Mags and I are visiting friends in SF this weekend. We’re pretty stoked to see some new art, eat great food and check out the SF surf scene. Anyone have recommendations?

I look around on the net every now and then, hoping to find a 300$ roundtrip to Costa, or a 200$ deal to Oahu. I gotta think though, that there is an easier way to find deals on flights than randomly sampling Travelocity or Orbitz or the airlines themselves. So my question to you is, what sites or services do you use to find cheap flights?

These pics are curtsy of my bro Wes, who took a trip up to the Ranch this weekend.

Nice rig huh?

I would like you advise you not to step on a nail the night before a trip to Baja. If, however, you can’t find a way around pressing a rusty and near completely dull object into your tender foot-flesh, make sure you get the right one.

The perfect nail for this kind of endeavor will keep you from departing at 4am, and give you cause to test your bottom turns. This may be because it knows your local spot is oil glass and semi uncrowded, but nails don’t really posses that ability, so it’s probably just chance. Still, chance is a good thing, especially when it’s of the overhead variety.

The perfect nail will also, in my experience, be a small one. Small enough so that it is capable of only making your foot stiff, but large enough that the pain makes you a bit picky with your wave selection. This works in your favor, by leaving you enough energy to go ahead with your short and dusty run.

The perfect nail will also know the swell angle is all wrong for the two good breaks within an hour of your chosen destination. Mine did not. No matter, I wasn’t walking on my sore foot, so we looked a little harder and found something that worked out very nicely.

In closing, I’d like to say, I hope that if you have occasion to step on a nail, you get one as kind and thoughtful as mine. Also, there is no perfect tetanus shot. Your arm is pretty much going to be sore paddling back out to the end of the point. Deal with it.

Compaired to how much we talk about waves, surfers take very few pictures them. How many photographers and videographers do you know who won’t shoot surfing because they’d rather surf? Generally if it’s good enough to shoot, they’d rather be surfing.

I recently picked up a waterproof cam for my trip south. Not surprisingly, I spent most of my time sitting outside waiting on the next set, which is a bad place to get footage. After a few days of constant surf I came to a comprimise with myself. I’d get a wave then wait inside for the next set and film that. (I swear it wasn’t because I was too tired to paddle the 150 yards back to the peak.) This worked out pretty well, except when I’d get all impatient and paddle back out.

While editing my footage from the week and remembering all the really good waves I didn’t capture, I think I get it. I think I get why photographers who surf spend some of the best days without their boards. Sure, having the footage is pretty damn cool, but not having shots of those macker set waves from the first and second days of the swell seems like a crime.

Audio: Man Man
See also: The Mission

Few breaks are off the map in Baja now. Still, you feel like you are on a mission when it takes you more than a day to get somewhere. Never mind that you slept in, or that you stopped at a few to many taco stands. With a swell model print out and the Baja Almanac in hand, you are trekking.

Others are charging too though, a fact you are warry of at first. Every rig with boards on top headed North is met with relief. You may hope they scored, but are definitely stoked to see them leaving. This attitude, born of crowds, drop-ins and more crowds wears off only when you’ve arrived at your destination and have assumed the last position in the lineup.

When three friends and I arrived at a point in Southern Baja, we were prepared to slide into the role of newcomers. Funny thing though, we found the spot where the lineup should have been, but wasn’t. Clean, 150 yard rights peeled right past our chosen camp like clockwork, with no one in the water. Needless to say, our astonished faces gave way to Cheshire Cat grins. Nowhere in the act of selecting boards or buying of food, did we let ourselves think we would surf for seven days with at the most, only 6 six guys in the water.

When the few surfers in the area did paddle out, one of my favorite things about surf trips to sparsely surfed regions began to unfold. It seems that, if given plenty of waves, a waverider will become increasingly more congenial the farther from home he or she travels. Deep in Southern Baja, this phenomenon can turn a stinkeyed Sponsorme into the most talkative surfer in the water. In fact, it can make him downright friendly.

At some point in between sets, almost everyone happily swaps stories of their journey South. Invariably, the better the break and the further from home they are, the more interesting the story becomes. Some have driven less than you and some hail from your town, but I always love to hear from those who traveled a bit harder. My crew was stunned by the 23 hours the chargers from Santa Cruz drove to ride hollow, reef fronted slabs. The Kite designer and crew’s drive from Oregon seemed a long way to go for anything, but plenty of time on these waves were surely worth it. The Colorado windsurfer will spend a summer getting 400 yard waves, connecting impossible sections with the aid of the wind.

Sometimes though, you hear a story that puts all the AC cooled hours on slick asphalt to shame. Such was our luck when a new arrival pulled up on a motocross bike to check the surf. I walked up to say hello and possibly point him in the direction of one of the breaks further down the coast. I soon learned he and a friend had ridden their bikes for days, all the way from the boarder. They carried only a few saddlebags of gear and 2 boards each, cradled in custom racks mounted to the frame of their 400cc and 600cc bikes.

Suddenly the adventure that was our swell predicted, sure thing point began to pale in comparison to his tale of mirroring the coast looking for new slabs, peaks and points rarely, if ever, surfed. I found out later this was Quik/Nixon/DVS ripper Jon Rose and friend, with no photographer or van full of team riders in tow. Their self appointed mission was to traverse the coastline all the way to Cabo and to document a trip that to me, truely embodies the journey as the destination.

A day later, while fueling up for my next session, I observed Jon and his friend take the last position in a sparse lineup. Wave after wave they created new curves in the face, found tight little shacks, waited thier turn through one wave sets or passed on closeouts just like the only other guy out. The whole session illustrated for me the root desire of all the travelers we met, regardless of the length of trip or type of transportation. Each one traveled to to find an empty lineup and unique waves which will never be seen again. I think I can speak for everyone I met when I say “mission accomplished”.

I’ll be putting together a video of the trip in the next few days so stay tuned. Hopefully we will hear more on Jon’s search in much the same manner as his 2004 book Towards Miles: Observations of an American Passage.