Pat, as I learned over time, had endured kooks and wannabe surfers for years, and never got too excited about meeting new guys.Īll the legendary stories about Pat Tobin are true. My presence was more of an interruption than a cause for congenial small talk. I found Pat in the middle of the coconut grove, along the banks of the river, in worn-out, paint-stained dungarees, staring at a canvas with a paintbrush in one hand and a filterless “Delicado” cigarette in the other. “Ahi, en la huerta,” my host Sofia signaled about this “intruder’s” whereabouts. I seized up the situation thusly: What I was looking at were the tools of the trade of a surfing Ernest Hemmingway. These boards were worn- really gone through the mill- with stress marks at all the right places, and broken off tail blocks and noses, haphazardly laminated together.
But beyond that, I sensed in these sticks a sense of their owner: a passion for surfing the post-perfect waves that Nexpa could offer. Something about these guns set me on edge: I could tell they were hand-made (funky, truth be told), and had the unusual trademark of “Cerveza Superior” wrappers carefully peeled off the bottles and glassed right on the boards. I’d been surfing Nexpa virtually alone- for months- since the last crew of Gringos left for the States. Totally by fluke, I had come from a shopping trip in Caleta, Michoacan, to the rancho of the friends I’d been staying with, and saw “evidence” of Pat’s presence: 3 huge guns, from 10′ to 11′ range, laying next to the trough where the pigs were eating.
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