Home Never Looked So Good

Six San Diegans find out that some surf trips just don’t go as planned.

Only a few days before we left on our trip we had still not completely decided on our destination. Somewhere in South America, perhaps? Bali, possibly? But only after we looked at enough swell charts and researched the toll that the trips would take on our wallets did we decide on mainland Mexico.   
Good ole Mexico. A land full of the unexpected, but usually full of consistent swells of considerable heights. Kyle’s dad and brother gave our crew a ride across the border and into the smoggy Tijuana night. We left amid rumors that there may be riots in the cities because of some questionable democratic processes in the Mexican elections. But with the boards strapped tightly to the roof, and our stomachs strapped as tightly to our spines, we began our journey to mainland.  
It’s a destination that is always a little unnerving; in a country where corrupt officers prey on ignorant tourists like coyotes, the slightest misstep can land a traveler into the guilty-until-proven-innocent judicial process.  Aside from that danger, with limited Spanish, we could hardly communicate with people, and while we tried to think of how to conjugate uncertain verbs we eventually just gave in to those universal hand signals: pointing and waving.    
We arrived after a layover or two and stepped into the blanketing heat.  The atmosphere hung on us like invisible wet rags as we lugged our board bags to the rental cars. We got to the hotel and each of us geared up for the waves that were to come. Some put fins in their boards and stacked them along the wall while others took out only one magic board that they would ride until it was broken and left the other boards to yellow in the bag until their time came.  
Our group was varied but we all were at least a little familiar with one another.  In one car, dubbed “G-ride” because of a metallic letter “G” left over from “Dodge,” rode Kyle Knox, Ian Rotgans and myself. The other car, a Dodge “Attitude” carried Layne Harrison, Pat Millin and photographer Billy Watts. Like other travelers, we put these cars through absolute torture. Our surf rack straps that ripped into the seal of the doors, the giant mud puddles that we went racing through for every surf, the nearly six hours of driving time that we averaged every day, and our mold-producing habit of jumping into the cars in wet boardshorts to escape the insatiable proboscises of mosquitoes all made the rental cars look years older than when we had picked them up.
We had to drive more than two hours to get to our first destination, and then an hour-and-a-half to the next surfable wave. The surf was fun but it was not nearly as big as what we were expecting. We drove the hour-and-a-half back to our hotel that night and settled into the Mexican night to the sounds of fried street tacos, diesel engines, and the quick crack of Caguamas being opened.
We woke up early expecting some really good waves. The swell predictions had called for the biggest waves to come throughout the day, but when we woke up and began checking spots we soon realized that the long winding road to the best wave in the area was completely flooded. There had been a lot of rain and all of the roads were pretty difficult to navigate, but none of the roads were as bad as the one that lead to the best wave.  We journeyed to the next point to discover fun waves that were plagued by inconsistency and an island off of the coast, which squandered a lot of the swell energy from the point.
After a quick lunch of fresh red snapper at the casa y cocina of the woman who lives nearest to the point, we headed back toward the hotel and checked one of the other points in the area. There were a couple of people out, an unfamiliar sight in the area. Their presence allowed us to gauge the wave quality, which was much better than anything we had seen up until that point. We hiked the long trek through the mini sand dunes and found the surf that we had traveled to find.
The session started out with chest high waves coming in pretty regularly.  The wave would start off with a mushy section that was ideal for cutbacks and then, just as the wave would hit a bump in the sandbar, it would turn so that it quickly wrapped along the sandy beach.  The offshore wind wound around the steep hillside that reared up over the point and created hollow lines on the inside section.  The surf just got more and more consistent, and by the end of the session we had all figured the wave out. Pat was the only backside surfer, but he was attacking the waves with vertical hacks, Layne was throwing in some big cutbacks, Ian was throwing some good turns off of the feathering lips, Kyle was doing some airs, and I somehow managed to score one of the most extraordinary surfing experiences of my life as I got a barrel on the inside section and was startled as a procession of bat rays flew along the face of the barrel with me.
After the session we were all pretty optimistic. The new guys to the area, Layne, Ian, Pat, and Billy, were each able to sample the perfection that the region has to offer. We woke up the next morning excited about what was to come and hoping that the next day would produce similar waves.
Things were not to go as smoothly as we’d hoped.  The key to the Dodge “Attitude” refused to work. Later we found out that Billy had left the key in his pocket as he went swimming, normally an action without consequence, but this key had an electronic device in it. Every time they tried to start up the “Attitude,” we would hear the mocking laughter of the alarm blaring, signaling to us that our hopes of surfing that morning were futile. I think that the key’s electronic computer also held some control over the fate of our surf trip because things began to deteriorate.  
