Barra de Navidad is one of the niceset, cleanest, more picturesque spots we’ve visited. Barra itself is a small fishing port town turned tourist town. Just to the north of Barra, across the crocodile infested river, is the town of Melaque. We had been erroneously informed that there was good surf in Barra. We arrived, in theory, right in the middle of a pretty substantial west-southwest, expecting to get a few choice waves. We were hopeful with the sizeable whomp smacking the beach in Melaque. Our first clue should have been the relative lack of surf shops in town. Normally, with as many tourists and gringo settlements as there were, should there be decent surf, you’d expect at least a decent shop with 10-20 rental boards, if not two shops. Sayulita is a comparable size town and must have six or seven shops. The one lone surf shop in town is run by a local by the name of Odin, his modest shop stocks four or so boards, mostly of the longer thicker variety and the pictures on the wall are of him nose-riding with his dog on the front. Not good signs. We chatted with the guy working the counter and it seems that there was good surf in town at the break and that it had been working earlier in the afternoon around 2:00. We wondered toward the jetty wondering exactly where the spot was. When the sets would roll in a small little peaky wedge would pop up and occasionally curl back to the jetty. Hoping that wasn’t the break we wandered back to the shop to ask. Sure enough, at low tide there had been some pretty consistent waist high rollers for a couple hours.
Had we actually been able to camp right out in front of the break we’d have stuck around for at least a day and scoped out a little more of the town. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to camp in Barra and you have to walk the 2 miles down the beach from the camping spots in Melaque. So instead of our original plan to hang here for a week or so we stayed for two days, caught up on some internet and made some skype calls, a little splash in the hotel pool and off to Pascuales.
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