1984 Mexican Mayhem by Rich Myers and Jeff Higginbotham

In 1984 Californian surfers Rich Myers and Jeff ‘Higgy’ Higginbotham went on a surf/sail trip to Punta Abreojos at Baja Mexico. Herbie Fletcher, the mastermind behind Astrodeck and his team of Hawaiian windsurfers Mike Waltze & Matt Schweitzer and Malibu super star surfer Allen Sarlo also joined the convoy.  

Punta Abreojos is a small fishing village on the Pacific coast of the Baja peninsula. Abreojos means “open your eyes” and refers to the treacherous sailing conditions, with many rocks and reefs.

Rich Myers has been credited with exploring and discovering the windsurfing havens at Punta Abreojos & San Carlos Baja Mexico. Source Clark Merritt Baja windsurfing article in Windtracks Journal Vol 15, No 3.

PART 1. Rich’s story of highs & lows in the desert.

In the 1980’s Yallingup water man Rich Myers lived in the States and was a world champion windsurfer (Masters Division) and a contributor to US wind surf magazines.

Rich. “After a summer of hard work at my Malibu windsurfing, wrestling, volleyball school, Higgy and I decided we needed a well-deserved break south of the border.”

I was stoked with anticipation looking forward to two weeks of fun, surfing, windsurfing, volleyball, etc camping on a desert point in Baja Calif.

We travelled in a convoy with the Hawaiian glamour crew, who planned to continue further south to Puerto Vallarta region after accompanying Higgy & I to Abreojos.

There were barriers on the way to our destination, like being stopped and questioned by the Federales (Mexican Federal Police) on the desert drive.

We turned off the main road and headed down the dirt track towards the coast. Normally a 3-hour drive. Then we had a flash flood in the middle of the desert and it flooded the track.

The Hawaiian boys with their souped up 4WD made it through swollen river and kept going without looking back. Then Higgy & I tried a run & swim through in my Datsun Ute and blew the head gasket. We could go no further!

The river evaporated, but we were stuck in the heat with no water as we used it all in the car radiator. Vultures started circling and things were looking grim! Locals seldom used this track.

We were stuck there for six hours then saw a mirage out of nowhere. It was a black shiny 4WD coming towards us. And it was two friends from home, who we didn’t know were even coming – it was a miracle!

Our ‘Knights in Shining Armour’ were Rich Guerra & Rollerball in a brand-new Black Toyota Forerunner! They towed us to the point where the other guys were surfing – it never occurred to them that we never made it. ☹

We settled into a couple of days of surfing, sailing & volleyball at the Point.

Then the surf & wind stopped so everyone with a car bailed and moved on. We were not happy with our Gringo mates leaving us there without transport. There was no garage or telephone in the local fishing village & no one spoke English. ☹

By chance one of the Mexican business guys with the Astrodeck crew had to go back to LA (500km 24-hour drive) to get something and catch up with them in Puerto Vallarta in a couple of weeks. He offered to pick up a gasket and bring it back to us on his return to Mexico. I gave him some $’s but didn’t really think our chances of ever seeing him or the gasket again were good.

So, there we were, no surf, no wind, no friends, no car and then woke up the next morning to find no surfboards!! ☹

Apparently, some kids from a fishing village 30k’s north, stole them from our campsite during the night.

Our camp was one mile from the fishing village and every afternoon the kids would ride their bicycles to visit us, as was custom for all other trips we made there. We always bought them surf clothes stickers & lollies. But now we had run out of everything including food & water, so they took us to their homes & we met their parents who fed us lobster tacos & washed our clothes & provided a bed to sleep for the night. I was surprised to see in their rooms 100’s of neatly folded t-shirts & surf accessories on shelves, they had been collecting all these years. They exclaimed “Ricardo you are poorer than us.”

We told them about our stolen surf boards and Luis & Ysidro, the leaders of Abreojos Kid Gang said they would investigate the matter and it upset them that their gringos had been robbed by the rival kids from the village La Bocana, so they set off on their bicycles and rode 30k’s north and retrieved our surfboards. I think maybe the thieves got a bit of a knuckle-dusting from the Abreojos kids.