Instead of surfing what we all envisioned would be fun waves with nobody out, we were all sitting around the hotel lobby while Billy took the “G” to go look for a person to fix the car key.  After hours of sitting, Billy finally returned, but still toting an unfixed key. We finally began toiling with the engine and fixed it by simply messing with the battery cables. We were ecstatic that we could finally leave but annoyed because the solution of tinkering with the battery cables was originally suggested when the problem was first discovered at least three hours earlier.
By this time our patience had worn thin and eventually snapped, being replaced by bitterness towards one another and a flurry of nickname creations. Layne became “Gramps” because of his seven-year gap over the next eldest member of the surf posse, an inability to see beyond 50 yards, and a slow driving pace. Everyone was pretty brutal, telling Layne that we would grab him some Metamucil and Diapers at the next convenience store we happened to pass.  Kyle was dubbed Labrador and Pastrana. He’s always happy like a Labrador and, like the MotoX rider Travis Pastrana, he wears bright clothes, and has bright surfboards; he also bears a striking resemblance to the dirt jockey. Ian was dubbed TGI (Tough Guy Image) by Kyle after of series of several playful name-calling exchanges between the two. Pat was the unoriginal “Grom” or Banana Pat because of an unusually large banana that he picked up on the streets of Mexico; he then walked into a bar with it, slamming it on the table as he asked for a drink. Billy was Billygoat or Billio, a variation from Coolio, a rapper whose hit song “Gangsta’s Paradise” we played as loud as we could while rolling through the main drag of town one night.  My nickname was the Wrench and it seems to override all other nicknames.  A P.B. local gave me the name because I tend to “wrench” waves away from other surfers in the water.  So there we were, Gramps, Labrador, TGI, Grom, Billio and Wrench, fish out of water in a land that grills fish in garlic and lime for three meals a day.
The rest of our trip was an endless search for improving conditions; just as one aspect of the conditions would improve, one of the others would regress.  The wind would turn offshore just as the clouds settled in.  The surf would pick up as the onshore winds kicked in.  Instead of finding double overhead point break barrels, we almost always found meager waist high waves that you had to risk your life to surf.  There were tales about how many cases of Dengue fever had been discovered in the villages of the points that we were going to surf.  We tried to block the rumors out, but as each of us awoke after a night drinking Modelo Especials, we wondered whether our headaches were caused by hangovers or a new case of Dengue.  
The mosquitoes were thicker than any that we had ever seen.  They surrounded the car every time we stopped along one of the dirt roads.  We pulled up to check the surf at one break and through the mosquito cloud that assembled in front of the windshield, we noticed good waves with no one out.  Kyle and Ian were able to quickly grab their boards from the trunk, but because my board didn’t have fins in it, I was stuck trying to screw in my fins.  The mosquitoes were just too thick so I grabbed what I thought was everything that I needed and headed to the beach.  I got to the beach and realized that I had either dropped my FCS key or left it locked in the car, which would have been fine if I had the car key.  Kyle had taken it out with him into the water.  
Ian and Kyle were both out surfing by the time I ran up the point.  The water was that bull-shark-feeding-ground type of brown, but I really wanted to surf.  I screamed at them and waved my arms to try and get their attention.  They both saw me and started stroking as fast as they could to the beach, trying to get any little wave that they could.  
“Did you see one?”
“How big was it?” asked the out of breath surfers, inquiring about the shark that they assumed I had seen.
They were pretty pissed off when I calmly asked them for either an FCS key or the car key.  After shouting some expletives at me, they paddled back out and I ran to the car and grabbed my fin key, rapidly waving my towel at anything that resembled a mosquito.  We had a fun session; there were huge schools of red or yellow-finned fish jumping out of the water every few feet away from us.  But where there are little fish in abundance there are probably also very large, man-eating fish that can mistake a bright sponsor sticker for a little fish.
Instead of hanging out in the village, tempting fate to give us Dengue or have a shark attack us, we decided to pack up all of our stuff and head to a famous break hours from where we were.  We went up the coast and got some fun waves, but not enough to keep us from changing our tickets to come home a few days early.  We arrived home after a full day of travel, expecting to see some of the hurricane swell that had motivated us to change our tickets but all we got was surf that was a lot smaller than any we would have surfed in Mexico.  That’s just the way some trips go.  We had to get back home before we all got malaria, dysentery, tape worms or any of the other dangers that lurk in the beautiful lands to our south.  We’ll take the optimistic route and know that the next time we venture south, we can’t get waves or conditions much worse than the ones that we got, so hasta la vista Mexico.