-enforcement agent to accompany him at all times during his return, and this agent also testifies to Fowlie’s good behavior. The only specific allegation of violence during Fowlie’s visit is that Fowlie threatened one of Chico Gomez’s “children”—not the best fabrication because the “child” in question was Bierno, who stood 6’3 and weighed about 225 pounds in his thirties.ⁱⁱ Though many know Fowlie for his bravado, the video tape of, and the eyewitness accounts of, the encounter—in which Gomez’s son had actually stopped in his car to invite Dan to his father’s house for a meeting—all suggest the opposite of baseless allegations of threats and violence. During this visit, only the people who had acquired parts of Danny Land illegally (most of them gringos) were unhappy to see Fowlie in Pavones. The indigenous people, who had become family to Fowlie in former years, embraced him.

Fourth, Fowlie insists that his exile is unjustified because it exhibits government corruption in light of the close connections between Pavones land thieves to high-ranking government officials. Though the facts of Fowlie’s accusations warrant further exploration, the government’s ongoing decision to trust the fabrications of court-recognized land thieves over hard evidence and the testimonies of Costa Rican police reports, a drug enforcement official, and local eyewitness certainly demands explanation.

The ban also hinders Fowlie from effectively exercising his right to reclaim and defend his land. During Fowlie’s absence, much of his land was sold via falsified titles or illegal squatting. Though Fowlie has already successfully reclaim much of his land in Costa Rican courts, his inability to enter Costa Rica has slowed down the progress of his legal defense in his dozens of cases and made legal processes less transparent. If allowed back into Pavones, he could direct his defense team much more efficiently, efficiency the government persists to prevent for no good reason.

Besides lacking all justification and aiding illegal land thievery, the banishment of Fowlie prevents him from significantly benefiting the people and land of Pavones. Since Fowlie’s absence, the local economy, forests, roads, and public health and safety have suffered. When Dan ran the local economy, he employed over eighty percent of the local population. Currently, Fowlie is collaborating with Parque Pavones del Pacifico to preserve Pavones as a private park and, thereby, leave it largely development free. Parque Pavones also has plans for a community northeast of Pavones, Playa Manzanillo, a residential and commercial development that blends with the natural beauty of the environment and fosters the economic welfare of residents in the region.ⁱⁱⁱ It’s hard to exaggerate the economic advantages this plan would provide Costa Rica’s South Pacific. It would provide jobs to all who presently lack them in the region, help youth who sell drugs for a living find better employment, and provide women with more economic opportunities than they currently share.

Parque Pavones also maintains the highest standards for conserving the forests and diverse aquatic life in the region. The collaborative agency between Fowlie and Parque Pavones has already saved Golfo Dulce, one of the most diverse biospheres in the world, from an environmental disaster. By preventing the implementation of a tuna-farming project by Granjas Atuneras de Golfito S.A., Parque Pavones’s political advocacy rescued from future peril dolphins, sea turtles, and more. Moreover, as Fowlie wins back his land and establishes it into private park, he will thereby preserve the emerald-green forests of Pavones from the deforestation of unplanned random construction.^iv Hence, this collaborative agency is essential to restoring Pavones to an economically prosperous and environmentally sound region. By donating his land to Parque Pavones, Fowlie wants to help people experience Pavones as he first saw it: a place where monkey-light jungle meets magical sea.

Regarding transportation and public health and safety, the roads have remained in disrepair ever since Dan’s absence, though he would doubtless maintain them if he returned just as he did so in the seventies and eighties after building the roads. In those days, Dan also refused to allow drugs in the cantina, and he fired a bartender for selling marijuana. Today, however, cocaine pervades the cantina in plastic straws behind the ears of local drug dealers. There have also recently been cases of rape, stabbings, and theft in the area, all without much of a deterrent of imprisonment due to the lack of an adequate detention center. Locals regret Pavones’s local inability to hold suspected violators before trial dates. In contrast to the government’s lack of assistance with these problems, Dan plans on working with Parque Pavones to maintain legal order by training government-certified park rangers and by building an adequate detention facility. When Fowlie returns, he also intends to build an adequate sewer-treatment facility to eliminate the stench and toxicity of improperly managed raw sewage in Pavones. When Fowlie lived in Pavones, he had it looking beautiful and running beautifully, and he would do so again, given the opportunity.

Given the real possibility of these significant advantages for the region, it’s no wonder that Pavones locals call for Fowlie’s return. Contrary to the ludicrous myth that the locals view Fowlie as some God because he once threw money out an airplane over Pavones, locals really know Dan as a proven means to their prosperity and as one who can effectively contribute to the worthy cause of helping Pavones flourish once again.

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                     i. A.M. Costa Rica staff. “Being Banned from here is a Surprise to Fowlie.” A.M. Costa Rica. Vol. 5, No. 112. 8 June 2005. Available at <http://www.amcostarica.com/060805.htm>.

                  ii. Tico Times staff. “Ex-Convict Returns to Claim Property.” The Tico Times. 10 June 2005. Reprinted from Explore Costa Rica.com. [Cited 1 February 2008]. Available at <http://www.explorecostarica.com/newsmanager/publish/printer_364.shtml>.

                  iii. Parque Pavones del Pacifico. [Internet]. [Cited 1 February 2008]. Available at <http://www.parquepavones.com/indexing.html>.

                  iv. Ibid.

"The Press's Prejudice against Fowlie's Unjust Drug Charges"

The Press’s Prejudice against Fowlie’s Unjust Drug Charges
By Justice Mendez

The public must trust the press as a source of accurate information. So it is particularly egregious when media accounts of events are based on faulty or inadequate research. Then, reporting’s air of informative objectivity simply ensnares our understandings in misinformation, and the resulting “news” piece becomes idle chatter that panders to the sensationalism that sells newspapers. The worst-case scenarios of media misinformation result when unfounded reports actually malign the character of individuals and, thereby, foster public prejudice: adverse opinions or leanings directed against individuals or their supposed characteristics without due knowledge or examination. The press then becomes responsible for these unjustified, unfavorable opinions of others that result in the public adopting irrational stances of hostility toward lambasted individuals. The most sinister aspect of this type of reporting is that it becomes next to impossible to counter the media’s erroneous statements because people tend to believe the “facts” the media reports.

Such unwelcome prejudice appears in the press’s continual treatment of Daniel Fowlie. Consider the Orange County Resister’s article (13 February 2008) about Fowlie’s “[f]ormer drug ranch” which “was a haven for a convicted marijuana and cocaine smuggler.” The article explains that in 1979 “Daniel Fowlie, a suspected pot kingpin linked to drug guru Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of [Eternal] Love, builds a house on Rancho del Rio” and that in 1985 “investigators raid the ranch [but] Fowlie escapes.”ⁱ Simply by reading the article, we have adopted an unfavorable opinion of Fowlie and his supposed kingpin characteristics without having the actual facts with which to render sound judgment.

