The First Surfers in Baja
By Serge Dedina
Although California surfers like to think of themselves as the pioneers of surfing in Baja California, native Cochimi and Hawaiian surfriders predated them by over a century. The indigenous inhabitants of Isla Cedros used rafts made from driftwood, native softwood timber and tule reeds for hunting sea otters, fishing and navigating the treacherous area between the island and the Rancherias (the Spanish term for villages) of the Central Desert region. Seri fishermen of the upper Sea of Cortez often paddle their elegant narrow rafts, made of bundled tules, while standing up – a challenge not unlike balancing atop a surfboard, especially during the often choppy conditions found in the region of Isla Tiburon and the Midriff Islands.
Disease had wiped out most of the peninsula’s native population by the 1850s, when American and European whalers, often carrying Hawaiian crew members, searched its coasts for gray whales. Hawaiians, or Kanakas as they were then called, signed on as crew members of waling ships that sailed from Hawaii to San Francisco and down to Mexico. Captain Charles Scammon, who hunted whales with his Kanaka crewmen for many year as along Baja’s Pacific coast, provides the earliest account of wave ridding in the peninsula.
In late 1857 two whalers, Scammon’s Boston and the Marin, anchored off the entrance to Laguna Ojo de Liebre, searching for a passage across the shallow bar into the lagoon where gray whales annually calve at the end of their migration south. The scouts located a passage, but because the whales had not yet arrived, the crews of both brigs spent their time attending to chores and searching the deserted coast for firewood. During one such shore detail, the ship’s carpenter became careless while bathing and capsized his boat, to which three other boast were made fast, just outside the surf line. Fearing for his life, he swam for shore and left the boats drifting out to sea. Captain Scammon recalled that,
The alarm was given to the party on shore, and it was disheartening sight to behind the four boats drifting through the breakers, for everyone knew that without them our voyage would e fruitless. There were several Kanakas among the crew, who immediately saw the necessity of saving the boat: and selecting pieces of plank to be used as “surf-boards,” put off through the rollers to rescue them, when the anchor, which had been dragging all the while, brought up, and the current swept both carpenter and Kanakas out of reach. They then made for the shore, which all of them regained in an exhausted condition, except the carpenter who was never seen again.
One can only speculate if these “planks” were actually surfboards brought by the crew for recreational use from Hawaii, where surfing had a long history. One wonders, too, whether the Hawaiians also took advantage of any free time while at San Juanico Bight to the south, a popular anchorage for whalers, to ride the “right-handers” of Punta Pequena, today famed as one of the finest waves for surfing along the entire coast of the Californias.