The Green Room

Nick Mucha was in the middle of a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America when he decided to use his vacation time to visit a friend’s surf camp in Nicaragua.

After going for months without seeing the ocean while working in the mountains of Honduras, Mucha and his Peace Corps partner, Adam Monaghan — both hardcore surfers — weren’t fazed by the arduous two-day journey by bus required to reach the small town of Pie de Gigante, along Nicaragua’s southern Pacific coast.

While they were impressed with the often perfect and empty waves they found at their friend’s newly established surf camp in Gigante, Mucha and Monaghan were more concerned about how the small town of about 400 was being affected by the rapid influx of foreign surfers in search of waves.

Even more disturbing was how the majority of people in the community — mostly poor fishermen — were seeing little, if anything, in return from the foreign surfers and surf camps that came to use the beaches and waves.

“I think if I had just come there straight from Santa Cruz, I would have been in hog heaven,” Mucha said. “But coming from a Peace Corps perspective in Honduras it was so clear that surfing was infiltrating this small town where the only exposure to the outside world is through surfing.

“Americans like my friend Jack are coming in and setting up hotels, taking advantage of the resources these communities are offering. There wasn’t a coordinated effort on the part of the surfers to make sure that the community was the primary benefactor.”

In 2005, Mucha and Monaghan founded Project Wave of Optimism, a 501c3 nonprofit foundation, dedicated to promoting sustainable community development in Latin America surf destinations. For the past year and a half Project WOO has been working on its pilot project in Gigante.

After their first visit, Mucha and Monaghan realized that the well-groomed tubes spinning just off Gigante Beach represented the town’s most valuable resource, one that could prove to be a vital asset in pulling the community out of the depths of poverty.

The rapidly growing, million dollar surf travel industry could wind up being the savior of this formerly isolated village — or its downfall.

“We wanted to make sure that these small towns are really benefiting from the presence of surfing,” Mucha said. “Our philosophy is that surfing’s footsteps around the world be planting positive seeds of social change.”

Mucha, 28, currently lives in Santa Cruz working full time for a separate nonprofit, but for the past two years his second “full-time” job has been his role as Executive Director of Project WOO. He works on a volunteer basis, receiving no pay.

“Project WOO is really where my heart is,” he said. “We’re on a very shoestring budget. Paying my salary is not a high priority right now.”

Monaghan, meanwhile, facilitates Project WOO’s on-the-ground operations in Gigante and is committed to staying in Nicaragua as long as necessary to ensure that the program becomes sustainable, Mucha said.

Drawing upon their community development experience in the Peace Corps, both knew that in order to create sustainable social change in Gigante it was up to the villagers themselves to decide what they wanted to do about the issue of surf tourism and how they wanted to accomplish their goals.

Instead of coming in as outsiders and telling the people what to do or just handing out what they deemed best, Project WOO asked the people what they wanted and helped them to address those needs themselves.

To that end, Project WOO worked with townspeople to conduct a “commmunity-wide needs assessment” study in which each citizen participated in workshops and town meetings to identify Gigante’s greatest needs. This project included the first census ever taken in Gigante. At the end of the nine-month process, the town identified transportation and education as its biggest priorities.

Gigante has never been served by a public bus, making things that should be simple — such as going to school or going to the market to buy and sell goods in the nearest city — a time-consuming and exhausting affair. Since there is no secondary school in Gigante, high school age students who wish to continue their education are forced to travel as far as 30 miles just to get to school every day through a combination of walking, hitchhiking and waiting for buses that run outside of town.

WOO is working with the community to acquire and operate the first public bus company in Gigante by providing the town with a “micro loan” to purchase the bus and cover the startup costs for the first six months. Over a five-year period, the town will pay the organization back and assume full ownership of the transportation business.

“There is no charity involved,” Mucha said.

Project WOO is also helping to pay the salaries for three new elementary school teachers at the town’s primary school. Before the new hires, there was just one teacher responsible for some 80 kids.

WOO also facilitates other town projects, including providing educational materials for the primary school, constructing two latrines and a swingset for the school, digging a well and constructing a water system for potable water, and improving the dirt road that connects Gigante with the nearest town.

In the coming months, there are also plans to build a town library. An architect from the States, who frequently visits Gigante for surf trips, is donating his experience to help in the process.

Project WOO’s innovative grassroots approach to helping poor coastal communities in Latin America benefit from the presence of good surf has also attracted the support of Reef, one of the most powerful players in the surf industry. The clothing giant recently launched a new project called Reef Redemption in an effort to get on board the “green” bandwagon and implement what its Web site describes as “environmentally conscious and socially responsible business practices.”

