December is the dry season established. The trades are blowing offshore across the isthmus every morning, the rain is finished, and Playa Venao returns twenty-six clean days out of thirty, two blown out and two too small.
The reason that figure matters more than a bigger one somewhere else is what it arrives on. Venao is a horseshoe bay with a sandbar across it, breaking left and right, at a size and a difficulty a first week can handle. The usual arrangement is that the reliable waves are the hard ones and the forgiving ones are unreliable; this is a month and a place where that trade is not being asked of you.
Cambutal, forty minutes west, is the quieter version and very rarely has anybody on it. Santa Catalina is four hours the other way, on reef, and it is a month from its own best figures.
