RIP
"It was a perfect a-frame barrel located in mainland Mexico. The wave was especially good because it was located at the mouth of the Rio Balsas, which was able to maintain the sand bars, focusing the waves. The sea floor drops off very deeply and quickly due to a deepwater canyon just off the beach here.
Another unique aspect of the beach that makes the wave ride able when it was very big is that the curved beach faces south to southeast. This means that the prevailing onshore winds were side or offshore most days. All of these dynamics made a wave that was consistently big, hollow and perfect.
This wave was practically destroyed by development. A construction of the largest steel mill in a third world country. The large development of the mill was significant enough to change the name of the city. This development resulted in a hydroelectric dam upstream.
The dam impeded the necessary sand flow for maintenance of the sand bars severely. The final nail in the coffin was the harbor and its accompanying jetties located to the north of the break. The jetties allowed a large south swell in August of 1975 to strip the beach of so much sand that wave was ruined forever.
It still breaks occasionally when conditions are just right. However, the present wave is rare and does not compare to the perfect peaks that frequented the beach with surprising regularity before the dam and harbor. Most days it is now an a-frame shore pound without any shape.
2.3 @ 8 secs from 310
Nope
posted by pushingtide @ Tuesday, May 08, 2007
8 comments
8 Comments:
How do we stop this? What do we do? It breaks my heart.
I've seen P@t$%^*co on a huge south and it's f#&k'd up now. It was so heavy the ground rattled when a set came threw. All the trendy beach pebbles that hip people put in their zen yoga gardens is stripped off the beach there by the locals. It a crazy little strip mining industry. They go down on these wierd three wheeled bikes and sort the rocks for color and then fill bags. The bags are stacked in front of their houses and someone comes to pick them up. It looks like everyone has a fox hole in front of their shack.
Crazy, but maybe if they move enough pebbles the sand will come back?
Cool info anon!!! Thanks alot man. Yeah, I hope it comes back.
That is a shame. Save the Waves is supposedly working to stop things like this from happening. I sometimes have my doubts about some of these organizations. The Surfrider Foundation only seems to be sue happy for example. But I get the feeling Save the Waves might be legit. They are working right now on trying to stop the San Miguel Harbor (which someone on the Baja Nomad had convinced me erroneously was defunct). This type of tragedy is going on all over Baja California Sur as well. I guess we could donate to the cause and become part of the solution.
A world class wave in Madeira, Portugal has been destroyed by the construction of a jetty to protect a swimming pool. This jetty is placed wright on the line-up, everything happened so fast that nobody had time to react, because there was public warning about the project in order to avoid opposition.
This facts demonstrate the lack of vision of the Portuguese authorities that see more interest in the small swimming pool and totally ignores that Madeira is a word class surf destination.
Seems to be happening more and more often these days, especially down in Baja recently. Madera was a huge disappointment, a place I always wanted to go to explore my Portuguese roots. But honestly we like our jetties up here.
There's a great story about this wave in an old issue of TSJ.
pointsurf -
I've heard complaints that Surfrider doesn't sue enough. Often times the courts are where you need to go for victories. Ask the surfers who used to get sick before the pulp mill was shut down in Humboldt. Surfrider sued and won.
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