Mike Gass, Director of the Reef Redemption program, said the company has been working with Project WOO and providing seed money to get operations off the ground for over a year now.

“The thing that most impresses us with the efforts of Project WOO is their commitment to empowering the local communities to take charge of their own destiny,” Gass said. “The model of work that they employ truly engages the local community and puts the prioritization and ownership of the projects in the hands of locals rather than handing down what is deemed ‘best for them.’

“It is a great extension of the concept of you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day or teach him to fish and he can feed his family for a lifetime.”

Unlike certain environmental non-governmental organizations that might have come in and spoken for the town, condemning all development in an attempt to keep this little stretch of tropical coast “virgin,” Project WOO has simply helped the people to organize their own assemblies and come to a democratic decision about how they want to confront the impending wave of surfers.

In Gigante, the community has decided that it wants to pursue responsible development. They want to welcome the surfers but to also make sure that the town as a whole benefits from the infusion of surf tourism dollars.

“Our biggest principle is organizing, mobilizing and empowering the people to accomplish what they want to do with surfing,” Mucha said. “Do they not want surfers? Do they want to make it harder for gringos to purchase land? We want them to do with surfing as they please. But it seems that in Gigante the people want to benefit from it. For them it’s a tremendous opportunity.”

Project WOO is still fundraising for the bus project in Gigante. If you would like to learn more about the project and how you can help, please visit their Web site at www.projectwoo.org.

“Why are all gringos so good looking?” the young waitress asks you in Spanish.

You’re sitting at a small outdoor bar and restaurant somewhere in the tropics, watching the sunset and waiting on a plate of food after a full day of surfing. The waitress—a short, curvy girl with dark hair and dark eyes—is spunky and direct. This is likely due to her spending the last year serving boisterous—and sometimes arrogant—young surfers from around the world who have begun to flock to this tiny fishing village in search of perfect waves.

The surfers stay at her family’s recently-built cabinas. Though the accommodations are rustic—stuffy rooms of bare plywood walls and no A/C—the surfer shacks are a bargain at five dollars a night and, most importantly, just steps away from a truly beautiful wave.

The reef at the southern tip of the bay is a swell magnet, channeling wave energy and focusing it into long walls of moving water that peel perfectly into the emerald bay. Still just a blip on the radar of international surfing destinations, the wave has yet to become “discovered,” and thus remains relatively uncrowded despite its world-class caliber.

You laugh, not sure how to answer the girl’s question. Why are all gringos so good looking? What a funny thing to say. Is she just flirting?

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One of Santa Cruz’s finest underground surf photographers recently returned from a trip to the islands with “the goods.” Below is a sampling of Howard “Boots” McGhee’s classic shots from perfect Pipeline, mid February, 2008. 

“Insane to shoot it…wish I knew the guys in the pics,” Boots said. “I used a 300 and a 600 @ pipe. Hooked up w/the old owner of Camera Club, Mark Berkowitz. He set me up shooting next to him and let me use both lenses. Now I have to have one, a 500 or 600.”

Look for more of Boots’ work in the upcoming April issue of The Surfer’s Journal. He’ll have a spread–a rumored eight pages!–in collaboration with legendary surf travel pioneer and surf scribe Kevin Naughton focusing on a tricked out “Baja mobile.” Looking forward to both the story by Naughton and the photos by Boots.

Luxury accomodations in Central Baja. Photo: Boots McGhee

You can check out more of Boots’ photos from this Pipeline session and some Waimea shots at his Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8322869@N04/

Just looking at these shots gives me butterflies in my stomach. I’m reminded of waking up at 5:30 a.m. filled with adrenaline and anticipation and riding my bike down Ke Iki road in the dark to go surf Pipe before the crowd swelled out of control.

Pipe was pretty much perfect for almost two weeks straight during my stay this February. I surfed it twice this trip. Both times I paddled out before the sun had risen above the mountains and got a few memorable rides before the heavies came out. The IBA World Bodyboard Championships were happening around this time, so during all hours of the day there was a constant army of spongers attached to the peak like flies on a steaming pile of dog doo.

Pipe is the only spot I’ve ever surfed where you can paddle out literally a half hour before the first morning light is even poking up above the mountains and there are already a handful of rabid surfers–mostly spongers–out on the bowl trying to get that one perfect barrell before the gridlock sets in. As the light fills in the crowd doubles about every ten minutes until there are thirty to forty people packed together and trailing onto the shoulder and it’s not even 7:00 a.m.