In reality, these “reports” about Fowlie comprise nothing more than prejudicial fictions. Fiction number one: Fowlie was convicted of marijuana conspiracy charges; no charges or evidence in his case states that he was involved with cocaine or cocaine smuggling—contrary to the article’s unequivocal declaration. Second, though many stories have been told about Fowlie, this article takes first prize for the most wildly imaginative claim that Fowlie was linked to “Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of [Eternal] Love.” Readers should remain leery of this unfavorable rumor when it offers no supporting evidence and appears nowhere in Fowlie’s case- or court records. Nor did Fowlie “escape” the Sheriff’s raid as the article asserts (giving readers a third fiction that elicits an adverse opinion of Fowlie). Fowlie was not even in the country at the time of the California raid.

Not only do the article’s “facts” constitute pure prejudice against Fowlie; the actual case against Fowlie was on many accounts unjustified as well. In fact, it was originally thrown out of California courts “in the interest of justice.” Fowlie’s case began in 1985 when the local authorities recovered less than an ounce of marijuana in an illegal raid of Fowlie’s 214-acre ranch (Rancho Del Rio) on the Riverside section of the border between Orange County and Riverside County: illegal because the property was just outside the department’s jurisdiction, and probable cause remained questionable in later appeals. Fowlie, who lived in Costa Rica at the time, only visited the ranch several weeks each year and was visiting Mexico when he heard that his ranch had been raided. Since many friends and workers of Fowlie occupied the seven houses on the ranch at the time of the raid, it’s likelier that the small amount of marijuana belonged to them than to Fowlie. Amazingly, this single ounce found in California was the only hard evidence of marijuana ever brought against Fowlie.

The other “evidence” presented against Fowlie was the purchased testimonies of jailhouse informants—paid by the prosecution with reduced jail sentences, money, and/or immunity from prosecution. (Since the Singleton Case, the justice system has begun rescinding the questionable practice of buying testimonies from informants, a practice which gives informants a self-interested incentive to lie in order to avoid punishment). The prosecution also presented testimony of an officer who claimed that twenty boxes were found on the California ranch with marijuana residue in them. However, the prosecution could never produce the boxes or lab results confirming that the residue was cannabis. Fowlie attested that he used the boxes to collect grapes on his vineyard. Later assertions that Fowlie possessed tons of marijuana were merely induced from the capacity of these empty, elusive boxes.

In light of all these facts, in 1986 Judge McBride threw Fowlie’s case out of California courts “in the interest of justice”—leaving Fowlie free and clear from all charges.

Yet nothing but injustice was then served against Fowlie when the local authorities found a federal prosecutor to bring the discarded dry-conspiracy case to a federal judge, who allowed the illegal search in court. The federal court convicted Fowlie on the single ounce of pot, alleged (but never produced) boxes or lab tests, and the paid testimonies of informants. In 1987, Fowlie was convicted for marijuana-conspiracy charges in US federal courts, was then incarcerated in Mexico at the request of the US, extradited in 1990 to federal prison on Terminal Island, California, and then released in 2004 after serving eighteen years of a thirty-year sentence (a maximum sentence with good behavior at that time).

During his imprisonment, the authorities seized and manned Fowlie’s property for three years—living in Fowlie’s house, auctioning or looting all of his antiques, and shooting up all of Gus Fowlie’s Volkswagens, cars which Gus, Dan’s son, planned to restore into off-road racecars. Not only did Fowlie lose his ranch, now worth an estimated $22.5 million; he also lost nearly all his land in Pavones, Costa Rica, to illegal squatting during his imprisonment, land which Fowlie has been forced to win back through slow and costly legal processes.

As if Fowlie has not endured enough, uninformed Costa Rican and American newspapers continue to vilify him with their prejudicial, sensationalistic depictions of him as a former drug lord in California and Pavones. After all, Fowlie already maxed out a thirty-year- (and more-than-likely-unjust) sentence. Fowlie has more than paid his debt to society for less than one ounce of marijuana (found on a ranch he owned but did not occupy) and for the conspiracy inferred from paid informants and boxes that the prosecution lost. Continuing to misrepresent Fowlie’s case for the sake of selling newspapers not only conceals the reality of these events from readers—to their detriment—but seduces readers into prejudicially adopting irrational stances of hostility toward others—to the advantage of no one.

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i. Collins, Jeff. “Former Drug Ranch Resurfaces as Luxury Retreat.” Orange County Register. 13 February 2008. Accessible at <http://www.ocregister.com/articles/property-county-million-1979456-orange-schwartz>. [Last accessed 10 April 2008].

"How Daniel Fowlie Discovered, Procured, and Developed Pavones"

How Daniel Fowlie Discovered, Procured, and Developed Pavonesⁱ
By Justice Mendez

Dan operating the equiptment he brought into Pavones

When the people from the mountains behind Pavones hiked to the beach and discovered tractors connecting Pavones to the Red Road to Conte, they “had a big fiesta every year on that anniversary date to celebrate the road coming.”ⁱⁱ Yet, many fail to recognize the agent who

Walking into the cantina in the 80s

provided Costa Ricans with this occasion for celebration: not the Coast Rican government but American surfer and Pavones pioneer Daniel “Mack” Fowlie, who principally built Pavones (the gem of Costa Rica’s South Pacific) through years of self-financed and painstaking work. The road did not come from Conte. Fowlie constructed the road from Pavones to Conte, and he also built the present-day cantina, beach roads, bridges, hospitals,

The first school Dan built in Pavones

schools, and nearly every other public amenity in Pavones. Thus far, the facts about this region’s early stage of improvement have been obscured by the stuff of legends. So how did this gringo Danny “Mack” actually discover, procure, and develop Pavones?

Pavones was named after a peacock-like bird called the Pavones (a Pava Royal), which has nearly become extinct because, purportedly, it’s also tasty. No less peculiar a beginning belongs to the story of Fowlie’s discovery of Pavones. Fowlie first heard about this paradise from the infamous Kenny Easton: a bodysurfer, fisherman, diver, and all-around beach rat who socialized with Fowlie and other chief water men of Pacific Beach (PB) and La Jolla in the early sixties, still the dawn of California surfing. From a broken family, Kenny lived with his grandfather in PB. One night, Kenny came home drunk, and his outraged grandfather began to abuse him with punches to the

Big  bugs and Dan

face and body. Kenny defended himself but accidentally killed his grandfather in the process, consequently serving a minimum term for manslaughter. Fowlie won Easton an early release from prison as Easton’s employer in the mid sixties, hiring Kenny as a line tender for Fowlie’s

Kenny Easton (left)

commercial abalone operation in Santa Barbara. That Abalone season, Kenny told stories about a perfect wave that he had discovered before imprisonment, a left point break that wrapped endlessly around the southeast shorelines of Golfo Dulce.

