January is the middle of the dry season, and on this coast the dry season is a wind. Trade winds cross the Caribbean, funnel through gaps in the mountain spine and come out over the Pacific as an offshore, morning after morning, for four months.
What that does to the water is the whole point. Santa Catalina returns twenty-three clean days out of thirty in January, five blown out and two too small, and Cambutal on the Azuero peninsula is close behind. Those are figures almost nothing else in this part of the world matches, and they are not a claim about the waves. They are a measurement of how often the wind was where it should be.
The point at Santa Catalina is a right over reef, very consistent, and it wants south-south-west swell with the northerly behind it. Punta Brava, the left reef a hundred metres away, shares its numbers exactly, because a hundred metres is not a distance a forecast grid can see.