One morning after I locked up my bike and was stretching on the beach in the dark, I saw a shooting star fall out of the sky right above a feathering Pipe lip in the swampy darkness. No matter how crowded, hyped, and commercial the North Shore gets, it will always be a magical place.

I surfed it much smaller than the waves in these photos. It was 6-8 foot faces with the occassional ten footer every twenty minutes or so. Still plenty of a rush though because it’s such a fast wave, the ever-present shallow reef, and the intensity of the crowd. I distinctly recall the sick feeling in my stomach when I tried paddling for one wave that slipped underneath the crowd and failed to get into it only to turn around to see a big set getting ready to unload right on my head. Never paddled so fast in my life.

Later on, sitting on the beach with my board just watching the show, I watched as one of the best Pipe surfers in the world, Tamayo Perry, paddled out. On his very first wave, Tamayo dropped in backside at Backdoor and got tripped up at the bottom and went over the falls. He popped up with his board in two pieces and had to swim back in. Once on shore he collected the two pieces of his board and ran back to the Ehukai parking lot for a spare stick.

Then, just minutes later, I saw 1982 Pipe Master Michael Ho straighten out on his first wave of the morning and immediately come into shore to examine what turned out to be a huge reef gash torn into the bottom of his board. Interesting to see how Pipe can humble even the best.

Sentinel surf columnist Leo Maxam is currently on vacation in Hawaii. He is sending dispatches from Oahu’s legendary North Shore with news and observations on the winter surf season…

On any given day during the winter season, there are likely a few surfers from Santa Cruz charging the North Shore. So far during my stay I’ve already run into four of them. They’re all seeking out the challenge of Hawaii’s legendary wintertime juice —- and looking to get some relief from the cold water back home.

Among these local surfers was supergrom Nat Young, who I met up with in the lineup at Laniakea a few days ago. Young told me he was in Hawaii for a USA Surf Team training camp. The team was training on the North Shore for a couple of weeks in preparation for the International Surfing Association World Junior Championships, which will be held this May in France. Young, 16, earned his spot on the team by outlasting a field of 63 of the country’s top junior surfers and making it to the finals of the USA Surf Team Trials held October, 2007 in Huntington Beach.

The goofyfoot joined a crew of elite junior surfers from across the mainland U.S., which includes big names like Evan Geiselman and Kolohe Andino, looking to unseat last year’s gold medalist, Australia. [Team USA narrowly missed the medals podium in 2007, finishing fifth.]

The 2008 PacSun USA Surf Team with Santa Cruz’s Nat Young (top row, fourth from left) : photo Surfing America/AJ Neste

While the final 12-surfer roster for France won’t be officially announced until April, Team USA Head Coach and former Pipe Master, Joey Buran, said that Young was essentially a shoe-in to represent the team in the boys under-18 division.

“Nat’s quickly moving from ‘up-and-coming’ to ‘already here,’ ” Buran said.

Young took a brief respite from tearing apart the North Shore’s waves with his teammates to talk a little bit about his first year on Team USA and surfing Hawaii.

(more…)

In a Surfer Magazine interview about his first-ever experience on the North Shore, Kelly Slater said that he was not unlike many young surfers from around the world who spent their inaugural Hawaiian campaigns holed up at the Backpackers Hostel in Pupukea.

Before all the world titles, seven figure sponsorship deals, and gossip magazines linking him to the latest Hollywood starlet, Backpackers was the only affordable option for a poor, fourteen-year-old surf rat from a Florida broken home. In the interview, Slater recalled negotiating with Backpackers’ original proprietor, the late Mark Foo, who took pity on the no-name grom and charged him a discounted rate.

Although Foo is gone, Backpackers continues the tradition of providing a low-budget, funky accommodation for young surfers with dreams of tasting a few ephemeral drops of the North Shore’s legendary juice. Like everything in Hawaii, the prices have gone up over the years, but it’s still a relative bargain, the only thing a poor surf rat could possibly still afford aside from sleeping in a car — which many do.

Backpackers is located along Kam Highway directly in front of Three Tables beach. Shark’s Cove lies just to the east and Waimea Bay just to the west. With numerous legendary breaks just a short bike ride away, and Foodland — the North Shore’s only grocery store outside of Haleiwa — strategically located just down the block, it’s a wonder that surfers ever check out. In fact, some don’t — they just start working there.