Kenny discovered the wave while working as a copra (or coconut) harvester in Costa Rica. After harvesting copra all along the shorelines of Golfo Dulce, the small group, on their five mules and five horses, headed to Golfito (near the southwest corner of Costa Rica or southeast shoreline of Golfo Dulce), where they set camp and sold the sweet coconut meat. Years later as Fowlie’s line tender, Kenny reminisced about a wave that he claimed to bodysurf for blocks. In all likelihood, bodysurfer Kenny Easton was the first person ever to ride the legendary waves at Pavones, some of the best waves on the planet.

In 1974, Fowlie (41 at the time) decided to find these waves himself, so he brought his adolescent son Dan and son’s two

Dan Junior, Central American surfing champion in the '80s

friends on

Michelle Fowlie at Rancho Del Rio

a surf vacation to Costa Rica. He left with the dream of buying some of the land Kenny spoke of because at this time Fowlie wanted to

Dan Junior getting shacked

move his children away from what he thought had become an unruly party-and-crime scene in Laguna Beach. 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. Fowlie had also been advised at this time to close his prosperous leather business, Leather Gypsy Inc., before an oncoming recession, when such markets usually suffer. Reckoning that beachfront property was his next profitable investment, he saved the millions that he had made selling leather clothing and accessories to over 3,000 international stores and boutiques for his new venture to buy and develop some of Pavones’s legendary shoreline, if it indeed lived up to Easton’s stories.

Contrary to legend, Dan did not discover Pavones by boat; he and the kids rented an Aztec airplane from Pat Hatch in San Jose and spotted the wave on a big swell from the air. (Hence, the first gringos did not arrive at Pavones in 1978, as Luz Marina Martinez,

Looking out Dan's plane window over Pavones

who arrived there in 1976, erroneously recounts; Kenny Easton arrived there much earlier, and Fowlie arrived in 1974).ⁱⁱⁱ Ecstatic to locate the source of Kenny’s constant reveries, Dan had the pilot drop them off in Golfito, and, wasting no time, Fowlie inquired at the cantinas into who owned the beach property. The locals referred him to Claudio Lobo (or Cullo). Fowlie found Cullo in a Golfito bar that night drinking a few beers.

Cullo owned about 100 hectares (or about 250 acres) of beachfront property in Pavones and owned and operated the crude sawmill. During these extremely rural days of Pavones, only about thirty families lived in the whole area, both in the mountains and by the beach, and the only way to get to Pavones was by boat, either from the sea via Golfo Dulce or from Golfito via river. Because Pavones lacked roads at that time, people traveled by horseback or mule, and they did so only at low tide because the tide rose to solid jungle, a fact necessitating a great deal of night travel.

Asked if he wanted to sell the property, Senior Lobo replied that he would sell for the right price. Fowlie recounts that Lobo wanted some time to think about actually selling, but during that very first meeting, Dan gave Cullo $10,000 and got a provisional bill of sale for the property, a bill which left open the possibility that Dan would purchase the property for more after viewing it. They

Mike Hynson and Dan Junior

scheduled an appointment to see the beach the next morning, but it took several days before Cullo found Dan at his rental. When Cullo finally arrived, the family that was so anxious to surf finally got its chance after a 2-hour outboard-canoe ride across the Golfito Bay, the La Trocha, and then the mouth of the Rio Coto to Pavones. According to Fowlie, Cullo said that he had only seen a couple of people, including a German named Winford, surf there before Fowlie and the kids. Fowlie rode boards shaped by his friend Mike Hynson of the first Endless Summer.

After viewing the remote and rugged property, where untamed jungle met perfect waves, Dan drew up a deal with Cullo to buy the entire ranch, including the crude sawmill, for $30,000. Worth millions today, this prime chunk of Pavones sold for today’s price of a modest automobile! (Dan remarks that he bought Cu

Claudio Lobo in the new sawmill built by Fowlie

llo’s sawmill in order to better preserve the magnificent old trees and growth from deforestation). From 1974 to 1981, Fowlie purchased every beachfront ranch and beach concession from Rio Manzanillo to Punta Banco; only four Pavones land owners refused to sell. These purchases gave Fowlie over fifteen miles of beach-concession land and over eighty percent of Pavones, land which he still legally owns today. As it would turn out, Dan Fowlie was just what the people of Pavones needed.

Rancho Del Mar and Fowlie compound in 1980 after development by Fowlie

 

The kids’ trip lasted about a month, during which time Dan and they lived in Golfito, camped on the Pavones beaches, and began importing building materials from San Jose. By the summer of 1974, Dan had moved 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 tower and power plant.

Dan's water-tower house, where Mike Hynson stayed when he visited Pavones

Dan Junior's house right on the point at Rio Claro in 1974

Dan's house under construction in front of Sawmill break 1974

First transportaion for Rancho Del Mar

      At first, importing materials from Golfito to Pavones by dug-out canoes through the La Trocha to the mouth of the Rio Coto was incredibly arduous work. As Fowlie recalls, one time when he was bringing horses to Pavones for beach transportation, having blindfolded and bound their legs in the canoes, one horse rejected the idea in the middle of the river and began kicking violently, a scene which could have cost the horse its life had Dan not been able to calm the animal. After time, Fowlie built large barges to supply the beach with tractors, road graders, and other farming and construction equipment.

One of Fowlie's barges

Building one of Fowlie's barges

One of Fowlie's tractors

From 1974 to the mid eighties, Fowlie employed almost every Pavones local, and together they built the soccer field, churches, two airports, medical center, several schools, twenty miles of beach roads, and the road connecting Pavones to Conte. Virtually

Agronomist John Hall

nothing was there before Dan built it. He also taught the people how to earn a living through farming. Together, they planted myriads of crops and trees—including coco, pine, balsa, fruits, and different rice species. Occasionally, Fowlie even played the role of local doctor by setting broken bones and distributing antidotes for venomous snake bites. Memorably, Dan put on a festive luau every month with Hawaiian-style pig roasts and musicians on the xylophone or steel drums, and before the luau, he always held a daytime turno (or “rodeo”) for the kids. The people of Pavones enjoyed these prosperous times very much, and many of them went on to begin their own farming businesses with the skills they learned with Fowlie. In those days, the Pavones people became not only Dan’s friends but also his family.

Experimental crops

Chico Gomez, Jimmy Obubo, Rory Russell, and Dan Fowlie at a cantina luau (from left to right)

During this golden age of Pavones, when Fowlie lived there from 1974-1985, everyone who wanted a job had one, and the roads were always kempt. Ironically, gringo Dan Fowlie did more for the people of Pavones than the Golfito municipality ever managed. In Fowlie’s absence, the municipality has let the roads deteriorate, let the people fend for themselves economically, and let squatting and random construction strip Pavones’s emerald-green forests from each fence line to the next. No wonder the people of Pavones do everything possible to secure Fowlie's return. 

