Zicatela
I WAS COMPLETELY UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. I THOUGHT the beach was a strip of land covered with sand that God in His wisdom had created for the purpose of placing deck chairs. When giant swells carried the sand away, it looked like erosion to my untrained eye: the devil undoing the Lord’s work. Now I see the beach as the exposed part of the ocean floor and its shifting size and contours as part of a much larger ecosystem which includes turtles and crabs.
The large swells generated by winter storms in the South Pacific arrive on the Oaxaca coast during our summer. (These waves, which come from as far away as Chile and New Zealand, do not actually move molecules of water along their trajectory, just as radio waves do not move the air they pass through.) When extremely large waves converge with the highest tides and half the beach is washed away, a new seascape is made from the sand below the waterline.
Zicatela, the “Mexican Pipeline”, is the foremost beach in Mexico for surfing. What makes the Zicatela wave so exceptional is a combination of factors that include the shape of the beach, the local winds and the contour of the ocean floor – the trenches and the everchanging channels.