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Surfers are seasonal creatures. From solstice to solstice, as patterns of weather, wind and swell change, we shift our hunting grounds accordingly.

And like many species on planet earth — those marching penguins come to mind — surfers often make at least one migration to far-away shores each year, looking to reap a bounty of good waves during the height of a region’s surf harvest.

These migrations have developed into annual pilgrimages for generations of California surfers, important rituals in our surfing culture. Mainland Mexico in the summer — although these days Indo is the more chic summertime destination; Europe in the fall; Australia is a good bet in the spring; and, of course, Hawaii sees its annual mass migration — everyone from Kelly Slater to Rick Kane — come wintertime.

Empty tropical island perfection. Photo: Robert “Butch” Martin.

With the exception of summer, when fog and flat spells often plague Northern California for weeks at a time, late winter is when I get the most intense itch to travel. After a few months of winter’s icy grip, my skin just seems to get thin. All I can think about is hopping a flight to some equatorial latitude and thawing out.

By February I start surfing less. In fact, the waves have to look like something out of the glossy pages of a surf magazine to even get my attention. My surf checks become longer, more drawn out, like I’m just waiting for it to blow out or for the tide to get too high or too low, so I’ll have a reason to write off the session. An extended stretch of stormy weather, south wind, and dirty ocean water doesn’t help my outlook.

Call me a fair-weather surfer. Call me a poser. And East Coast surfers can tell me to quit whining unless there’s snow lining West Cliff Drive. But this time of year I can’t stop dreaming of warm water, palm trees, and the tropical sun on my back.

When I pick up the latest surf magazine overflowing with images of sparkling, warm water barrels, I find myself overcome with jealousy. At night these same tropical idylls invade my dreams and the waves tease me until I wake up in a sweat, only to hear another round of cold rain rapping outside my window.

Realizing that I’m in drastic need to scratch this itch for travel, I decide to take some action. I start by spending a disturbing amount of time every day looking up cheap flights on the internet, checking out surf travel websites, and ogling pretty pictures of emerald blue waves around the world.

With a destination in mind, it’s time to implement phase two: strategizing the cheapest trip possible. Finding a hookup with someone who lives in a warm water surfing destination and might be willing to provide a couch, or even a floor, to sleep on is always a good place to start. Family and friends are the best bet, but when you’re a poor surf bum you have to exercise all your options. Random acquaintances, friends of friends, and distant relatives are all fair game.

“You don’t remember me? The Richards’ wedding back in ‘89? I was that cute little kid running around. You know, Jerry’s nephew.”

“You mean the little brat that knocked over the wedding cake and kept pulling all the flower girls’ hair?”

“See, you do remember me! Anyway, I was hoping I could crash in your living room for a week — and I’ll need somewhere to stash my boards.”

When this fails, I’ll try and convince myself that I have the funds to pull off the trip anyway, even if it’s a completely irrational presumption. I’ll draw up a budget of all my expenses for the trip and manipulate the numbers ["I'd say three square meals of corn flakes and bananas a day is a conservative estimate of all my costs"] until I’m out of the red.

Despite all the logistical obstacles, the excitement of planning a surf trip makes it all worth it. In fact, planning a big trip can be as much fun as the actual trip itself — sometimes even more.

Take a Baja expedition I made last winter. A friend and I spent a month assembling enough gear for a trip to the moon, planning out a detailed itinerary to maximize surf time, and fantasizing idealized visions of the most epic Baja trip in the history of surf travel. We figured a two week escape to Mexico in the dead of winter would be a sure thing, yielding some much needed relief from the frigid weather back home and some clean surf. By the time we hit the road we were flying high with surf trip euphoria.

The actual voyage, however, turned out to be pretty anticlimactic. By the numbers: 14 days, 2400 miles traveled, nearly $1,000 spent, countless spots checked, 2 days of waves above waist high, 1 lost shovel, and 1 moray eel attack. To top it off, we ran into some of the coldest weather to hit southern Baja in years — we actually got rained on an hour north of Cabo, and not tropical rain, cold rain.

Basically, we got skunked. But the trip was still memorable, and having something to look forward to — poring over weather forecasts, swell charts and maps, planning an itinerary and just fantasizing about the trip — kept me stoked through most of a forgettable winter surf season.

Of course once I do buy a plane ticket, that’s often when the sun decides to finally come out and the waves begin to turn on. But at that point I’m usually too preoccupied with planning the perfect surf trip to notice that the very thing I’m chasing is dancing by right in my own backyard.