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               i. Much of the information in this essay is based on a series of interviews with Daniel “Mack” Fowlie: Daniel Fowlie, “Interviews with Daniel Fowlie.” Interviews by Justice Mendez. December 2007-February 2008.

               ii. Quotation is from “excerpts from interviews with Senor Jose Antonio Sandi conducted by author Anne Weston in the summers of 2003 and 2004.” “As Promised—Pavones, Costa Rica.” [E-mail]. Subject line: “Pavones History.” Message to Daniel Fowlie and Pavones Surf School. 12 December 2007. 12:01 a.m. PST. [Cited 11 February 2008].

               iii. [Internet]. [Last accessed 23 August 2007, cited 11 February 2008]. Text-only cache accessed from <http://www.cantinapavones .com/history.htm>.

"My Brother’s Early Days: A Portrait of a Precocious Entrepreneur"

 My Brother’s Early Days: A Portrait of a Precocious Entrepreneur
By Dan Fowlie’s Sister

To the Editor of the Surfer’s Journal:

I have observed that the Surfer’s Journal, unlike other surfing magazines, frequently presents the reader with the historical perspective as it relates to featured surfers and surfing in general. I commend your efforts in this regard as well because it is important to capture the stories and history of surfing particularly through those that experienced it in its infancy. Since the early pioneers in this sport are aging rapidly, your contribution to the historical perspective becomes more significant at this point in time! As my brother Daniel Fowlie is one of these pioneers, I thought you might be interested in knowing more about him and his real life

Dan in the '40s

adventures, particularly as they relate to surfing. Danny is the builder of the famed Cantina and owner of the majority of property known as Pavones in Costa Rica.

Danny arrived in Pacific Beach, CA, from Minneapolis, MN, in 1941 with his mother Valerie and sister Pat. Valerie married James Mack, an engineer at Convair Vultee Aircraft (later known as Consolidated Aircraft and as General Dynamics), and they added two more girls to the family, our sister Barbara and me. Because I am ten years younger than Dan, I had to enlist his help in putting this perspective together, as my memories of him start when he was around fifteen.

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. Before he was ten years old, he was trapping skunk, rabbits, and coyotes in the canyons so he could sell their pelts to Sears Roebuck for fifty cents to a dollar per pelt. He had spent a summer with our mom’s logger relatives on the Minnesota/Canadian border where they made extra money by selling pelts to various buyers, including Sears. San Diego would have seemed an unlikely place to many for that venture, but that did not stop Danny from seeing the potential at a very young age. He was a true entrepreneur long before the word was in common usage.

Danny was always in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which was just six blocks from our home in Pacific Beach (or PB as the locals call it). He loved to dive, surf, and fish. He would be up before dawn and bring home a catch of lobsters and abalone before

Chuck Snell and Dan in late '40s

school started. After school, he would peddle his cooked or cleaned (and pounded for the abalone) catch to restaurants in Bird Rock or La Jolla. 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.

In his senior year of high school, Danny would charge admission to our back yard and would show homemade surfing movies of local spots as well as films produced at Makaha. The price of admission would include a steak (Palomino filet from a local pet shop), salad, and beer, and the back yard would be standing room only. I remember the parties getting pretty loud and everybody having a really good time. Dan sponsored the surfing movies several times, each time raising the price to try to cut down on the crowd, but each time the crowds increased despite the higher admission price. By the time Danny was in his late teens, he would frequently make more in a week on his many business ventures than our engineer father made the entire year.

Unfortunately, from his English-classroom window at La Jolla High School, Danny could see the breaks at Windansea. When

Windansea today

he saw they were big, he would play hooky and surf the remainder of the day. Clearly, if the surf was up, he would be surfing; if there was no swell, he would be diving, and if the ocean was in between rough and calm, he would be fishing. By 1951, he had saved enough money to go to Hawaii, where he spent the winter surfing and making surfboards.

Because Dan was also exceptionally gifted with electronics, he was hired at an aircraft plant in San Diego with his buddy Jr. Knox. There, Danny was exposed to new applications of a material called fiberglass, was immediately impressed, and saw the potential for improving the fiberglass application on balsa surfboards. He had learned to surf on a lightweight hollow board built by Bob Simmons. It had rounded redwood rails and a scooped-up nose (typical of the Simmons shape), and it weighed less than fifty pounds. Simmons, who was the great board innovator of the time, was buying war-surplus balsa life rafts. He would cut and shape surfboards from them and apply a thin coat of fiberglass. The trend at this time was to make surfboards lighter, smaller, and more buoyant, and the Simmons boards were down to thirty to forty pounds.

In his typical way, Danny saw an opportunity, did some research, and launched a successful business. (Remember, he was just seventeen or eighteen at this time). He found that he could go to a wood supplier in Los Angeles, General Veneer, where he could hand pick through the bundles and find the lightest pieces of balsa to build his own boards. In 1951, he had assembled enough light balsa wood to make about twelve to fifteen boards. He made several bundles, went to the docks in Long Beach, and shipped them to himself in Honolulu “will call.” He discovered that Thalco in Los Angeles was the only company in CA that sold the relatively new material, fiberglass. They also sold resin. The “old” application process required adding a two-part catalyst to the resin, a yellow powder, and a purple liquid that was stirred into the resin, and then it required putting it in the sunlight or heating it to about 85 to 95 degrees so that it would harden. In the winter, it was very difficult to get the boards to harden correctly. Glassing technology was still in its infancy. Danny says he can remember the new resin and catalyst he took with him to Hawaii. It was a one-part mix and was a yellow powder called Sunshine Catalyst. He remembers setting the rails up toward the sun and then turning to the other rail and then to the flat bottom or top. If you left the board in the sun too long, the resin would bubble and the board would have permanent blisters that had to be sanded out and re-resined.

Danny talked about his first trip to Hawaii in 1951with Jr. Knox where they shared a $32-dollar-a-month apartment on Koa Street across the parking lot and street (Kula Kula Blvd) from the Waikiki Surf Club. Jr. Knox was

Bob Card's and Walt Hoffman's cars at Makaha 1951

Danny’s diving buddy,

Makaha 1952

and he was a more proficient diver than surfer. However, Jr.’s brother Carl Knox was the surfer in the family and a member of the Windansea Surf Club.

Junior Knox and Dan

It was Carl who owned the hollow Simmons board that Danny learned to surf on, and it was Carl who had surfed Hawaii with his friend Billy Males before Dan went there. Billy Males had an unfortunate surfing accident that cost him his life. While swimming to retrieve his own board, he was hit on the back of his by a kook on a hollow board. His body was recovered by a

Joey Cabell, Squirrelly, Buddy Boy Brown (on Squirrelly's Shoulders), and Dan at a beach funeral

group of twenty beach boys, one of whom was Rabbit Kaki. Carl returned to La Jolla with Billy’s ashes.

That winter in Hawaii, Danny retrieved the balsa wood he had sent from the docks in Long Beach and started his business. He shaped all the boards by hand since there was no

Making boards on Waikiki Beash

power equipment available. He used a hand saw, draw knives, and hand planes, as well as a few occasional strokes of an ax. Danny was one of the first to draw pictures, names, and designs on boards and then glass in the colors. He used chalk because it wouldn’t run or smear when the resin was applied. Danny also built a number of boards for Walt Hoffman and Dave Mogges’ rental business in 1952. They rented the boards to tourists at Waikiki.

