Pascuales was comprised of two or three sparse accommodations and one gigantic restaurant that is apparently famous throughout Mexico, but closed from 6pm, as I discovered when I asked about eating there. We found a room at the main surf hotel in town called “Hotel Real de Pascuales”, where the owner Eddie runs the surf shop and shapes boards.

There’s not much around in Pascuales except monstrous surf breaking on the sand bars. On the smallest day, it was barrelling 6-8ft, and a more typical size was triple overhead. The wave is notorious for being heavy in the way it breaks, with a vertical face and crunching lip. People come from all over the world to ride it, and we left just before a major competition was about to start.

The board breakage was legendary. On the biggest morning we saw 3 boards snapped before 10am. While we were there, one guy snapped a board on his first wave, then went out again and snapped his second one on the very next wave. Tom and I surfed a little north, where there was a much calmer beach break that was only around shoulder height, but still quite a steep takeoff.

The vibe was very ghetto-surfer, with bare necessities only and a massive surplus of dudes. The black, sticky beach sand probably keeps the masses away.

Our main objective in Pascuales was to buy some cheap boards, which we managed to do pretty quickly due to some good luck. Armed with the new quiver we set off south again, where the break was supposed to be a little more forgiving.