If you’ve ever taken a surfing road trip to Baja California, you know the feeling. In the morning you wake up to the sound of waves crashing and poke your head out of your tent just in time to catch the sun rising over a beautiful, empty beach. After a full day of surfing and fishing with friends, followed by dinner and beers around the campfire, you awake feeling satisfied and free, ready for another epic day.

But on your way into town for supplies — beer and fresh tortillas — you are confronted by a reality in stark contrast to your care-free state. It might be two children you see walking the few miles along the dusty dirt road into town. It might be the dilapidated local schoolhouse, a single room constructed of weathered cinder blocks and a yard full of playground equipment in disrepair. Or perhaps it’s the family of six crammed into a beat up 1989 Toyota Corolla, puttering slowly along the washboard road, and as you speed past the little car it sounds like the transmission is about to blow at any second.

It’s these scenes — the abject poverty facing many of the people in Baja’s remote desert villages — that slap you in the face. Compared to their daily struggles, driving hundreds of miles into the Mexican desert in search of some empty waves seems about as trivial as the drama on a telenovela.

This Christmas, a group of ten surfers, mostly from Santa Cruz, is organizing a different kind of Baja surf trip, one where helping those in need is just as important as scoring the ultimate wave. The surfers hope that through their combined efforts they can give back a little something to the people and the places that have provided them with so many good memories over the years.

In a nutshell their plan goes like this: Ten friends buy five used 4WD trucks. They load the vehicles up with 5,000 pounds of donated books, toys, clothes, art materials, bikes, tools and other supplies they are collecting throughout this holiday season. Come March, 2008, the ten surfers will break into five teams of two and drive the entire length of the Baja California peninsula — some 1,600 dusty, bumpy miles from Santa Cruz — surfing and donating the supplies, including the five trucks, to those in need along the way. Once they reach the end of the road in Cabo San Lucas, they will fly home.

In all, the team hopes to make donations worth more than $30,000. Because each team can spend a maximum of $3,000 for everything — including vehicle, food, gas, license, tolls and airfare home — the trip has been dubbed the Baja3000.

“We’ve been surfing Mexico for a long time, and we love it,” said expedition organizer Robert Brough, 42, of La Selva Beach. “This year, we decided to return one small token of thanks to a people and place that has become a part of our lives.”

Despite the logistical challenges of such a large-scale surf trip and charity mission, the surfers in the group feel they have the experience to pull it off. Most of them have been taking surf trips to Mexico — both Baja and mainland — for over twenty five years. The crew has also organized expeditions to exotic destinations as far away as Fiji and the Galapagos islands. They have been planning the Baja3000 mission for over six months now.

The friends have also created a contest format to add a little element of competition to the long road trip. In fact, the trip is governed by a set of rules so convoluted I won’t even try to explain them all here. According to the surfers, the rules are designed to maximize their donations as well as their own ingenuity, teamwork and grit.

While the trip is not a race, a points system has been established in order to determine the winner of the event. Points are awarded for a variety of tasks ranging from doing one’s own vehicle repairs and rescuing stranded motorists, to surfing fabled out-of-the way breaks and visiting important cultural sites. Once all five teams reach the final destination point in Cabo, the scores will be tallied and a coveted Baja3000 trophy will be awarded to the winners.

“We decided to get back to our roots, travel simply, meet people, and just surf” said team member Robert Ellenwood, also of La Selva Beach. “Because we surf some very remote locations, we’ll be able to make our donations in towns that seldom receive any kind of assistance. We hope to have a direct, immediate and positive impact.”

Ellenwood, a filmmaker, plans to document the entire trip with video equipment and produce a DVD movie complete with surf footage, music, stories of how donations are used, and all the inevitable mishaps and adventures of a Baja road trip. As a token of thanks for their contribution, donors to the cause will receive a copy of Ellenwood’s Baja3000 DVD.

Thus far, the group has identified three charitable organizations in Baja that they will work with during their trip. The first, Fortalecer, provides a mobile classroom to children of migrant farm laborers all around Baja California Sur. The program, run by Mexican and American volunteers, visits migrant labor camps and provides toys, games and educational activities to workers’ children and helps about 500 kids each week.

The Baja3000 also plans to contribute to a special needs school in Todos Santos, a small town about 50 miles north of Cabo. The school provides education and therapy for severely emotionally and physically challenged kids suffering from autism, deafness, Down syndrome and other disabilities.