Danny is a talented fine artist, and 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. A few years ago, I read a comment by Mike Diffendurfer in which he said he had not made his first board but rode a Danny Mack board with a tiki chalked on its deck.

Allen Gomes, Squirrelly, Joey Cabell, and Fowlie making boards

      Danny said he was not the first to build light balsa boards in Hawaii. He gives credit to Mat Kivlin and Dave Rockland for making what the Hawaiians called Malibu Boards. Joey Cabell was a fast growing kid on the beach at that time and had outgrown the board Mat had made for him.

Squirrelly and Dan 1951 Hawaii

Joey did not like the board at first, but his buddy Squirrley, who was taller, liked the board because it fit him better. Joey eventually grew into the board.

Later in 1952, Danny was drafted and served time on the front lines during the Korean War in the 25^th Tropic Lightening Division. When the war was over in 1954, Danny had advanced to Operations and Intelligence Sergeant of the 27^th Battalion of the 25^th Combat Division. He was sent home in the advance party to the 25^th Division base in Hawaii. He said that Walt Hoffman was still there serving his time in the Coast Guard, as well as a host of other surfers.

Dan in Army 1953

Danny spent seven more months in Hawaii until he was discharged from the service in California

Fowlie, surfing the shore break at Makaha, on the cover of Sports Illustrated

in 1954. During the seven months he was in Hawaii, he was only required to spend two of the months on the base. He took two thirty-day vacations and, because the advance party had little to do until the rest of the troops arrived, he had plenty of time for surfing and diving. He also managed to be featured on the cover and in the centerfold of Sports Illustrated surfing the shore break at Makaha in the October 18, 1954, issue.

In 1954, Danny subdivided a parcel of property that he had purchased in 1949 (at the age of sixteen) with the inheritance he had received upon the death of his father, Dan Fowlie Sr. The property had been surveyed by Pat Curran and his surveyor father. The property overlooked La Jolla Shores from an area referred to as Hidden Valley. Danny sold the first lot from his subdivision for more money than he had paid for the entire parcel. The attorneys who distributed Dan’s father’s assets had opened an offshore account for Dan and instructed him to keep his liquid assets offshore. Danny followed their instructions and sent his profits to the offshore account.

During this period, Danny resumed his commercial diving for abalone, which was possible only on six-to-eight good diving days per month. Again, he had plenty of time for the beach and surfing, along with his share of partying. In

Dan's three children

September of 1955, Danny enrolled in Orange Coast College in Newport Beach to study petroleum technology under the GI Bill. He was feeling prosperous from his success in his diving and subdivision ventures. He purchased a new Cadillac convertible and rented a house on Lido Island. On one of his first days at the College, he was surprised to run into his old friend Joey Cabell, who also attended Orange Coast, and even more surprised to note that Joey had doubled in size. In his senior year, Dan entered into a successful partnership in Orange County with one of his petroleum-class teachers buying and selling oil leases. He again sent his profits to his offshore bank. That same year, he was introduced to Miss Newport Beach. They were married and eventually had three children, Dan Jr., Gus, and Michelle. He continued with his abalone diving and fishing whenever he had the time.

He divorced in the sixties and started several companies, one of which became Leather Gypsy Inc., a very successful venture designing and manufacturing leather purses, belts, wallets, and shoes. The company grossed millions of dollars a year in ladies’ hand bags, selling to over three thousand national stores and boutiques. One of his employees at that time, Jay (Sparky) Longley, is still profiting from his experience with Danny. Jay advertises his Rainbow Sandals regularly in Surfer Magazine and the Surfer’s Journal. When Danny closed down his Leather Gypsy business, he designed and drew a set of patterns for Sparky in 1974. Dan told Jay that if he rented a small shop, was the first guy to manufacture a great sandal, and used good materials, it would be a good business for life because it would be the first great sandal to be sold in the marketplace. The name “Rainbow” came from the multi-colored rubber that Danny used to construct the first pair of sandals, an idea he had copied from Roger Van De Vanter, a famous shoe maker in Laguna Beach who used multi-colored rubber in his elevated shoe. Sparky had seen Dan’s success, believed in his idea, and capitalized on the suggestions, and he has been successful in the business since 1974.

After shutting down his leather business in 1974, Dan started buying beachfront property at Pavones, Costa Rica, an area that was home to four or five exceptional goofy-foot breaks. Dan, always the entrepreneur, saw the potential interest in owning property at a surf spot with a perfect left and believed the coastal property would eventually be worth millions. Danny lived in Pavones and San Jose,

House Dan bought from Vasco in San Jose

the capital of Costa Rica, from 1974-1981. He purchased the home of Robert Vesco, the fugitive financier, in 1976 at a deep discount price before Mr. Vesco was ordered out of Costa Rica. Danny spent a few days a week in the Vesco house and had a warehouse in La Ruca for his equipment sales and repair business in the industrial area of San Jose. When Dan had discovered that it was nearly impossible to buy or lease the equipment necessary for any construction project in Central America, he immediately sought out and obtained the distributorship rights for Yanmar (which specialized in light industrial equipment), Mikita power tools, and Fuji Roben, which produced generators, machinery, and other power equipment.

During these years, Danny was also very active on the farms he was buying in the Pavones area. Danny designed and built barges to haul heavy equipment and fuel to Pavones. Then he designed and built roads, bridges, schools, and churches. The community grew and prospered. During that time, he employed eighty percent of the Pavones workforce. Danny also employed several agronomists and conducted studies on fruit trees in the area. He planted thousands of trees, including balsa, coco, all the citrus varieties, avocado and other tropical fruits, and acres of rice.

Dan Fowlie Junior, Jimmy Obubo, Buttons, Frank Bruder, and John Akin at a cantina luau (from left to right)

          Dan also enjoyed the waves at Pavones. The good breaks include “the River” (Rio Claro), “The Esquina” (Cantina Break), “The Sawmill” (Rancho Del Mar), “Pavone,” and “Pilon.” The waves start at the river and recycle themselves through all the breaks, all great to surf. In the early years, Danny was able to keep his secret surfing spot void of all surfing crowds. Only a select handful of his friends and the friends of his children were invited to surf at what had been proclaimed as “the best hotdog wave in the world” by Buttons and Rory Russell. Spider Wells and Greg Weaver filmed the history and surf action of Pavones in 1978, 1980, ’81, and ’82, but Danny did not allow the films public showings in those years. However, during Danny’s long-term vacation at the federal resorts of the US Government, the surfers and the conmen converged at Pavones.

