Surfing Mexico | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Riding with the Ghost Dolphin (cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine, May 2005

Page:

Riding with the Ghost Dolphin (cont.)


	(Photographs by Kurt Markus)

I HAVE COME TO IXTAPA for three weeks to train with Leon. I started surfing six months ago, while visiting a friend in Huntington Beach, California, and got hooked. After 25 years of kayaking whitewater, it seemed a natural progression to begin again where the rivers end. I went back to California two more times last spring and now have a total of 35 days on a board. I wonder if, on day 365, I'll be able to ride a North Shore Hawaiian tow-in wave like the ones you see on TV. I'll need constant instruction to keep the learning curve steep. So when I met Leon while on a family vacation in Ixtapa last summer—I'd already heard about him in California—I asked him if he'd coach me.

It's not surprising that Leon doesn't believe in holding a student's hand: All his life, his only teacher has been the thumping waves. As a small boy, living in a tiny village called Chutla, up the rugged Guerrero coast, he saw a neighbor who had been to California as a migrant worker wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a surfer shooting a tube. Six-year-old Leon kept thinking about that barrel. A few years later he began to see vans of American hippies with boards on the roof passing on the narrow, potholed coastal road. "I was thinking," Leon says, pointing to his sun-burnished head, "I want to do that."



	(Photographs by Kurt Markus)

When his father, a traveling electric-appliance salesman, moved the family to Zihuatanejo—then a small beach town with one dirt road out to the highway—Leon stole a scrap of plywood from a wood shop and began boogie-boarding. When he was 12, he heard that an American friend of Jacques Cousteau's who lived across the bay had a longboard. Leon and a dozen other local kids asked to borrow it and took turns, and a local surf culture was born.

The same phenomenon of scrappy local kids hitting the waves any way they could was occurring up and down Mexico's Pacific coast. Unlike California surfing, born in the early 1900s, the sport in Mexico didn't have a direct pollination from Hawaii, with its centuries-old surf culture. There was no Duke Kahanamoku bringing showy exhibitions and aloha spirit; there were only wayward gringos. American legends Bud Browne and Greg Noll took some trips to Acapulco and Mazatlán in the late fifties, but, according to Nathan Myers, a historical-minded editor at Surfing Magazine, Californians didn't start poking down the coast of mainland Mexico in significant numbers until the 1960s, after the Gidget movies and the Beach Boys craze had ignited the American surfing boom that suddenly crowded California's beaches. The majority of the first Mexican surfers were the sons of poor fishermen and hotel workers. I asked Arturo Astudillo, now 52, one of the early Mexican pioneers around Acapulco, how he and his friends got their first boards. "We stole them," he said. He hung his head. "I am sorry. It was the only way."

By the late seventies, Leon, then a teenager, was shredding. He bargained with gringos for beat-up boards. He dripped candle wax on the deck for traction and made his own leashes out of surgical tubing. He began working in the booming new tourist center of Ixtapa. One morning, he and a friend named Antonio Ochoa paddled out into a wickedly fast hollow break beside Ixtapa's recently built breakwater. No one had attempted it before. They dropped in on an overhead, right-breaking barrel that blasted them through a tube like buckshot. The wind at their backs almost flattened them. They came back the next morning, and the next, and named it Las Escolleras, "the Jetties." Then they began exploring northward, finding the Rio La Laja break on the other side of a crocodile swamp.

They heard about a legendary Mexican surfer from Acapulco named Evencio Garcia Bibiano, who everybody said was like a demon on the waves. In 1978, they went to watch him compete at the first Mexican national competition on the mainland, at a break in Guerrero called Petacalco, a 15-foot barrel that broke dependably twice a day. Garcia, despite long nights spent partying, was beautiful, almost frightening, to watch.

Leon never missed a day on the waves. When he was 24, he became a waiter at the club Carlos 'n Charlie's, right on the beach in Ixtapa, a five-minute walk from the Jetties. At Carlos 'n Charlie's, every night is spring break, and Leon quickly became chief party maker. He wore his shirt unbuttoned to his waist, danced on the tables, judged bikini contests, administered a devastating sangria from a spouting pitcher. He knocked back tequila every night and was such a ladies' man that he is still called El Tigre. He dated models and TV stars, often didn't sleep, and, when the sun came up, grabbed his board and went surfing. When the onshore winds blew out the waves in the late morning, he'd nap for a couple of hours, then come back to the bar and load up the donkey with buckets of ice and beer.

"The donkey's name was Lorenzo," Leon said. "We shared free beers on the beach, for advertising. As soon as he saw me open the first beer, he chased me down. I taught him to drink. By the time we came back, he was drunk."

"Too much party," Leon admits. After 15 years in the fastest lane, he downshifted to a slower one, surfing with single-minded devotion and opening his shop. He, a sister, and two youngerbrothers started renting boards, giving lessons, and taking customers on day trips to nearby breaks. And once Leon got serious about competing, he won the nationals in his age class—over-40 in 2002 and over-35 in 2004. There are few men alive who know the Pacific coast of Mexico as well as Leon.

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.