La Mina de Oro

E L P M SA E L C I ART #14 slidemagazine.com Issue #14 R.R.P $14 USD

R.R.P $20 AUD / NZD

JAZZ THE GLASS NOOSA + LA MINA DE ORO CABIN FEVER + ANYTHING BUT 3 THE DANCE + ALA MO BOUND + WOOD GRAIN + GARDEN OF EDEN

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Words and Captions by Michael Kew Photos by Chris Burkard

“I have always felt about two steps away from living in a van with three dogs. If that ends up happening, Mexico is the place I’d choose to do it.” —Alex Kopps

It’s lovely being a surfer in a zone of none, because nothing is more irksome than spending hours flying to a Third World country and finding yourself in the immigration line behind a gaggle of other dudes with boards. They came for the same reasons as you, alone or with their wives or girlfriends or rowdy peers, draining the airplane’s booze stock all the way from Brisbane or Honolulu, later staying at your same hotel, hassling for your same waves, prowling at your same seedy pub for the same curious dark local girls and cheap beers and shabby billiard tables, the barstools, the peanuts, the jukebox, the filthy urinal.

But, really, is that the spirit of surf travel? It occurs often in Malé and San José, Denpasar and Padang, in Nadi and Papeete. Yet the world is huge—thousands of warm waves are going unridden right now. Anyone with the money and moxie can find them, and those willing to endure expense and hassle are often rewarded with lineups unlike the ones they left at home.

Last March, Chris Burkard did not discover any unmolested righthand Mexican points, they had been surfed before; but as far as the young photographer and his crew could tell, they were the only dudes there, and, hence, could briefly claim it for themselves.

Anyway, mainland Mexico is big, so if one surf spot seemed crowded, there was always elsewhere. Barra de la Cruz wasn’t the one-trick-pony. Neither were Puerto Escondido, Pascuales, or Rio Nexpa.

We’re not going to tell you where Burkard scored, but he did avoid the now-famous pueblo of Barra.

Thrust into the limelight after the Association of Surfing Professionals held a Rip Curl Search WCT contest there (Rip Curl called the spot “La Jolla,” which means “the jewel”) in June 2006, the perfect, sand-bottomed Mexican Kirra was immediately heralded by many of the Top 44 as being one of the best—or the best—waves they’d surfed. All any non-Top 44er had to do was look at some photos or footage of the place and they’d tend to agree, especially if they were regularfooted with a penchant for long, shallow, sand-dredging tubes.

The coast there faces southeast, so prevailing winds blow offshore, and the swells wrap perfectly into Barra’s ancient, cliff-backed rivermouth nook. And while Barra was not hermetically sealed before the ASP came to town, it was definitely unknown publicly.

With its worldwide contest Web cast, though, the L A MINA DE ORO ¤ SLIDE ¤ 23

contest raised the curtain, forever changing that sleepy little fishing pueblo that’s now in the crosshairs of surfers everywhere.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, Mexico is uncrowded. The marquee spots have their share of tourists, sure, and Mexico is experiencing a boom of local waveriders, but that didn’t deter Burkard’s crew from deplaning in La Mina de Oro, the heart of Latin America’s greatest surf nation, toting maps and a grip of alternative surfcraft, anything from inflatable mats to fish to bonzers to hulls.

Mainland Mexico’s 2,500-mile-long Pacific coast is one of the world’s most variegated and fertile wave zones, heaven for a little separation from generic 6’2” x 18.5” thrusters. The place is cheap, too, and for any Californian seeking an easy escape route, Mexico rules all. Which was the approximate summation (“Dude, I love Mexico!”) from Grover Beach’s Burkard.

Joining him were Newport Beachites Andrew Doheny, Ford Archbold, and “Punker” Pat Towersey, plus San Francisco’s Alex Kopps and Hawaii’s Daniel Jones.

The crew offroaded throughout the fringes of La Mina de Oro, meeting 2009’s first austral swell head-on. They’d known spring was the best time to visit the area—it was still rainless, the air temperature was warming (but not too much), the tourist masses had yet to appear, and there were those early-season southern hemi treats colliding with sandbars, pointbreaks, rivermouths, and reefs. But the sand-bottom points were the atracción primaria, and if there was a board built specifically for them, it was the gloss-coated monofinned displacement hull.

“La Mina de Oro was authentic and raw,” Towersey said. “Dust, cactus, dirt roads, dogs, locals, religion—just real life in its simplest form. It made me become present and fully aware. I loved it.”

But what of hulls? What’s with the cheese hype surrounding these funky ’70s-era shapes that are useless in waves smaller than chest-high? Is it the purple Kool-Aid syndrome? The over-romanticized Zen of the single-fin? The retro fad that’s infected so many surfers who weren’t born (or were too young to surf ) in the ’60s and ’70s? The bitter old cynics among us rate the latter as truth, but let’s face the facts: Most retro equipment is interesting and fun to ride, regardless of how much proselytization we glean from Thomas Campbell films.

