DANNY WAS SCROLLING through an iPod for sounds that matched the land. Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad had worked well in the cloud cover, but our newfound sun required the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Just when it seemed like we'd exhausted our desert soundtrack, we pulled up on a town we knew to be near the Pacific coast, Punta Prieta. I found a roadside taco joint with two tractor-trailer rigs parked out front. My high school Spanish always gets me in trouble. I looked at the menu and guessed that they had only two kinds of taco, beef and fish, and explained that we wanted four of each kind. When the woman emerged from the kitchen with 40 tacos, I realized that her menu was more varied than I'd expected.

Not being inclined to waste food, we took the tacos to go and began searching for a place to gorge. We rolled southward, and soon Pooter looked west and said, "Damn, look at that." Through a crack in the brown hills was the distant expanse of the Pacific flashing in the sunlight. The view passed as quickly as a glimpse of bare breast in a movie, but that was all we needed to see.

I should have looked for a better road to the beach, but these were desperate times. As we bumped and scraped along, we occasionally stopped to check for major damage, and I could tell what the rental's underside looked like by examining the rocks that we'd snagged on. Each time we bottomed out, someone would deny the occurrence by saying, "We almost bottomed out." We plowed along despite the mechanical protests and, after a few more miles, found a beach where a long tide pool formed behind an exposed reef of rocks that must have supported 300 pelicans.

No one announced that there was a race to be the first man to tie into a fish, but our careful packing job was destroyed in a matter of seconds as the four of us dug through the back of the rental in a frantic search for gear. I was the first to break free from the pack, and I scampered across the rocks while watching my back trail for competition and simultaneously trying to string my spinning rod. I pasted out my first cast on the shore side of the pool and felt the bump of a fish but missed the strike. Two casts later I landed a two-pound spotted bay bass. By the time I had the fish tied to a stringer, Danny had picked his way out to the tide pool and, ever the purist, was trying to buck the wind with his fly rod.

Matt's always the first to put his neck out, and I watched as he scrambled his way over urchin-covered rocks to reach the reef. The pelicans were still lifting off when he let out a whoop. He was hooked into something good. His rod doubled over and then bounced back up, the fish gone. I heard him yell, "Aaaawww, shit!" He smacked his spinning rod against the water and then flung out another cast. Within seconds he was into a nice bass.

An hour later we realized our mistake. We'd been in such a rush to hit the ocean that we'd neglected to stock up on a night's worth of beer. And now here we were at the perfect beach, with the sun slipping down into the horizon and no one wanting to drive to the next town. This had us feeling stuck between a rock and a hard spot, but just then a middle-aged surfer with sun-bleached hair came riding across the sand on a beach cruiser and yelled, "Welcome to Fibber's Paradise!"

As it turns out, we'd inadvertently taken our tacos and stumbled onto this man's home turf. He pointed out to a wave, explaining that it was one of the longest rides on North America's Pacific coast, and informed us that we were just a half-mile away from "headquarters," which amounted to a small motor home, a brick oven built out of beach cobbles, and a stack of surfboards. Fibber makes an annual migration from California to spend six months a year there and keeps enough wine on hand to get him through the entire season. He supplied us with firewood and all of the intoxicants we could physically handle. It didn't take a genius to see that this trip was going to work out.