Danny and his Costa Rican attorneys claim title to most of the land and Cantina in the Pavones region. All the local Tico squatters and residents know very well that the property belongs to Danny. A number of the squatters (not including the organized Communist squatters that are still there) are willing to give the property back to Danny because they know he was once responsible for the only real prosperity and progress they have ever enjoyed and know that he generously improved the area specifically for their benefit.

Those who purchased parcels of Danny’s property after his incarceration knew there was a cloud on the title of the registered lots they “purchased” from the conmen of the eighties and nineties. All of the new owners knew the prices that they paid were too low to be legitimate. All were warned by local ticos and resident gringos that they were buying land that belonged to Danny and not to the conmen “owners.” Most of the conmen have taken their profits from the “innocent” buyers and left the area. Of course, some buyers remain in denial that their title is clouded. Danny believes that the courts will render all these “buyers” very disappointed when the land is ordered returned to its real owner. Many of the foreigners only have a local title from the municipality of Golfito, where recently a half dozen municipal officers were jailed for taking bribes in exchange for registered titles and beach concessions. The majority of the property involved in the officials’ charges legally belongs to Danny (who has been paying taxes on the property since 1974).

On several occasions over the years the Nacion newspaper (as above notification) has published warnings like this in Spanish: "Warning of Disputed Property." Please note the red line from Zancudo to Punta Banco where Fowlie's land is located. No title insurance will be issued until now to Exclusive Pavones Property clients only.

Allan Weisbecker’s article “A Night at the Cantina,” which appeared in volume 13, 2^nd edition of the Surfer’s Journal had a few of the facts incorrect, which I thought I would correct. Danny was in Pavones in 1985, and on his way back to the US, he stopped in Mexico to purchase a beachfront ranch and was notified that the Orange County Sheriff wanted his ranch in Riverside County. The Sheriff was able to get permission for an illegal search of the ranch and found less than one ounce of marijuana on the compound where there were seven houses and where Dan did not even live at the time. The case was dismissed by Judge McBride in the interest of justice in 1986. The DEA mentioned in the article was never involved. I hope this letter is a positive addition to your continued efforts in presenting the historical background to the great sport of surfing.

"Pavones Surf and Travel Facts"

Pavones Surf and Travel Facts

  Pavones, considered one of the best lefts in the world, thrives on South Pacific swells, which affect the area’s point breaks to

Dan Junior getting shacked

perfection, but the waves also break on north swells in the rainy winter (especially in October and November), north swells that sometimes produce partially closed-out twenty-foot waves. The long summer between January and April is hotter than the moderate summer between May and June. And it

Dan junior riding the waves at Pavones

rains more in the long winter between September to November than in the short winter of July and August. Spring begins in December. The waves break best and most consistently in the summer—especially in April and May—but Pavones is somewhat unpredictable, seeing overhead waves in every month of the year and sometimes going as long as a month without waves. The waves always break close to shore over a cobblestone bottom, and hold downs are very forgiving. Fish are often seen exploding out of the water, chased by rooster fish, and sharks are rarely seen and never a problem. The water temperature typically remains between 85-90 degrees and drops only to 82 degrees in winter. Don’t bring a wetsuit; just pack a rash guard, a vest at most for morning or evening sessions, and a sweatshirt for the chilly nights. The waves are always glassy in the morning but typically develop a little bump in the afternoon, yet winds haven’t blown over twenty knots in twenty years. On rare occasions, offshore winds blow in the rainy winter, sweeping all the pesky bugs to the beach from the jungle.

 When it comes to Pavones’s many surf breaks, gringo newcomers call the break at Rio Claro (which connects to the Esquina break in front of the cantina) “Pavones,” but the real Pavones break—one of the longest (albeit softer) waves in the area—is actually farther north past the Sawmill break and just before Pilon. Few people actually surf the real Pavones break because it’s hidden from the road, which passes it, so you have to hike along the beach to find it. The entire area is a tropical paradise where the exotic jungle meets pristine shorelines, which thrive with iguanas, monkeys, parrots, and red and blue macaws. Sunsets after rainstorms light up the evening sky with a psychedelic green light that locals call monkey light because it brings to life strange monkey howls and bird songs from the jungle. And those elusive green-flash sunsets can be seen almost daily during the rainy season at Pavones.

"History of Pavones"

History of Pavones
By Justice Mendez

When the first Costa Rican families ventured to homestead the remote, unoccupied area of Pavones in the sixties, the Boruca Indians had already departed the region for the Talamanca Mountains or elsewhere to establish their reserves, leaving behind only their gold-strewn graves, which early homesteaders eventually looted. Only twenty to thirty Costa Rican families occupied the vast region surrounding Pavones when American Daniel Fowlie, who principally bought and developed the region of Pavones, arrived there in 1974. A two-hour-minimum boat ride from Golfito (through Golfito Bay, down the La Trocha, and across the Rio Coto) separated Pavones’s raw land from civilization.

In the early sixties, San Diegan body surfer Kenny Easton, who grew up diving and surfing La Jolla with Fowlie during the dawn of California surfing, became the first surfing foreigner to find Pavones and first person to ride its now legendary waves. He moved to Costa Rica to

Dan with ofer 3,000 pounds of big lobster

harvest copra and then found Pavones while harvesting the coconuts on Golfo Dulce’s eastern shorelines and selling them in Golfito. Pavones appeared totally uninhabited to him, and virtually no one lived there who might have seen him. The few families who occupied Pavones in the sixties and seventies preferred the place for its fertile, self-sustaining, and unclaimed land, which neighbors twenty fresh-water rivers and is conducive to practices of raising cattle and pigs and growing fruit trees, rice, and beans. Though land conflicts inevitably arose among early settlers of this open frontier, squatters were few, so existence was halcyon—like the morning glass on undiscovered waves. The stories Kenny told Fowlie (fishing out at sea) about Pavones’s perfect waves left Fowlie with the lingering dream of following Easton’s treasure map to paradise.

When Fowlie followed Kenny’s map ten years later in 1974, hoping to move to Pavones if it lived up to Easton’s stories, Fowlie immediately inquired in the Golfito cantinas about the beach property, and that very night Fowlie found Claudio Lobo (who owned the 250 acres Fowlie later called Rancho Del Mar) drinking beer in a Golfito saloon. That same night,

Town of Golfito 1976

Fowlie got provisional bill of sale from Cullo for the property, and within a few days, Fowlie had seen the property and bought the whole parcel and rudimentary sawmill for

Rancho Del Mar, Fowlie's first property

$30,000. One by one, the other beach owners approached Fowlie to sell pieces of their land. From 1974 to 1982, Fowlie purchased every beachfront ranch and beach concession from Rio Manzanillo to Punta Banco. Only four of the original twenty owners refused to sell, including Dan’s friend Herman Vargas (a gentlemanly Costa Rican who wanted to keep his homesteaded land to raise cattle but who since died). These purchases gave Fowlie over fifteen miles of beach-concession land and over eighty percent of Pavones, land which Fowlie legally owns today with legitimate title because he bought the land from its original Costa Rican homesteaders. 