“The school’s library only has about 50 books, the water doesn’t work in the restrooms, they need an internet connection, and even basic supplies such as paper and pencils are in short supply,” team member Mike Brozda said in an email from Baja, where he is currently researching other potential charitable organizations and what supplies are most needed.

Children enjoy playtime at the special needs school in Todos Santos.

The final charity the Baja3000 plans to assist is the Palapa Society, which runs nine different community services in Baja, including a scholarship program, library, medical clinic, rural-area road grading service.

“Baja has a high poverty rate with 34 percent of its people living in ‘extreme’ poverty, so the needs are huge,” Brozda said. “Coming down here for two decades, we’ve come to know and respect the wonderful people here. It seems right that we should give something back.”

The Baja3000 team is looking for donations of quality supplies. Especially needed are warm clothing, shoes, infant and children’s supplies, books — especially children’s books in Spanish — tools, toys, bikes, mechanical services, household items and cash.

Donors will be able to read all about how their contributions are used and view photos and video of the trip via regular updates posted on the Baja3000 web site at www.Baja3000.com.

To make a donation please contact Robert Ellenwood at 206-3080. More information can be found at www.Baja3000.com.

This is already old news, but in case you haven’t heard about the whole fiasco, it’s worth a look simply because you might get a laugh out of just how ridiculous the whole scenario sounds.

As the story goes, a group of Santa Cruz pro longboarders headed down to Scorpion Bay in Baja California to catch that epic November south swell. Allegedly, they severely angered the “locals” (i.e. well to do gringos who have bought up property there, mostly within the last five to ten years since the ejido was broken up) with their cocky, overly aggressive, wave hogging attitudes.

To get even, the group of surfers who felt victimized but apparently wish to remain anonymous, snuck into the SC guys’ campground at night and stole all of the fins out of their boards (not a single glass-on fin among them?!).  According to the self proclaimed “Vigilantes of First Point Justice,” the SC pros had been such jerks that nobody around town was willing to lend them any fins. As a result, CJ Nelson and the boys were forced to cut their trip short a make the long drive home.

Third Point as it appears in dreams. More paintings at www.zoesurfart.com

Just the fact that some dude (who wishes to remain nameless) was actually angry enough to get a press release put out on Surfline.com and start his own blog with the sole purpose of bashing CJ Nelson and glorifying his own petulance is hilarious–it’s like a satire in itself. But the pettiness didn’t stop there. Apparently the stolen fins wound up on craigslist and were being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

There are probably as many different accounts of what actually happened down there as there were guys in the lineup that day, and the unbiased truth is probably impossible to uncover. Did CJ really do all the evil things these guys claim? Doubtful. At the same time, sometimes when you get a crew of guys together, especially in Baja, common sense goes out the window and guys start using one brain between the lot of em. One thing that is certain is that we all end up looking stupid when events like this take place.

Like children fighting over toys, we surfers need a reality check. Perhaps the Mexican government will finally step up and abandon this whole Escalera Nautica/tourism investment from abroad development plan (yeah right) and confiscate the land at San Juanico so none of us gringos will be able to ruin with bad vibes and golf courses what was once a mellow, beautiful little fishing village.

I haven’t been to San Juanico in years, and drama like this is mainly why. Two days of driving on the highway from hell, washboard roads, and federale shakedowns, all for this? No thanks, I can get that right here in California norte.

For all the drama, check out the press release that came out on Surfline along with the link to the blog and all the subsequent posts (i.e. trash talking) below.

The future of Central Baja? Fore!

Longboard Sharks De-Finned by Mysterious Invaders at Remote Baja Location
November 14, 2007
PRESS RELEASE

Apparent extreme wave hogging and bad attitudes by a group of visiting longboarders created high tension at a remote Baja surf spot on this last south swell. After multiple days of drop ins, back paddling, disrespect for other visitors and the locals, this crew of longboarders woke up one morning to find all of their fins missing from their longboards. Obviously someone had quietly visited their camp in the dead of night to complete the deed, supposedly the removal of some 40 fins without anyone waking up!

