Editor’s Note: This adventure was proudly made possible by Subaru. Find yours today.
See? Mexico is beautiful.
Mexico is a beautiful place. It’s beautiful in a way I’m not used to, either. I haven’t been there too much – save for the occasional week long jaunt after a winter’s work in Northern British Columbia – so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when Subaru rang us up and asked us to take a trip south of the border. Las Gaviotas, to be exact. It’s a perfect place if you only have a few days and want to stay out of tourist-ville: about an hour south of the border, it lies just outside Tijuana, in all its filthy glory. On this trip we had to do two things: 1) go to Mexico, 2) learn how to shape a surfboard on the way. So we did. We piled surfboards on our roofs and bodies in the seats, then threw in a liberal amount of beer for good measure and called it good to go.
First stop: the Ride Anything headquarters in San Clemente. The friendliest guy you’ll ever meet, Bryan Knowles, the Ride Anything ruler, met us at his door. After a few pleasantries and the cutest puppy I’ve ever seen (Brewer), we got after it.
Bryan and I chose a Mini-Simmons because of its relative ease-to-shape (although Bryan gave other reasons). Less rocker and a more forgiving shape made it a relatively easy decision. After a few very interesting hours and more than a few screw-ups (which Bryan wordlessly fixed), this thing sat on the sawhorses, so white and pretty and smooth I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. “I wish we didn’t have to glass it,” I told Bryan. “It’s just so pretty like this.”
The thing about the lights in a shaper’s bay is that they’re set up to show every single imperfection. And they are incredibly successful at it: the smallest deep spot on the deck looks like a gaping chasm, and the tiniest imperfection on the rail looks like an s-bend in a road with a car accident at the end. This was somewhat disheartening, of course. As someone with almost no shaping experience and very little patience, it was difficult to understand that time and serious attention to detail are both paramount in shaping surfboards. I’m not sure what we would’ve ended up with if Bryan weren’t there, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. Thank God he was; because it was pretty. Extraordinarily so.
Board shaped and foam dust shaken out, we started the drive to Mexico, hitting the border in the late afternoon. It was funny, that border crossing. Things change immediately. The quickest culture shock ever occurs on that border: San Diego’s wealth is so much more apparent when directly contrasted with Tijuana’s lack thereof. The freeway winds its way passed Tijuana and through sections of slums that squat against hillsides, the occasional light flickering out from behind corrugated aluminum siding with smoke from a few scattered fires winding its way up through the night air. There is a certain beauty there, if only because it makes the spectator acutely aware of – in my case, at least – the incredible luck that goes into being a first-world citizen.
Just outside TJ sits Las Gaviotas, an area home to a few world-class waves. Of course, they weren’t anywhere to be found on our trip. I’ve been less skunked on trips to the lake. But we made do, dragged out the longboards, and rode the tiny Mexican bulls until the Mexican sun was low in the sky and the Mexican beers were cold in the fridge. Because that’s what surf trips are about, I think – not the surfing, really. It’s about making do with what you run into. It’s about looking for something without having anything in particular in mind and making it as great as you possibly can.
We also made a little video documenting the trip.
And here’s all the anticipation leading up to it.
Editor’s Note: This adventure was proudly made possible by Subaru. Find yours today.
