Kurt Van Dyke, Renowned Californian Surfer, Brutally Murdered in Costa Rica

Kurt Van Dyke, 66, a well-known figure from Santa Cruz’s legendary Van Dyke family, was found dead in his Costa Rican home this past Saturday. His body was discovered under his bed, a sheet pulled over his head, multiple stab wounds to his torso. A knife lay beside him.

His 31-year-old girlfriend, Arroyo, was in the shower when two armed men entered the apartment. According to reports, she was zip-tied, assaulted, and forced at gunpoint into another room. The place was fleeced of valuables, and their car was also taken before the assailants fled. 

A tragic end for Kurt, who had woven himself into the fabric of Costa Rican life. A resident for decades, he had opened a hostel in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on the Caribbean coast, where he was a familiar and well-liked presence, and one of the area’s pioneer surfers, dubbed ‘The King’ of Salsa Brava. 

“My personal experience with him has been pretty much exclusively at Salsa Brava,” says Mikey Ciaramella, Editor-in-Chief of Stab, who now calls Costa Rica home. “I first went over there in 2019, and I was pretty shocked and amazed when I saw somebody out there surfing a nine-foot longboard on a proper slab and getting legitimately barrelled in really big waves. And that was Kurt.”

“He would just stroke into these giant waves on his giant board, and he had it so dialled,” Mikey continues. “He seemed to read the lineup better than anybody. And I came to learn that he’d been there for decades and decades and basically helped pioneer the wave. And he still dominated that wave to this day. I think he was 66 or something like that and was still getting crazy, crazy waves out there. I found him really impressive, and I looked up to him a lot.” 

Mikey also mentioned Kurt’s cameo in Allan Weisbecker’s In Search of Captain Zero, a memoir about Weisbecker’s journey through Central America to find his estranged friend, where he crosses paths with Kurt. I happened to be at my parents’ place and remembered reading that book as a kid. I dug around in my old room, found a copy, and flipped through it until I found the sections with Kurt. Let’s revisit:

“There were a few familiar faces bobbing in the lineup, guys I’d seen in rown, including Kurt Van Dyke, to whom Christopher had introduced me soon after my arrival. The nephew of big wave legend Fred Van Dyke, Kurt was owner of the Puerto Viejo hotel, which largely catered to visiting surfers. Kurt and I would eventually become friends, but it would be in spite of my history with Christopher, not because of it. As it was, on this, my first Salsa Brava go-out, Kurt vouchsafed me no more than a sour nod when I said “Hi.” This was a tight-knit group, I sensed; my presence was pointedly ignored.”

“I looked outside to see Kurt Van Dyke tucked into the last and biggest wave of the set, an immense open-ended barrel from which he emerged unscathed onto a wonderfully flat, innocuous shoulder, his board decelerating from some absurd velocity to a slow plane right in front of me. Falling in beside him for the paddle back out, my voice broke into an embarrassingly high squeak as I yelled, ‘I want one of those!’

‘Go for it, bro,’ Kurt replied, my enthusiasm for his accomplishment breaking down the first barrier between us. ‘Sit in the pit and catch a fat one.’”

“Kurt was out, lurking deep in the pit at first point to the south of the pack, just outside the swirling boils that mark the shallowest point of that jagged, treacherous sea bottom. The southern lineup point is the real deal at Salsa, where sneaker sets and unmakeable rogue walls make wave selection difficult and critical. I approached from the channel to the south, so my view was back-door—from behind the peak—as Kurt launched himself over the edge of a fat, nasty one, a near mutant. I winced, thinking no way he’ll make that, but then he popped out over the shoulder 40, 50 yards down the line with a hoot and both arms raised, indicating hed been deeply barreled. Kurt was fearless here; he had been surfing Salsa for 10 years.”

While the typical assumption for an expat murder in Central America might point to drug running or other illegal dealings, Weisbecker had this to say about Kurt:

“One thing I quickly came to realise about the boys who rode Salsa Brava was that none of them was involved in the local drug scene. Although joints were smoked and beer-bingering not unheard of, white drug-taking was shunned. It just wasn’t done.”  

There’s clearly more to this story, and when more details emerge, we’ll report on them. But for now, let’s take a moment to reflect and remember Kurt. RIP.