It's the power of positive thinking, dude

Written by Corky Carroll | October 13, 11

Ya know folks, there are people who can see dark side of everything.

The frowny faces who can never be happy no matter how wonderful things are. The surf can be 10 feet and perfect with 80-degree water and nobody out and they will say, "yeah, but where are the naked babes on the beach?" And there can even be naked babes on the beach and they will say, "yeah, but the one with blond hair is kinda fat."

I know dudes like that. I do my best to avoid them as much as possible. I hate it when you see someone you know and when you give 'em the normal, "Howsit?," they give you a 30-minute rundown on all the horrors and chaos in the world. Kinds turns down the heat on my stoke.

But then, thankfully, there are those other ones who can see the bright side in almost any situation. No matter how bad things can be they are the ones who will come up with a joke or funny one liner to make everything seem not so bad. These are the people that I gravitate to.

Hey, we all have challenges in life and we all have some sort of problem that we are trying to solve almost all the time. For me the stress level seems to hit about 3 a.m. when I should be sleeping and dreaming about 10-foot waves, 80 degree water and naked babes, fat or not, on the beach.

For some reason I wake up and all my troubles are like megamount in my mind. I hate that. Thankfully when I wake up at 7 and look out the window and see that the surf looks good it all seems to pale in importance. I guess this is why I get stressed in the first place; I put lifestyle very far ahead of income and material things. Then some bill comes in and reality smacks me in the chops and 3 a.m. comes and I worry about it, followed by 7 when I paddle out and don't worry about it.

Anyway, all that has nothing to do with my story for today other than to set the tone.

Have you ever gone on a trip where just about everything goes wrong? You have a horrible time and the truth is that you wish you would never have gone in the first place. Yet you tell everybody about what an amazing trip it was and how you had the best time ever and how the surf was 10 feet with 80 degree water and naked babes on the beach.

This is one of those adventures.

My pal the "Iguana" and his pal Jim VanDerhyden once took a surf trip to a place called Scorpion Bay in Baja. I guess they had one of those car breaking down, running out of gas, getting lost in the desert, no surf, no chicas and bad conditions kinda adventures.

Jim's board got huge dings on the rocks and the fleas and mosquitoes ate them both for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day and night.

They decided to go into a town called San Felipe for dinner and drinks one night. They were in the mood to relax and try to forget all the problems of the trip. One thing led to another, which led to a few "nightclubs" that maybe they should not have gone to if they had known better but they didn't know better so they did.

Sometime during the night they got back in their car and tried to get back to where they were staying. Unfortunately they were lost, and not seeing correctly anyway, they drove around for hours and had no idea where they were or how they got there when they eventually stopped and fell asleep in the car.

Have you ever woken up after a night like that and not known where you are, even when you do know where you are? It's way worse when you really and truly don't know where you are. Trust me on that.

So this was the case when the Iguana woke up and got out of the car to look around. They were in the middle of the dump. There were piles of trash and the car had wound up next to a big mound of decaying old mattresses. Jim opened his eyes and asked if the Iguana knew where they were.

"Yeah, we are OK. We're at San Felipe Springs."