The kids & the whole town kept our spirits up. They were so gracious, generous & helpful to our plight. I was so angry our American friends abandoned us that I seriously considered learning to speak Spanish (with no English), marrying a local girl, becoming a fisherman and live there forever!

But reality is real & Higgy and I stayed in our camp bored out of our minds. Surfers reading this will understand, no surf with nothing to do. I spent days my days killing time walking all day in the desert. Higgy did his own thing, very low spirits to say the least.

One day I went with Pedro, the town elder, for a day trip in his old Model T-Ford to the oasis town of San Ignacio on his monthly journey to get supplies, a 10 hour return trip. Pedro didn’t speak a word of English let alone understand it, and I only had a limited Spanish vocabulary, so the round trip was a bit quiet, dusty & awkward. But it did kill another day.

Higgy & I sent telegrams to our friends & family in US but received no replies!

Two weeks later the required head gasket turned up at our beach camp. The Mexican guy was a legend! Then he left and continued his journey to Puerto Vallarta.

While our optimism of escape hit a new high, Higgy put the gasket, head and cylinders back together only to discover the head required a one-of-a-kind Allen Key wrench to torque it. Apparently only in that year, my 1974 Datsun ute had a special wrench designed for that particular job. Our hopes just dropped down to the lowest depths of the well.

Where the hell would we find that part in our out of the way desert camp?

We were very depressed & still no surf or hope.

I remembered there was an American hermit type hippy camp two miles south and noticed he was self-sufficient and had a toolbox. On one of our day journeys, we said “what the hell” we had nothing else to do so we walked in bare feet across scorpion infested ground and asked him if by chance he had a special torque wrench key for my 1974 Datsun ute. He smiled a quirky grin under is beard & replied “Yeah, I had one once, couldn’t believe the manufacturers made a special tool for that year. I blew my head gasket & had to buy that special wrench, but I was in civilisation back then ha ha ha. Well, let me check the toolbox, but ya know I bought it. (rummage, rummage ….). Wow, what da ya know, here it is, I still got it!!! “

Higgy & I were absolutely flabbergasted, it was a one in a billion chance!!! 😊

We got Chuy, the village mechanic to tow my ute to the ‘Pit’ in town. it was a dug-out hole with concrete stairs so a vehicle can park over the top & the mechanic can go into the pit and work under the car. There was a thick metal beam overhead with a block & tackle hoist to pull motors out. When the pit wasn’t in use for vehicles, they used it to slaughter, hang & butcher cows & pigs. There was a drain at the bottom for blood & oil. We actually witnessed the butchering of a freshly killed cow. The first week of exile, the chiefs cut it up & gave all the families their share, so the blood, smell & flies where still in the pit, when Higgy was working fastidiously to put our motor back together!! I’m no mechanic, so I entertained the Mexicans who were happy to lend their dual garage/abattoir. We chewed the fat literally while Higgy saved the day😊.

We got out of there faster than Speedy Gonzales could say “ADOIS AMIGOS.”

I travelled to Baja for years afterwards, but never again in a Datsun. 😊

A couple more drops in the Big Bucket of Rich😊

PART 2. Higgy’s recollections of Punta Abreojos trip

Jeff ‘Higgy’ Higginbotham is a multi-talented Malibu California local, perhaps the best underground surfer ever from the 26-mile Malibu coastline. Best description would be a real MacGyver / Swiss Army knife, good at volleyball, surfing & windsurfing. A professional photographer behind the camera and flexible in front. Solid friend, brother & father. Higgy is important as a First Aid kit on any travel adventure. Bio by Rich Myers.

Early 80s Baja Trip. I must have been in early 20s!

Going on a trip with Rich Myers was always an adventure magnified! It was part a strong double Espresso coffee, part Tequila, part Comedy Club and part Bull in a China shop. That’s what made it so fun.

All of us always admired Rich with his humour and antics and how he could always get himself out of a bad situation, it was like he had some human airbag around him that let him bounce off things, roll down cliffs and get into all kinds of weird trouble and always walk away and sometimes you were on that ride with him. 

