Gooooaaaallll!!!: A Baja Victory

Last Friday, I caught up with Serge Dedina of Wildcoast after his group had just scored a major victory in the battle over the Escalera Nautica (Nautical Ladder) project in Baja. He was preparing for an interview on national television in Mexico, but took some time out to discuss an apparent victory for anyone who has ever surfed a Baja point break. It’s also a victory for surf enviro activism, and it just goes to show that if you can change the system in a place like Mexico, it’s possible to change the system here too.

Chris Dixon: You guys went down to Baja with a Wall Street Journal reporter after you got a copy of the report on the Escalera Nautica’s boat traffic projections being 600% overblown. When did you guys actually get a copy of this report?

Serge Dedina: About a week ago and then we gave it to the Wall Street Journal and they made an agreement to have an exclusive on the story. All these guys do is spend their time investigating economic development. So we took Joel Millman, he lives in Carlsbad. We flew him in last week when the surf was really big. Oh man, on the way down we saw some surf in Ensenada that was going off. I mean even Ensenada Harbor — it was going off. I’ve never seen it break like that.

So Wednesday he flies in and we meet him at Punta Prieta which is just north of Santa Rosalita. There’s a little military outpost with a landing strip.

We get to Rosalita and of course there’s a big swell running and you see waves breaking off the point but since there’s so much natural erosion there, the waves don’t roll through anymore and what was interesting to see was that with that marina what we saw was that all the wave energy backs off after it breaks off the point, and then it builds up and you see corduroy lines breaking right where they built the Marina. So they built the Marina exactly in the worst spot in the whole bay in terms of wave energy and we got to see it.

CD: What was happening out there?