Hokey alaia replicas? Pass. But hulls? Yes, please. Punker Pat and the artist Kopps were believers down Mexico way, and who are we to judge them? Shit, I’ve owned four hulls, all made by the jovial Marc Andreini, an all-things-retro guru/shaper from San Mateo County, California. Unfortunately for him, Andreini has never surfed those Mexican points.

It’s wise to gather information from the horse’s mouth, though. Hey, Marc, can you tell us what exactly makes hulls worth riding? What differentiates them from the average McThruster?

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“The simplest analogy to draw is: There’s a hull and there’s a hydroplane, the two basic hydrodynamic designs,” he told me in April while we sat in his blue Chevy Suburban parked on the ocean side of Highway 101 at La Conchita (not in Mexico). “A hull you would liken to a sailboat, which has a deep, rounded curved surface that extends down into the water. The pressure that the vessel has pressing against the water displaces water from the heavy, rounded surface of the boat’s hull as it passes through the water. It creates forward propulsion.

“Hydroplane,” he continued, “is a flat or concave surface which creates lift and brings the board immediately to the surface and planes on top of the water.

The obvious differences are that one board quickly gets up to speed as it comes up on top of the water, but also quickly tops out, where you lose control once you get going too fast, so you have to put all kinds of fins on them to keep them in the water. Whereas a displacement hull reaches a terminal speed after a series of driving turns, and you build speed from one turn to the next.

“Another analogy is driving a stick-shift sports car, when you accelerate and powershift though the gears to gain speed. On a hull you’re driving from one turn to the next, and the object is to connect yourself down across the wave into the pocket and bank off that angle and create additional speed. Unlike a hydroplane, you never reach a point where the board loses control.

It’s always attached to the water, and you maintain control at any speed.

It’s a more fluid, natural design that goes through the water more so in the way that a fish or a dolphin or a tuna would, as opposed to taking a flat stone and skipping it across the water, where it’s detached from the surface.”

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1. Pat Towersey sweats with some cervezas after a long day under the hot Mexican sun. Down there, nothing tastes better.

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1. Hawaii’s Daniel Jones floats through a whitewater rebound on the day he swapped a loaner hull for his shortboard quiver. Jones flowed ’til the scorpions came home.

2. Towersey, hole-in-one on his 5-fin bonzer.

3. Evening hues at the hard-hitting beachbreak.

2. Towersey leans into some fresh-squeezed Mexican juice at a secret pointbreak. His displacement hull proved worthy for such angles.

4. Alex Kopps, looselipped on a tail-sliding fish.

5. The crew (from left to right): Pat Towersey, Ford Archbold, Alex Kopps, Daniel Jones, and Andrew Doheny, in town.

6. Archbold (left) and Kopps, cruising on a sunset sand dune.

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Si! So this was why Towersey, once a shortboard-only, Volcomized darling of the OC surf media, became a retro convert, applying such scientific dogma to some green, fifth-gear walls.

“It’s an addiction,” Towersey said. “Hulls are so fun, and you feel like you’re going so fast. The more I watch modern highperformance surfing, the more disinterested I get. It seems homogenous and very predictable.”

One would suppose the jetties of Newport Beach were equally mundane, particularly in March. Get out of your damn RVCA office, Pat, and head to the AeroMéxico check-in desk at LAX. Kopps would thank you— except he couldn’t, for a while, at least.

Kopps’s passport had been stolen, and since this Mexican trip coincided with a weekend, the government agencies were closed, and Kopps was left hanging passportless. He couldn’t risk missing the swell’s peak, so: “I found this alternative in which I would only fly domestically, not requiring a passport. I flew from San Francisco to San Diego and got a shuttle to the border. I couldn’t get the driver to cross the border due to the recent violence around it and within Tijuana. I ended up walking into Mexico, dragging my boards, cameras, and tripod behind me.

I caught a cab to the Tijuana airport and flew from there. The whole mess ended up taking more than 24 hours.” But it was well worth every minute, especially considering how Kopps streaked hull-top. “They really enjoyed the groomed pointbreak waves that populated the area,” he said. Burkard, too, was thrilled, but not about hulls. He’s a picture guy. He’s also half-Mexican, and his first trip to his father’s homeland was a lesson in both ancestral and surf-potential elucidation. “I’d always been jaded toward Mexico,” he said. “My initial thoughts were that all Mexico had to offer were the giant tubes of Puerto Escondido or the super lame contest aftermath scene of Barra, but when we got to La Mina de Oro I realized there was so much more to the place.

Empty lineups still exist with perfect peeling barrels. There was a lot more mystique than I’d ever imagined.”

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1. Towersey, grab-rail bottom-turning on a displacement hull near one of the numerous jetties in the area.

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1. Got a skimboard?

2. Buttery arc courtesy of Mister Punker Pat. 3. Newport jokester Andrew Doheny slips into some smoothness amongst the jagged fray.

4. Tipping his sombrero to George Greenough, Towersey hits the shorepound bowl on his inflated surf mat.

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