On this particular trip that I’m gonna be writing about. There were signs this was going to be another one of those kinds of adventures with Rich. 

On the way down to our ultimate final destination of Punta Abreojos that was well south of Guerrero Negro we decided to stop at a spot called Punta San Carlos for a couple of days and yes we barely survived just getting to our first destination, as it was getting late Rich fell asleep at the wheel and we ran off a very dark dirt road, flew over a dirt berm and came very close to going over a cliff into a large ravine just to land on a nice flat landing spot that we were able to drive away from. Rich woke up right as we were landing. Just too tired from being up to many hours and maybe those shots of Centenario tequila that we loved so much had something to do with it.

As our trip pushed forward my Old-Man-Itus disease makes it hard to remember where we met up with the crew of Herbie Fletcher, Matt Waltz, I think Matt Sweitzer, and a crew of others doing some kind of wave warriors Carnival road trip.

As I remember now, we were parked on a side road right next to the deadly roundabout you come to at Guerro Negro right after going straight for the last miles 100 miles. At this spot, you come into this roundabout out of nowhere with no notice anywhere letting you know you are about to die unless you slow down! maybe that’s the way the little town taxes the gringos by getting their spoils after they wreck. So all of a sudden I hear these tires screeching and Rich and I look over to see Herbie Fletcher’s suburban towing his Jet Ski‘s jumping the curb and going sideways surprised like every other poor soul by the sudden hard-right turn they had to make with the rest of the crew following.

They all make it thru and shortly after Rich and I get back on the road well behind Herbie’s Carnival. We meet back up with that crew again at a large riverbed that was running hard after some really hard rains the night before. Rich and I are in his little Datsun truck with a shell on the back and those days these little trucks were pretty small 4 cylinders single cab and not too high off the ground. Herbie and his crew had big full size Suburbans, and Blazers that were ready for the challenge and went ahead and cautiously crawled through the river successfully.

Then Rich and I give it a go and punch it with speed thinking it better to get across than get swept away, but in doing that we sucked up some water through the intake which created a hydraulic effect in the cylinders and it blew out the head gasket. Herbie’s crew in front of us were already way ahead and didn’t realize we were going to be eventually stranded. 
 

We tried to limp the truck down the 2-hour long dirt washboard access road thru the desert to Abreojos by refilling the radiator with water but the motor was not having it and we stopped dead shortly after so we didn’t fry the motor, so there we are stuck in the middle desert on one of the hottest days on a dirt road that maybe one vehicle passes on daily if you’re lucky. We both later had blisters all over our backs from the heat of that day.

After sitting in what seemed to be 110° heat for a few hours, a black shiny 4WD driven by two of our US friends unexpectedly came out of nowhere and thankfully towed us stupid unlucky gringos all the way out to the point of Punta Abreojos where we wanted to be.

The little fishing village town loves Rich, he’s been going down there for years, in the little café they had posters of Rich that he has given them on past trips, Old ladies and fathers would try and make a match with Rich and their daughters and he would promise them he will marry them all. It was all pretty damn funny. Back then, the people of Abreojos were just honest beautiful people and they were happy Rich was back down there again no matter the circumstances.

Now that we have been towed all the way out to the Point where Herbies’ Carnival Crew has already set camp, it wasn’t so bad with some decent surf and hanging out with the carnival and a few of those nights getting hammered with all the madness that goes with it, we didn’t need the truck to go surf or Rich to sail or get supplies.

Once Herbie‘s carnival crew left to continue on down to Cabo San Lucas it kind of hits us that we were now stuck out there on the Point by ourselves twiddling our thumbs wondering what to do next. Even though we were getting decent surf you couldn’t help to wonder how you a going to get back in a time that was Pre Cell Phone, Pre Amazon, and Pre overnight style delivery. Kids today don’t get that some of these adventures back in the day put you way out there on your own!

