Surfari Lifestyle: Niceville Grad Lance Moss’ Surfing Dream in Nicaragua!

In Brief:

Lance and Kristin Moss started Surfari Charters in Nicaragua, turning a risky investment in their early twenties into a successful surf camp.
The Mosses helped pioneer the surf tourism industry in Nicaragua, significantly impacting the local economy.
Despite challenges, including repercussions on perceived safety due to political instability, Surfari Charters continues to thrive with a loyal client base and a unique lifestyle in Popoyo, Nicaragua.

When Niceville Native Lance Moss and his now-wife Kristin were in their early twenties, they did the early-20s couple thing and took a huge risk.

After seeing a VHS tape of the waves from southwest Nicaragua, a friend showed them that they had taken the money that was supposed to be used for their college education and bought an acre of dirt on the Pacific Ocean in Central American Nicaragua.

Now, the Mosses have a life totally different from everyone else who graduated from Niceville High School with Lance in the 90s.

“We like to call ourselves ‘stoke brokers,'” Lance said with a laugh during our recent conversation on the phone.

The pair, along with their two kids and a staff that fluctuates between 15 and 20, run a boutique surf camp that got in on the ground level of the Nicaraguan surfing boom.

Surfing’s Wild West

Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself – the Nicaraguan Surf…what?

And business is still booming. “like 99% of the people thought we were completely out of our minds, including our parents,” Lance added – but the bet has paid off in spades.

Well, that’s a story in and of itself. When Lance and Kristin got to the southwest corner of Nicaragua in 1999, there was a whole lot of nothing in the area—except amazing waves to surf. The only thing Nicaragua was known for in the USA was a brutal civil war, which led to the Iran-Contra Scandal, which deeply embarrassed the Reagan Administration and launched Colonel Oliver North’s television career and criminal record.

By then, the civil war had been in the rear-view mirror for about a decade. But the huge boom brought in by surf tourism had yet to hit the front covers of the world’s most prominent surf periodicals and a Delta Airlines seat-back magazine near you. Lance remembers a crazy stat brought to him by a buddy who earned his Ph.D in History with a dissertation about surf tourism: in 1999 when they arrived, the bulk of the economic output of the country was from agriculture – which makes sense for a country with lush, volcanic soil. By the second decade of the new millennium, tourism was the leading source of income – and surf tourism was the most significant subsector of the tourism economy.

That’s a win, Lance says, for surfers and locals alike. “So it’s kind of nuts that, you know, a bunch of young guys came down here just to chase waves and kind of changed, you know, the whole economic structure of the country,” Moss Said, “There was no cell service, there was no telephones, there was no internet. None of the locals had cars or motorcycles. There was one telephone in town that everybody used to call back to check in with their family, and now it’s just like exploding. They’re putting in a paved road down the entire coastline. All the locals have motorcycles. Lots of them have trucks.”

Starting a Business

Lance’s dad was a fighter pilot in Vietnam, which led to an early obsession with planes when he was a kid. “If he would have said one time that I should be a fighter pilot, I would have 100% been a fighter pilot,” he remembers. But Lance said the stress and disillusionment two tours in Vietnam caused his dad filtered to his son in the form of a different dream. “I was an only child, so my parents told me, ‘You’re going to start your own business. You’re an entrepreneur; you’re going to start your own business.”

With a laugh, Kristin reminds me that the Mosses are “not planners.” Nor, they say, have they ever really been planners. They decided to buy the acre lot and move to Nicaragua after Kristin finished school at Flagler College.

They immediately realized that the surfing environment was perfect – and not yet inundated with people making a living surfing. “There was nobody here,” Lance said, “there might have been like five to ten surfers in the whole country, and the waves were just incredible.”

So they started on the ground floor. Literally, the ground floor of the jungle.

In 2000, Lance and Kristin joined a couple of other friends at their plot of land to build “a little box in the jungle” to serve as their first house (it’s now the kitchen) and began working on the business that would eventually become Surfari Charters. They “immediately saw an opportunity to guide people and take people fishing, because I grew up doing charter boats, investing as a mate, and just really love to fish, just as much though love to serve. So yeah, I decided I was like, All right, well, if we’re gonna be showing people around, might as well make some money.”

By 2002, they were in Nicaragua, making a go of it as entrepreneurs. Twenty-two years and two kids later – they are still at it. They have healthy surfing and fishing components to their business and something like 80% of their business are return guests to their surfing camp. “Definitely the part we love the most about what we do is like, every week, it’s like another extended family coming down and visiting us, and we get to show them a good time and hang out on the beach and still come out, you know, have cold beers and sunset and catch up and see how everybody’s families are doing.”

Living in Nicaragua

The loud hum of a generator trills in the background when we start our phone call. Initially, we were supposed to do a video chat – but the internet, which they get from a cellular connection that they get from the Capitol with a 50-foot-tall tower, was acting up that day. Kristin and Lance quickly move inside so we can all hear better.

Life is different in Nicaragua than in the States, as you might have guessed. Childcare, for example, is much less expensive and different from anywhere else. Plus, children benefit from a strong dollar in this part of the world. “There’s a big disparity and wealth between the United States and Nicaragua, which is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,” Lance said, “There’s a lot of people here, they’re really eager to work. And I mean, obviously, the minimum wage, or the wage they earn, is significantly less than what someone would earn in the states.”

They add that the country suffers from an unfair negative perception, thanks to the long civil war that tore apart the country during the 1980s between the American-backed dictatorship of the Somoza family and Soviet-backed guerillas.

Political instability in 2018 didn’t help matters, and plenty of their charters were cancelled even though nothing happened in their part of the country. “It was really difficult for charter guests to convince their wives to let them come down,” Moss said.

Going Forward

As you might have guessed from this story – the Mosses aren’t exactly interested in building a Surfari empire any time soon – though other groups in the area have begun to do just that. “There’s a lot of options down here these days,” Kristin added, “when someone sees something working – well, imitation is the highest form of flattery, right?”

Still, that doesn’t really change their business model. After all, it works. “That’s the nature of Nicaragua; we’ve always sort of operated on the here and now. Let’s go with whatever is working, you know?” Kristin added.