By the summer of 1974, Dan had moved his family into huts he constructed on the beach and had begun employing almost every local to build essentially every public amenity found in Pavones today 

Argonomist John Hall

(including the roads, schools, new sawmill, and new cantina). They also planted more

Exparimental cocoa project

than 200,000 trees—over 60,000 of which trees squatters have since destroyed. Fowlie hired several agronomists, including Costa Rican residents Dr. Bull Hunter and John Hall, to develop nurseries, teach locals how to farm, and develop experimental balsa and cocoa trees by hybridizing varieties from all over the world. Knee boarder Tom O’Neil (of the O’Neil wetsuits family) also worked for Fowlie for a time and planted thousands of palm trees from Rancho Del Mar south to Rio Claro and north to Rio Manzanillo.

  In 1976, Fowlie rebuilt the makeshift cantina, previously owned by a local tico named Alvaro. Alvaro had bought a little land from Juan Mendoza, gotten a beer license, and put 

First schoolhouse in Pavones, built by Dan

up little a shack. Fowlie bought the whole setup from Alvaro for $1,000 dollars and immediately built the present-day cantina, which became a gathering place for all the local families and home of regular luaus and dances

Cantina after rebuilt by Fowlie in 1976

for the local adults and children. Fowlie later hired Francisco (or Chico) Gomez as the cantinero, but when Fowlie was afterward imprisoned, Gomez became one of the richest men in Pavones by selling Fowlie’s cantina to gringo Sam Claiborne. Fowlie personally informed Claiborne by phone from prison that the cantina was not for sale, but Claiborne continues to profit off both Fowlie’s land and cantina, while Fowlie unwinds the cantina’s illegal sale in courts.  

Absolutely no police presence existed in Pavones in the days before Fowlie or 

A squatter's shack being burned down by locals when Dan was imprisoned

Typical living quarters, built by Fowlie on Rancho Del Mar

during Fowlie’s time in Pavones from 1974-1985, and the gradual influx of squatters made Pavones’s west even wilder. Many people carried guns and machetes for protection. When Dan left Costa Rica on occasion, he’d often return to find that squatters had built shacks on his property and cut down spreads of trees in order plant more familiar crops, a practice which left the locals who had labored planting the trees heart broken over the loss of their work. Without help from the law, locals just gathered a posse on horseback to go rattle their machetes at the squatters. Since squatters usually hid away from their shacks out of fear of landowners, locals simply burned down the shacks or pulled them down with tractors. Only on a few occasions did Fowlie elicit help from The Rural Guard to perform a desalojo (or eviction). Yet, law breakers were rarely jailed for more than a few days in Golfito because the municipality had so little budget for incarceration. The detention facility in Golfito was so crude, in fact, that suspects regularly escaped. Even Fowlie’s ex wife, whom the Golfito police detained after a bar skirmish, managed to sneak out of jail and meet Fowlie on the road before he could pay off the guards, who never pursued the matter further.

When the surf was flat in Pavones, you’d find Fowlie working with the locals on one of their many planting or building projects. When the swell rose, he enjoyed the company of no more than ten surfers in the water, a group composed of his son and son’s friends, of locals they taught how to surf, or aspiring surfers (like Buttons, Pat Curran, and Rory Russell, all of whom Fowlie knew from his surfing and shaping days in California and Hawaii in the forties and fifties). Fowlie also invited early surf cinematographers Spyder Wills and Greg Weaver to document the waves at Pavones between 1976 and 1982. They created hundreds of recordings during their extended visits, some of which footage the surf documentary Chasing the Lotus features and more of which footage Love Machine Films’ forthcoming documentary about Pavones’s history plans to display.

A German could have actually become the king of Pavones before Fowlie did, but fortune fated otherwise. German surfer and sailor Winford Zeegen (the second surfing visitor to Pavones) arrived there in 1973—one year before Fowlie and ten years after Kenny Easton. Zeegen purportedly fled from problems in Germany to Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast and then traveled as far away from the Atlantic as possible, ending up in the remotest South Pacific portion of Costa Rica: Pavones. In exchange for $200 dollars, Winford got a handwritten note from a local landowner at Rio Claro, Marcella Mendoza, that gave Winford permission to erect a shack on a little piece of property for not more than a year. Winford had found his temporary sanctuary. Fowlie, however, bought

Winford Zeegen

the entire ranch from Marcella and then declined Winford’s request to keep his shack there because Winford had failed to complete a paid sailing mission for Dan. Dan had hired Winford to replace a sailboat’s engine in San Diego, but Winford had sailed the boat only as far as Mexico and returned the sailboat in worse condition. While Fowlie was still in Costa Rica, Winford claimed to own the property and then illegally sold it to Steve Love—though the handwritten note from Marcella had long since expired and all the land had been legally purchased by Fowlie. Love tried to obtain the concession for the municipality, but Fowlie (possessing Winford’s original note from Marcella) presented the note to the municipality, which denied Love’s concession request, so Love just walked away from the property. Later when Fowlie was institutionalized, Zeegen sold the same piece of land again to Alex (owner of the Pavones surf shop). Alex successfully obtained the concession from the municipality, which failed to grant Fowlie his legal right to defend his beach leases, though he has always paid taxes for them. Fowlie plans on reclaiming all the land he bought from Marcella and from every other original landowner, including the parcel sold illegally by Winford. Sadly, in the early nineties, Winford was found dead by his boat on an island in Panama; he had been badly beaten and his boat looted.

In 1987, the tides of fortune then turned against Fowlie when he was convicted for marijuana-conspiracy charges in US federal courts, was then incarcerated in Mexico at the request of the US, later extradited to federal prison on Terminal Island, California, in

Rancho Del Rio

1990, and then released in 2004 after serving eighteen years of a thirty-year sentence. The case against Fowlie began in 1985 when local authorities recovered less than an once of marijuana in a raid of  Fowlie’s 214-acre ranch, Rancho Del Rio, on the

Dan's Vineyard at Rancho Del Rio in Orange County, CA

boarder of Orange County and Riverside County in California. Fowlie did not live on the property at the time of raid; he generally lived in Pavones and was visiting Mexico when he heard that his ranch had been raided. Since many friends and workers of Fowlie occupied the seven houses on the ranch during the raid, it’s likelier that the small amount of marijuana belonged to them. Yet amazingly, this single ounce found in California was the only hard evidence or marijuana brought against Fowlie. Contrary to sensationalist depictions of Fowlie, nothing ever suggested that he ran drug operations in Pavones or elsewhere. The other pieces of “evidence” leveled against Fowlie were the purchased testimonies of informants (paid by the prosecution with reduced jail sentences) and the testimony of an officer who claimed that twenty boxes were found on the California ranch with marijuana residue in them. However, the prosecution could never produce the boxes or lab results confirming that the residue was cannabis, and Fowlie attested that he used the boxes to collect grapes on his vineyard. Later assertions that Fowlie possessed tons of marijuana were simply induced from the alleged capacity of these empty, elusive boxes. In light of all these facts, in 1986 Judge McBride threw Fowlie’s case out of California courts “in the interest of justice”—leaving Fowlie free and clear from all charges.