Word is, this group of longboarders left the next day because they could no longer surf and nobody would lend them fins due to their past rude behavior. Ironically, the fins seemed to have turned up at the surf spot and there are even photos of them online at http://scorpionbayjustice.blogspot.com. There is also some talk about creating some sort of monument of the fins encased in concrete on the tip of the point as a reminder for visitors to always share waves with respect for others. As always, crazy stuff in Baja and we travel at our own risk…

I received a lot of positive feedback from readers after the most recent column about the surfing experience along the Northern California coast beyond the Golden Gate. It sounds like many Santa Cruz surfers still yearn for those days when you could be alone with your thoughts while riding a few empty waves. Everyone who wrote me seemed to appreciate the slower pace of a place like the North Coast, despite the challenging conditions. Unfortunately, because of space restrictions, the article was trimmed back quite a bit. For anyone who enjoyed getting lost in the slow vibe of the North Coast, here’s the uncut version for you:

Veteran surf scribe Dave Parmenter once described Santa Cruz as Huntington Beach with pine trees.

I suspect Parmenter was surfing somewhere in the far northern reaches of California when he came up with that statement. While it’s obviously an exaggeration, his words struck a chord as I skirted my way down a steep goat trail with my board in tow, trying to get down to a boulder and driftwood strewn beach somewhere along the Sonoma County coast.

The scene down on the beach was a far cry from the mild weather, crowded lineups and bustling surf and tourism industries of Santa Cruz. Like most beaches north of the Golden Gate there were no signs of civilization. I also couldn’t find a grain of sand on the entire beach, just an assortment of rocks and stones of various sizes. Thick patches of bull kelp bobbed in the ice cold water and a group of elephant seals wriggled about on a sea stack far offshore.

I was up on the North Coast—the ambiguity of place is intended, no surf spots will be harmed in the making of this article—visiting my friend Jamie. He had invited me up to his house for a couple of days to go abalone diving and, if we were lucky, maybe even score some waves.

The vibe along the North Coast is how I imagine Santa Cruz must have been like some fifty years ago. Except for a few small towns like Jenner and Point Arena, the coastline remains relatively undeveloped and wild. It’s a mellow, pastoral scene—old barns with sagging roofs, endless green hills peppered with grazing cows, and a dramatic rocky coastline covered in groves of cypress and pine, often shrouded in mist.

It’s easy to find opportunities to surf alone up here if you so choose, and when a crowd does gather it’s often a small group of locals who all know each other.

“You know everybody,” Jamie told me of growing up along the Sonoma coast. “There’s really just a handful of local surfers, you could count them on both hands. Everyone else comes up from the Bodega Bay area or from the valley like Santa Rosa, and Sebastopol. It can still get crowded at certain spots when all the conditions are obvious, but overall it’s more of a community vibe.”

There are two main reasons why the surfing experience along the North Coast has failed to mushroom into the crazy scene so prevalent in Southern California and Santa Cruz. First off, the surfing conditions are harsh. A 5/4/3 mil wetsuit with a hood and thick booties is really the minimum gear necessary to surf year round. I found this out the hard way when I began shivering in my 4/3 and booties after being out for just an hour under gray, overcast skies.

Then there are the waves, which do their very best to frustrate surfers and only reveal their true potential to the most meticulous wave hunters who constantly study what the conditions are doing.

Nate Buck, 27, is a lifeguard for the California State Parks who’s been patrolling the Sonoma Coast State Beaches since 2000. He grew up in Encinitas surfing spots like Swami’s and Cardiff Reef and says that what really sets the North Coast apart is the region’s lack of consistent surf.

“In Santa Cruz and Southern California you can pretty much go surfing almost every day,” Buck said. “Up here it’s just really fickle. Someone who comes from down south needs to understand they won’t have as many days to surf.”

“It’s a little bit slower paced and there’s not the immediate reward. You have to be able to tolerate less than perfect surf and handle paddling for 45 minutes to get out and maybe catching just one wave. There are no cameras up here, no one’s watching you. You just have to be in it for the experience.”

As a result, the level of surfing talent in the water tends to be less high performance than in a surfing mecca like Santa Cruz. The average age in the lineup tends to be a lot older as well. Many of the local surfers up north are people who moved up there in the 60s and 70s to get away from the crowds and pioneer new spots.

“Up here it’s pretty rare to see anyone in their early twenties surfing really well,” said Luke Walton, 25, who grew up surfing the North Coast and currently lives in Humboldt. “It’s partly because it’s not really consistent up here, so it takes a lot longer to progress. You can’t surf 300 days a year here. You can try, but most of the time it’s not going to be very good.”

But what your average North Coast surfer lacks in hot dogging ability, they make up for in ocean knowledge, competence in raw conditions and heavy water and—most importantly—commitment and patience, essential character traits for surfing success up north.