To try and communicate back home the only thing the village had was a Western Union which was full old school telegram, You could only send a note that they would deliver back home by wire on the other end to who you were trying to get it too. IE: “HELP! BROKEDOWN AT ABREOJOS. BRING HEAD GASKET. I’M WITH RICH MEYERS I’M GOING TO GO NUTS. HELP!”  I sent out a telegram to a couple of friends telling them that we needed help and a list of parts and with the understanding to help they would have to drop what they were doing, come drive a couple of days to come to save us when you’re not even sure if we’ll even be there once you come down since communication is nearly non-existent.

We didn’t have any takers at least not knowing if we had any takers, since there was never a reply at the Western Union office so in the waiting, hours became days, days became weeks, weeks became months even the surf went flat and at our lowest point some thieves from the Village at La Bocana stole our best surfboards and you could not stop thinking about getting back home, your girl or a place without the Abreojos flies, air conditioning, or a real bed!

The first week we were there we came across this guy (Rich recalls he might have been a cartel figure, I know nothing! ) from the village, that said he was going up to San Diego and then he might come back down in a week or so and we didn’t want to leave everything behind, so instead of getting a ride back to the States and leaving the truck and everything behind, I gave him a super basic list of some items that I needed, not knowing I was going to need anything to specialized, hoping that I would be able to somehow bush fix the head gasket. I was just gonna wing it.

There was one dirt road into the village that you could see from a distance and when the one car on average would come into the village you could see it coming or going by a big dust trail going down the road and when we would see that dust cloud coming into the village for weeks we would wonder is this was our day that this guy is coming back with some parts and day after day after day after day this went on, almost like a bad joke with no return from this guy with any parts to get us out of there. after a while, you feel like you’re going to be stuck there forever and the locals are going to talk about the gringos that went crazy and moved into the hills and we’re never seen again.

Just when we had had enough and we are going to just start hitchhiking back the dust cloud reappeared and it was our guy and he had the parts and our hopes got good again. I was always a gear head ever since I was a little kid and I always was all about surfing, but I was always into motocross bikes and hot rods. I liked to call it “SURF & TURF,” so I knew a bit about the mechanics and started taking the motor apart and I’m not 20 minutes into it when I take the valve covers off and I see it takes a specialized tool specifically for the Datsun head bolts! WTF! There’s no way I could’ve gotten these head bolts out with the tools I had on top of already not having the tools necessary, with the absence of a Torque wrench for the head bolts which is an important part of installing a head gasket.

We’re now both super low…..Fuming we walked down the point to the area where there were a couple of these little rundown trailers where this one hippie guy lived and he was outside, we start talking and I start ranting to him about the breakdown and finally getting the parts and then getting shut down because I need this f@cking specialized tool before I can even try and fix the f@cking truck! and as I am there venting to this random hippie character from the US he replies with a very slow 60s LSD drawl “HEY WOW MAN……., I HAD THAT SAME TRUCK ONCE…. AND I HAVE THAT TOOL FOR THOSE HEAD BOLTS AND I ALSO HAVE A TORQUE WRENCH” I am like WHAT! !#$@*. My jaw dropped and sure enough, it was no joke he had all of it and now things are looking good again.

Without missing a beat, we dragged that truck to a small roof covered tire / chicken coup. I then feverishly went to work to do hopefully a successful bush fix on the truck with Rich and a small group of townspeople looking on.

I was able to get that Motor back together and running. Like two Mad Men we threw everything back into the truck and took off for home. All we wanted to do is get back to the States and after a good 30 plus hours from the morning before working on the truck then driving all night thru to the next day, we finally crossed that border. It was a good day 😊

All in all, always good fun to have adventures like this with Rich, good or bad and like I said at the start of this article with Rich it was always an adventure magnified! Or as he calls it a misadventure!

Jeff “the HIGG” Higginbotham

Bonus Video

Mexican Mayhem Rich Myers interview by Thea McDonald-Lee MOPS Media. Run time 9:59min.

Thank You Rich (Yalls) & Higgy (Malibu) for sharing your Baja stories and Thea McDonald-Lee (Dunsborough) for capturing Rich’s Mexican Mayhem recollections on video.

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