Brazilian delta becomes kitesurfing capital
High-flying surfari reward for intrepid
From a distance, it probably looks like I’m having fun.
I am off the northeast coast of Brazil, kitesurfing across one of the largest river deltas in the Americas, and I’m terrified. Ten-foot swells pitch from all directions, crashing into each other like demolition derby cars. The current here, where the mighty Parnaiba River pours into the Atlantic Ocean, is swirling, further complicating the fluid physics equation that is kitesurfing. The group I set out with has dispersed. I am alone, and the sun is setting – fast.
A wave knocks my surfboard from under my feet. As I use the wind-filled kite to drag through the mountainous swells in search of the board, the rubber loop that keeps me connected to the kite pops off and the buffeting wind nearly rips the steering bar from my hands. Summoning every bit of my strength, I pull downward on the bar, reattach the loop and miraculously find my board - back in business but still far from safety.
I should add that I’m here voluntarily, on a week-long, late-October guided trip attempting to kitesurf more than 120 miles, from the city of Parnaiba to the town of Atins, along a coast lifted from prehistoric times. Beach and dunes stretch infinitely in both directions, broken periodically by a river mouth or low forest and free of infrastructure save for the occasional thatch fishermen’s hut.
This isolation, along with consistent wind, tropical days and 80-degree seas, is a big part of the appeal here: While kitesurfing has exploded in northeast Brazil, the action is centered in once-sleepy fishing villages between Fortaleza and Jericoacoara and few visitors make it to the remote delta, where the 1,056mile Parnaiba dissolves in a jigsaw of jungle islets, shifting sandbars and wind-scalloped dunes.
Our outfitter, Surfin Sem Fin (Portuguese for surfing without end), runs numerous trips throughout the region during its July-to-December windy season, providing guides and a network of trucks, buggies and boats to shuttle luggage between lodges.
I was drawn here after becoming enamored of kiting downwind in waves - a discipline that entails steering the kite to maintain power while surfing. When everything aligns, this is an incredible rush like having a motor on a surfboard to outrun white water, crank through turns and transform mushy, disorganized surf into an aquatic playground.
I also saw this as an achievable challenge and a chance to improve my skills under the tutelage of our guides, former world wave-kiting champion Guilly Brandao and Andreas Lagopoulos, a Canadian expat who runs kitesurfing camps from his home in Cabarete, Dominican Republic.
Now it’s Day 1 and “achievable” is in doubt. The morning had started innocuously, with a poolside breakfast at the charming Hotel San Antonio in Parnaiba, a colonial city about 10 miles from the coast.
We had amassed there the prior night, an eclectic pod of white-collar adrenaline seekers: my buddy Andrew, an anesthesiologist from Oklahoma City, Okalahoma; Lula, who owns a sailing school in Rio de Janeiro; his childhood friend Andre, a food processing executive and, at 59, the oldest among us; Ricardo, who runs Coca-Cola’s bottling operations in northeast Brazil and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world”; his friend Chris, the youngest member of the group at 45, retired after selling his steel company to the country’s government; and Emily, a San Francisco, California, lawyer and the only one among us who had done this trip before.
“Now we go to a very remote part of Brazil, even for us,” Chris tells me as we load kites, boards and luggage into two late-model Toyota pickups in the warm morning sun. He’s a kind of Zen Tony Stark, a former Porsche racer and paraglider who heli-skis in Alaska for multiple weeks a year, meditates daily and wears a near-permanent smile.
We drive a half-hour past tileroofed houses and patchy forest to Pedra do Sal, a beach at the eastern edge of the 1,211 square-mile Delta do Parnaiba Environmental Protection Area. As we unload next to a small thatch bar - the last oceanfront business we’ll see for five days - a 25-knot wind whips up a concussive shore break, along with my anxiety: After an injury, I’ve kited only four days over the past six months and all in far friendlier conditions. The plan is to ride for an hour here and then spend the next three to four hours surfing 15 miles downwind, across the river and to our next lodge.
As we pump up kites on the hot sand, I realize how peculiar we must look to anyone who’s never witnessed this spectacle before – nine people in surf shorts, sun shirts, brimmed hats and strap-on shades, wearing child-size hydration backpacks while inflating huge arcs of brightly-hued nylon.
I have trouble from the outset, fighting the wind and waves, crashing and ripping a $1,000 (!) loaner kite. And, once we start downwind, I find myself trapped inside the break and relentlessly beaten into shore. Andreas, the designated last man back, patiently coaxes me along and, eventually, adjusts my kite lines to quicken the steering, allowing me to - finally - zip downwind.
When we reach the river, though, he hangs back to help Ricardo, who is also struggling, and directs me to hustle.
As I do, it’s hard not to dwell on stories like the one about the guy who spent the night at sea off Jericoacoara in 2017 after a kite malfunction and recounted clinging to his kite canopy through the lonely, dark hours while roachlike sea bugs skittered all over him.
I emerge from the white-knuckle crossing happier than a hobbit escaping Mordor. The waves, although still big, are marching uniformly toward the beach. In the dimming light, I see tiny figures around a fisherman’s hut.
“You are a warrior!” Guilly shouts as I stagger onto land in the near darkness. Someone spots Andreas and Ricardo, and we load gear onto two waiting all-terrain vehicles that spirit us over a quarter mile of Sahara-like dunes and up a hill to our base for the next three nights.
We are on Ilha dos Poldros, a 3,000-acre island owned by a Spanish tanning magnate who adorned his Eden with a guesthouse of stone, local carnauba palm wood, glass and thatch, along with a swimming pool and two cabanas.
As we rinse gear under a starpierced sky, the calls of frogs, birds, bugs and monkeys echo across the delta.