Sitting in San Diego waiting for a call about our trip to Baja was a taxing experience.

To escape the freezing winter surf in Nova Scotia, Dean Petty and I flew down to sunny California. Both having relatives scattered around the state, it was a no-brainer. Dean’s brother Mac and roommate Willy were both living in Santa Cruz, and had planted a seed about heading down to Baja a few months back.

It turned out that Willy and a couple of friends had bought a 1978 GMC Vandura motor home the previous summer. None of them had oceanfront properties, so they purchased the ol’ beast, aptly named “Norma,” as a temporary beachfront pad.

After a couple of hundred dollars in repairs, Norma was ready to go. Willy, Dean, Mac, and T.K. started trekking down the coast from Santa Cruz, testing Norma’s roadworthiness on their way to pick me up in San Diego.

As they were heading down, I was sitting with my family, who decided that it was a good idea to have an intervention about the dangers of Mexico’s drug wars the night before we were scheduled to leave, piquing my already anxious personality. When the boys arrived, I didn’t even know if I was going to go down with them. CNN had put the fear of God in my family’s hearts and minds, and they were kind enough to pass it on to me.

When the boys showed up the next day in their rickety, gutted ‘70s Vandura, my worries weren’t really put to rest. But at this point I felt like I couldn’t back out of our trip. It wasn’t all bad — there were three beds for five people, a camping stove, two bikes, fishing gear, and a dog named Tea Bear. There was also an extensive shared quiver that included longboards, shortboards, a fish, an alaia, a single-fin, a Doyle soft-top and two boogieboards.

As we entered Mexico, my head was on a swivel, ready to be in the middle of a drug war 50 feet across the boarder. Dean, Mac, T.K., and Will looked at me as if I was crazy tucked in the back of Norma. Our first stop was at a taco stand. The boys tumbled out of Norma, Will leading the charge, engaging the first person he saw with his take on the Spanish language. The local quickly explained that he hadn’t seen too many gringos down this far because of their fear of getting shot. This didn’t ease my anxiety, but I did take some comfort in hearing the calmness in his voice and the seeming peaceful environment that we were in.

Being able to go on a surf trip with such a diverse quiver takes away a lot of the stress of finding waves. We arrived at the first point that we had scouted on our map to find small, cross-shore, unorganized waves breaking over a cobblestone bottom. After being in the car for so long, no one cared about the wave quality. Everyone grabbed a vessel from the communal quiver and headed out. The waves where shitty but we didn’t care — we were surfing a point with just our friends out.

Late that night, well after we’d squeezed ourselves into our shared sleeping quarters, my biggest fear came to life. A banging at the RV door woke me. I peeked out the window to see the blaring high beams of a big truck and the silhouettes of five men carrying five really big guns. In my mind, I was thinking this was the end. I imagined being tied up naked in the desert with no one around for miles and all of our belongings, passports, and money gone with no way to get out of Mexico.

There was another bang — clearly these guys weren’t going to leave. Will got out of his bed naked and opened the door. A staunch poked his head and flashlight in to look around.

“Drogas?” he questioned.

Obviously, we hadn’t been stupid enough to carry drugs in Baja. Will, still naked, gave him a quick answer in Spanish explaining that we didn’t do drugs and that we were in Baja to go surfing. Somehow he managed to flip the conversation to a lighter topic (probably by way of his lack of clothes).

“Donde estan la mujeres?” the soldier asked.

Will responded in a light tone by saying, “No mujeres, todo hombres… tenemos un perro.”

The soldier laughed. And from that moment on I knew that we were OK — Will’s nudity and joking were enough to completely change the direction of the soldiers’ questioning.

Three days later, we were bumping down a dirt road in our ill-prepared RV hoping it would stay together just until we got to our next campsite. As we cleared the crest of a hill our next point came into view. Small, clean lines rolled around its corner, then along a sand bottom to shore. A longboarding night session led to an alaia/longboard morning session in which Dean honed his skills on his DIY wood plank and Mac curled his toes on the tip of his 9’6” Takayama.

After a couple of days of mini-pointbreak perfection, we saw that the ocean was going to go flat for a week. We wanted to go south, and knowing that we needed a south swell for the points down there, we decided instead to head to the Sea of Cortez and make the best of a flat week.

The east coast of Baja is very different from the west — warm water, more snowbirds, and really great sailing. We rented a Drascombe longboat from National Outdoor Leadership School, a 21-foot two-mast vessel that had multiple sail configurations allowing it to sail in almost any wind. Mac had worked at NOLS a couple of years back, and he knew how to read charts and captained our little vessel. For seven days we sailed, camped, cooked, read, and hiked. But knowing that there could be swell coming pulled us back to the west coast and further south to another point.

Upon our arrival, we thought that we had found heaven — no other surfers and a reeling righthander that looked as if it was going to offer some serious barrels and perfect fast sections. The next morning, expecting to find epic surf, we woke up to find similar surf to the day before. We still went out, and for the first time on our trip, the shorter boards came out of the shared quiver. Mac glided down the line on a quad fish while Dean blew the tail out on his thruster.

Knowing that there was a solid south swell on the way, it was hard to leave our perfect point. But flights were booked and everyone had obligations in the real world. It’s always hard leaving a spot with that much potential, knowing that waves were on the way. But all in all we had a great trip with fun waves and amazing experiences.

Outside of our one military encounter, we had none of the issues that I feared while waiting to be picked up in San Diego. The majority of people we met were generous and friendly, and it seems that every time I’ve been told to fear a place to which I’ve traveled, it’s never as bad as I’m told. And Baja is definitely included on that list.