Places to surf before you die: La Jolla

THE surf at La Jolla – in a remote, dusty corner of Mexico – is so good that its true destination is a whispered secret between hard-core surfers, writes Sean Doherty.

TAJ Burrow's eyes were still spinning in their sockets like a poker machine.

"It's the best wave I've ever surfed. Full stop. It really is. I've never surfed a wave that perfect in my life. Guaranteed."

Twenty seconds of tube time on the one wave has a tendency to regress grown men into stammering, surfstoked grommets, and that's exactly what the rifling righthand pits of La Jolla had just done to Burrow.

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Similarly, many of his pro surfing comrades developed temporary tics when asked to describe the waves they had just scored in a remote, dusty corner of Mexico.

"It's a cross between Kirra and Burleigh, but it's better than both of them," said an incredulous Bede Durbidge.

And for two weeks in June 2006, during the Rip Curl Pro Search event at La Jolla, that's exactly what the world's best surfers enjoyed.

The formerly underground Mexican point break played host to a leg of the World Championship Tour, and produced what was unanimously regarded as some of the greatest waves seen in 30 years of professional surfing.

The surfing gringos had lucked on a once-in-a-decade swell, and the chocolate tubes were simply hypnotic. The sand on the point, groomed by recent heavy rainfall that had flushed out local waterways, was perfect to a grain.

The big southerly swell stormed out of the Pacific and wrapped in behind the point at La Jolla, before firing off mindless perfection for hundreds of metres.

Surfing the place became a case of speed management. The bottom-turnkickstall-five-second-barrel routine was replayed over and over, often several times on the same wave.

At the end of the week the guys packed their bags for the next tour event, at Jeffrey's Bay, with heavy hearts - it's not often you travel to the world's best righthand point anticipating a substantial drop in wave quality.

The reality of the situation is that La Jolla - Spanish for "the jewel" - isn't even La Jolla. The righthander was code-named in an attempt to throw people off its true location, an effort that proved futile once the first perfect barrels of the event were webcast to millions around the world.

For decades the place held semi-secret status, existing only as a late-night, whiskey-breath whisper from the mouths of a select crew who had surfed the famous barrels of Puerto Escondido and figured there had to be more waves to the south.

For most of the year, however, the Jewel is closer to a cubic zirconia. The point itself has a very narrow swell window, and needs a big south or southeast swell to even begin to show signs of life.

It's stiflingly hot and often crowded, the mozzies will take your arm, and your feeble western digestive system will have trouble adapting to the local cuisine.

The tiny pueblo in front of the wave is poky, dusty, isolated - and not at all prepared for the surfing onslaught that would follow in the slipstream of the 2006 contest.

The Rip Curl event was the modern global surfing machine bivouacked in a sleepy surfing backwater. More puritanical members of the surfing brotherhood have devoted page after page on chatrooms not only about how the event broke surfing's golden rule of not exposing secret spots, but also about the imperialist nature of dropping the event into a third-world village like La Jolla. There have even been rumours of offers by an unnamed surf company, to buy the entire town.

One thing is for sure - La Jolla will never be the same again, and let's hope that those trawling atlases and internet sites to find its true location treat the place and the people with respect when they eventually find it.

"Surfers are the biggest kooks," said one chatroom posting, lamenting the loss of yet another secret spot in an ever-shrinking world. "We are our own worst enemy."

The Pilgrimage: 50 places to surf before you die, edited by Sean Doherty, is published by Penguin Books on the Viking Imprint and is available in all good bookshops for $49.95.