Stef and I just came in from a surf session south of the border in Baja, Mexico. There is good surf all along the Pacific and you can easily find your own little slice of paradise down here. We are staying at Las Gaviotas, a gated community 40 miles south of San Diego, where you can rent a sizable house for about $200 per night. The house we're staying is called Baja Paradise and holds five people. We came down with a caravan of surfer girls who are at a house around the corner and some guys who have a house with a ping-pong table-so we feel like we really own the place. We estimate about 100 houses in the community, so if you book ahead there is definitely room for you and everyone you know.
We can see the water from the living room and it is a short walk down the hill to a very mellow longboard spot. It can get crowded in the summer when this place gets booked up (it's pretty much all surfers who stay here), but if you go off-season you can get some of the winter swells all to yourself. Las Gaviotas is a reef break with peeling lefts and rights. While it is a blast to come down with a big group, that means that everyone is sharing the same waves. One morning Stef and I and our friend Andrea paddled around the rock jetty just south of Gaviotas, where we had to work harder to get the waves but got a session all to ourselves.
This small summer swell is definitely different from our experience here in February. For that trip, we stayed just up the way in a complex called Club Marena, which is around the bend from K38 (we called our spot K38 1/2). We happened to hit it during a big swell so we got sick waves all weekend. Stef just poked me to say that I should tell you about how my boyfriend Thomas saved her life during that trip. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but a group of us went for an evening surf (there's really no better way to see the sunset than when you're sitting on your surfboard!) and, silly us, stayed out until well past dark at an unfamiliar spot. It was a long paddle in and we'd already been out for hours. The waves were crashing onto dry rock and you couldn't see them before you were right on top.
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