The North Coast surfing experience is as much about the hunt itself and solving the puzzle of where there will be decent waves as it is about the actual act of riding a wave. You can drive around for hours on twisting roads searching for waves and still end up getting skunked, which is exactly what Jamie and I did one day during my stay. We had driven around all morning and checked a half dozen spots, but nothing was really working. Either the swell direction was wrong, or the tide wasn’t right, or there wasn’t enough swell, or a combination of all of the above.

“The wind is huge,” Jamie explained to me while in the car. “Some years it will blow hard for literally like three months straight. It just junks up the waves so bad you can’t even surf.”

Many North Coast breaks don’t even look like surf spots. They are often strewn with a minefield of jagged, black rocks and thick heads of bull kelp. Every time we passed by a rocky cove or hiked to the end of a bluff I found myself thinking, “If I only had a few sticks of dynamite I could turn this setup into a perfect wave.” Aside from the handful of beachbreaks, most of the surf spots are reefbreaks that work best on higher tides so that potential landmines are covered with a bit of water.

“There’s a lot of almost perfect setups,” Buck said. “There are so many places where there’s just a big rock in the wrong place, or the point is oriented not quite right, or the wave is too sketchy and if you blow the drop you’ll be right on the rocks. You spend a lot of time mindsurfing places. I’ll bet there will be a lot of good setups here in like a 1,000 years when the coast has had more time to get worn away.”

Not to say that there aren’t a few rare gems. Like anywhere, the spots up north can all have their day. On the rare occasions when they do go off, the waves can provide as thrilling a surfing experience as just about anywhere in California, and usually with half the crowd. Furthermore, because the coast is so inhospitable to surfing, when you do finally score the North

But the real locals you have to watch out for hang out beneath the water. The northern tip of the Red Triangle extends up to Bodega Bay and shark sightings are common along the entire North

Buck was one of two lifeguards who first responded to the scene at Salmon when a 20-year-old female surfer was attacked by a great white estimated at 16 to 18 feet in October of 2005. On the way to the scene, they had received a report over their radio that the victim had a severed artery and was still in the water. Fortunately the information was incorrect and other surfers had helped the woman get to the beach, but at the time Buck and his partner were prepared for the worst.

“You’re going to that call basically thinking you’re going to have to swim out and retrieve a dead body,” he recalled.

Buck said he has two surfing friends who have had encounters with sharks along the North Coast, and one of them has been attacked on three separate occasions. None were fatal, although they easily could have been.

“Shark attacks are a reality here,” Buck said. “I live at Salmon Creek beach where someone gets bumped or circled at least once a year. When you consider the relatively low number of surfers around here, you realize that’s a pretty high chance of having an interaction.”

While they will be the first to admit their coast is no world class surfing destination and can at times seem cruel, it’s rare to hear North Coast surfers complain. They are used to the tough conditions and whining just isn’t their style. In the end, most North Coast surfers will always stay true to their home turf.

“I think this area is where I’m most comfortable,” Luke Walton told me. “I would much rather surf a slightly less quality wave with just a few friends than a high quality wave that’s super crowded. For me, the wild experience of surfing up here is a lot more satisfying.”

Got a surf story? Contact Leo Maxam at leomaxam@yahoo.com

Check out this footage of Hawaiian hellmen Garrett McNamara and Kealii Mamala towing into a tsunami wave created when a massive chunk of ice breaks off Child’s Glacier in South-Central Alaska and plunges into the Pacific Ocean.

No matter where you stand on the whole Motorized Personal Water Craft/tow surfing issue, you have to admit one thing–it’s strangely appropriate that a tsunami wave resulting from global warming and the subsequent melting of thousand year old glaciers, only be possible to ride with the aid of a fossil fuel burning machine like a jet ski.

The more these guys tow the outer reefs (and the more your average Joe practices tow-ats in three foot waves down at Moss Landing), the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere, and thus the more their chances of scoring another one of these freak waves increases–even if it’s only by the tiniest increments. Ironic? We think so.

Who knows what other strange new extreme sports will be made possible by the tragedy of global warming? Mountain boarding the steepest alpine peaks that once were covered in year-round ice and snow? Iceberg hopping near the poles? Tow surfers hunting the ever-increasing number of hurricane swells in the Gulf of Mexico every summer?

History has been made. Tsunami glacier waves have officially been ridden by surfers. Cutting edge and creative, or a big fat waste of time, money and resources for a freezing cold, mushy wave? That’s for you to decide. But honestly, Kealii– “All natural?”–come on, dude.