Playa Venao breaks over a sandbar across a horseshoe bay, left and right, on a south swell with a north-north-westerly offshore, and it is best on a falling mid tide.
December is the figure worth carrying: twenty-six clean days out of thirty, two blown out, two too small. Only Popoyo in Nicaragua beats it, and the mechanism is the same dry-season offshore, here crossing the Azuero peninsula from December to April.
What makes it worth more than the number is what it arrives on. Consistency usually comes attached to reef, and this is sand at a difficulty a first week handles. Rips are the named hazard, and in a bay this shape they run where the water leaves, which is the first thing an instructor will point at.
It is popular and it fills, which is the price of being the easy answer in a country with a hard one four hours west.
Spot sheet
- Level
- Beginner, Intermediate
- Wave
- Left and right
- Bottom
- Sand
- Swell window
- SSE – SSW
- Ideal wind
- NNW
- Best tide
- mid tide
- How often it works
- Very consistent
- Crowd
- ●●●●○
- Danger
- ●●○○○
A month in figures
In December, the month the forecast guides single out for this coast:
Shares of the month, from the published forecast statistics. The model reads a grid, so neighbouring breaks share a figure: this describes a stretch of coast, not this wave on its own. The other eleven months are not published.
What to watch for
- Rips and undertow
Technical figures read off published surf guides. Where two disagree, the sheet says so.