The story goes something like this: Rip Curl hosts an ASP tour contest in a formally off-the-map killer mexican surf break and fails to have any charitable component to the event that helps the town. People associated with the event manage to consume massive amounts of local tacos and beer, but little more is given back to the community. Surfline steps in, a year later, to host another contest at the same spot with the idea of raising 20k to build a local hospital facility. All seems to be honkydorey. Unfortunately things go awry when visiting surfers try to enter the water for dawn surf sessions (not within contest hours) and local security guards get a little over zealous and start chucking rocks. Conflicting reports say that confrontations lead to violence. Surfline contest organizers respond a tad late with a white-washed description of events that fails to address the overly hostile security and surfermag.com and surfline pulls threads where first-handers have posted their stories. tisk tisk. Rob turned me on to the discussion and I added my two cents here. I’m reposting it here, because I think it speaks to good intentions of the organizers while bringing up the illegality of barring people from walking on a beach and entering the water in Mexico:
Hey guys, Rob emailed me to ask my opinion so i thought I’d jump on and reply here instead, for discourse. I’ve been living/surfing, full time, in the Puerto Vallarta/Punta Mita area for 3 years now.
Personally, if someone had ace forecasting skills and came down here and blocked off access at Burros (my local spot) for a two week chunk of time during an insane swell window, goodwill or no goodwill, there’d be a lot of pissed off locals. There’s no way they could even attempt something like that in Sayulita. Contests are ok (contests that raise money for good causes are great), but they usually have a window of like 5 or 6 hours/day, there’s no reason why Anthony Brown should have been stopped and harassed like that. I woulda gone straight to the state troopers for sure.
And now for my “gringo’s understanding of the mexican legal system” ramble: Mexico is different from the US, Mexicans have a strong association with beach access, it’s a part of their constitution and beaches are called the “patrimonia of the people”. From the highest tide mark to 20 meters back, legally no one can stop you from walking on the beach, entering the water etc.. it’s called the Federal Zone, and even if a contest organizer has local or state permits to hold the contest, they do not have the power to stop admittance by anyone, at any time. I’m not exactly sure if there is some kind of legal, federal permit that organizers can apply for, but I highly doubt that Surfline had one. This is my understanding of Mexican law, it’s a hot topic down here because of all the development going on, just off some really great formally accessible-by-land surf spots.
Surfline’s intentions are good, but the devil is in the details and somehow things just went fubar. Surfline should definitely make amends and publicly address the Anthony Brown story, fast, and on the front page. I’m sure they are upright guys and this was a charitable event, so to see it trashed would be a bad thing. Yes they got some things wrong, but the event concept is good and it attracts attention to a good cause (you don’t even know how badly small mexican towns need hospitals, schools and sewage treatment plants). My hope is that Surfline can tweak the concept a bit, work more closely with local authorities, get the details right and make this an annual event that forces larger surf events to think about having charitable components of their contests or risk looking outdated, insensitive and overly capitalistic.
just my 2 cents…
My response was originally regarding the contest and it’s merits, bringing a charitable component to surf events, which is an excellent idea and one whose time has come, but that the details kinda got fubarred. It was before Surfline put out any kind of official response and before threads started getting pulled. In order to have effective online communities, you can’t just start pulling threads. you have to nurture the community, ask people to not say inflammatory things and address concerns promptly and directly. Flickr has been excellent at this and both surfermag.com and surfline could both use a lesson from the Flickr folks.
There was a commenter on the 70% blog thread that said: “no good deed goes unpunished eh?”, I’m not trying to lay blame on any one. It was an event with excellent intentions. I hope that Surfline isn’t deterred and in fact learn from the mistakes that were made to create an even better event next year, in some little podunk town, might I suggest La Ticla, Nexpa, Pascuales or Rio Seco? I also hope they learn that deleting forum threads is the easiest way to justify the haters. Online forums are hard places to manage, but if you want to be host to a healthy online discourse, you need to nip things like this in the bud by being active and visible on the threads, as soon as trouble arises. Pulling threads just adds to the deafening silence.