Yet nothing but injustice was then served against Fowlie when the local authorities found a federal prosecutor to bring the discarded dry-conspiracy case to a federal judge, who allowed the illegal search in court. The federal court managed to convict Fowlie with just the single once of pot, alleged boxes, and paid testimonies. The authorities then seized and manned Fowlie’s property for three years—living in Fowlie’s house, auctioning or looting all of his antiques, and shooting up all of Gus Fowlie’s Volkswagens, cars which Dan’s son planed to restore into off-road racecars. Not only did Fowlie lose his ranch, worth an estimated 22.5 million today; he also lost nearly all of his Pavones land to illegal squatting during his imprisonment, land which Fowlie has been forced to win back through slow and costly legal processes. As if Fowlie has not endured enough, uninformed Costa Rican and American newspapers continue to vilify him with their prejudicial (i.e., adverse and unwarranted) depictions of him as a former drug lord in Pavones and California.

The story worsens. After waiting eighteen years to return to Pavones, Fowlie’s dream of living there again was shattered. In June 2005, Costa Rica’s Director General of Immigration Marco Badilla exiled Fowlie from Costa Rica for purposes of public safety on the basis of reports that Fowlie’s brief return to Pavones after his release from prison caused public fear and disorder in the region. However, the source and legitimacy of these reports of disturbances remain completely dubious. All extant evidence proves that Dan’s visit was “muy tranquillo,” as the local police commented in official reports during Dan’s return. Fowlie, convinced that land thieves would harm his efforts to reacquire his land by planting contraband on him, hired an unarmed Costa Rican drug-enforcement agent to accompany him at all times during Fowlie’s visit, and this agent also testifies to Dan’s good behavior. The only discernable allegation of violence in circulation contends that Fowlie threatened one of Chico Gomez’s “children”—not the best fabrication because the “child” in question was Bierno, who stood 6’3 and weighed about 225 pounds in his thirties. Though many know Fowlie for his bravado, the video tape (and eyewitness accounts) of the encounter—in which Gomez’s son appears to stop his car to invite Dan to his father’s house for a meeting—all suggest the opposite of these baseless rumors of violence. During this visit, only the people who had acquired parts of Danny Land illegally (most of them gringos) were unhappy to see Fowlie in Pavones; most of the original families, who had become family to Fowlie in former years, embraced him. Why, then, do newspapers and government officials continue to trust untrustworthy rumors of violence, which were most likely disseminated by the very land thieves interested in keeping out of Pavones Fowlie and his legal right to the land they acquired illegally? In reality, an exile meant to prevent fear and disorder in the region has succeeded merely to protect Pavones land thieves from fearing the disruption of their thievery by Fowlie’s return.

While Fowlie was in jail, squatting in Pavones increased like rain in Costa Rican winters. The first surge of squatting came in 1988 from Costa Rican farmers trained and armed by Cuban communists. Well-organized communist squatters had inundated the southern zone of Costa Rica after the United Fruit Company (the main exporter of bananas in Costa Rica) abandoned their vast properties in southern Costa Rica when the unions raised export tariffs. The fruit company’s abandonment of the South gave all squatters every right to squat the land and later claim title to it. Under Costa Rican law, squatters can claim possession rights to land (commonly known as squatters’ rights) after occupying land uncontested for three years, and squatters can homestead property and claim escritura (or national title rights) after occupying land uncontested for ten years. From the South, a handful of communist opportunists organized and armed a group of farmers, and together they succeeded to take over the entire Langostino beach area (just northeast of Pavones) by force. During this violent period in the early nineties, many shootouts and scenes of brutality occurred as the well-armed group drove out all but the original landowners (the only ones who were armed and tough enough to resist the invasion). All other new opportunists in the region—including all other Costa Rican squatters (armed with just machetes) and the many gringo surfers who came for land in the early nineties—were forced to relinquish their land battles. The victors reigned in Pavones for several years until they lost their legal quest for the land in 1993 when Fowlie won the case against IDA, who supported the campesinos in tying to claim title. As a result of this legal defeat, the handful of communist organizers of the invasion departed the area, but many squatters remained and many more came. None of them realized, however, that all squatting and homestead rights are void in the case that the land’s owner is rendered unable to defend his or her land due to institutionalization or exile.

In the nineties, the squatting struggle gradually left the fields and entered the courts, but spurts of squatting violence continued to occur. In one widely publicized case, 72-year-old US-citizen Max Dalton got into a shootout in 1997 with squatters on a piece of property that Dalton occupied, an incident which resulted in the death of Dalton and purported shooter, Alvaro Aguilar. Fowlie actually owned the land that Dalton occupied, having purchased the property from its original land holder, Alejandro Gomez Concepcion. But during Fowlie’s absence from Costa Rica, Dalton bought the property from Owen Handy despite Fowlie’s warnings about Handy’s bogus power of attorney for Alan Nelson, Fowlie’s former attorney who ludicrously claimed to inherit Fowlie’s property. After occupying the property, Dalton was harassed by every side of the land conflict. Original homesteaders resented Dalton for taking Fowlie’s land and for fencing off the path through which Dan had always allowed locals to herd cattle. Eyewitness accounts of Dalton’s killing purport that Gerardo Mora, a professional land thief in the area, armed a group of squatters, including the person who shot Dalton as Dalton came out armed to defend the property. As rumor has it, Mora then shot Alvaro to make things appear like Dalton and Alvaro shot each other. However, no shells or other evidence was ever collected. Currently, Max Dalton’s family occupies the property and contends for it in court, while Fowlie intends to reclaim the land with his better-than-fools-gold title.

As civilization developed in Pavones in the nineties, so did law and order. The people vying for Danny Land laid down their guns and machetes for the new weapons of lawyers and payments to corrupt municipality officials. For an envelope under the table, the notorious Golfito municipality would give away Fowlie’s beach leases (which are required for all property within the first two-hundred meters of ocean shore) without ever fulfilling the legal burden to notify the lease holder and provide him an opportunity to defend them in court. Many squatters were also issued national titles based on squatting and homestead laws while Fowlie was unable to contest the squatters. Fowlie later won several major land cases in court, thereby reacquiring about a thousand acres of the five thousand he owns and some of the biggest properties taken from him. The courts rejected all titles created within Fowlie’s titles due to the caveat that Fowlie was unable to defend his legal rights to the land while institutionalized. Costa Rica no longer grants national titles for Fowlie’s land, but Fowlie must still legally unwind long chains of illegal sales of many of his properties. Many of Dan’s loyal former employees have also assisted Fowlie by squatting his land and refusing to sell to the many willing buyers. These loyal locals plan on handing Fowlie back his land when he returns, and Fowlie plans on rewarding them each with a nice house or property.

"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

---

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.