For years, I had heard of Cuico, the man with twelve abs.
I mean, you have nice abs, Jordan told me, but I didn’t think it was possible to have more than just a six-pack.
I found myself spending a lazy Monday at a place called The Ranch, surfing with a small group of pro surfers, one of whom is the fabled Cuico. Cuico, aka Juan, is a serious and soft-spoken guy, who lives for all things related to the sea. Patient and soft-spoken, Juan is full of advice, whether it involves my surfing technique (“it’s like you’re fighting against your own weight”) or how best to ward off a shark (“the trick is to keep your knife pointed at its nose”…”I don’t have a knife”…”you need a knife”).
… it’s like you’re fighting against your own weight…
Juan and some other friends, known to each other as “la banda”, had invited me out for a morning session. A bit of driving down dirt roads and over one dry stream bed (“there’s usually a crocodile here when it’s wet”) and we arrived at a rocky strip of Pacific beach. We watched the waves for a while, then grabbed our boards and dove in.
Hours later and exhausted, we sat around a couple of plastic tables, chatting and having some post-session beers. “It’s 11:30 on a Monday and I’m having a beer after spending the morning surfing with a bunch of actual champion surfers,” I thought to myself. It was a surreal moment. Ok, exclaimed Beto, mañana la banda se reune a Manzanillo que el surf va a ser chingón allá!
The surf probably was chingón the next day, but I bowed out to do the responsible (f*king boring) thing and finish the revisions to my dissertation. There are many more surf days ahead of us, but I know myself this well: if I wait for the bad surf days to write, then the one thing I’ll never write will be my dissertation. By Friday, it was done and submitted.
The other studs
The other studs came in the form of wheel studs. One of these studs twisted and split cleanly into two pieces while performing a tire rotation. I had rotated two tires and everything up to that point had been straightforward and simple. Then the final bolt on the front driver’s side wheel refused to budge a half-twist into getting it off. After expending some strength, I decided to try working smarter, rather than harder. If you have to force something, you’re probably doing it wrong. I had set up shop in the driveway of Mark Schmitt, another overlander spending the summer in Troncones.
If you have to force something, you’re probably doing it wrong.
I borrowed some WD40 from him and after spraying the bolt, I tried easing the lug nut back and forth to work the grease into the bolt grooves and thereby get the lug off. It seemed to work at first. I would tighten the lug a half turn, then pull back to get it loose. At each turn, the lug loosened a little bit more. And then, with all the ease of twisting off a piece of a Red Vine, the bolt sheared off, into two pieces, the one with the lug nut held in my breaker bar and the other ensconced firmly in the rotor. I removed the half-bolt and lug nut from the breaker bar and looked up at Mark. “Well this sucks”, I said.
Mark stood with his hands on his hips, smiling. No it doesn’t, he said. What sucks is when this happens on a god-forsaken mountain road miles from anywhere, everything is covered in sand and the only people you can see scare you. Mark and his family have been on the road for some years now, so not only does he make a good point, but I suspect that it is borne of solid experience.
Mark and I got to troubleshooting. While Mark has respectable mechanical experience, none of it has involved Subarus and I have very little mechanical experience at all. One of the exciting/frightening things about this trip is all that we expect to learn about auto mechanics on the road. We each did some YouTube research to check what other people had done. On my way back to my place and computer, I ran across Beto, one of the surfers mentioned earlier. Hey, let’s go to La Saladita this afternoon, he cried out to me, the waves are great! I showed him the half of a wheel stud that I was carrying and explained that I might be busy with other things that afternoon. Beto immediately called a friend who (he claimed) worked as a mechanic.
Despite my fluency with Spanish, there will undoubtedly be language barrier moments along the way. This was not one of them. Beto told his friend the year, make and model of our car and what had happened. No problem, his friend said, it’s an easy fix. I have the part. I can be by in an hour.
No problem… it’s an easy fix.
This was communicated in simple, clear, grade-school level Spanish. Imagine my amusement, then, when the ‘mechanic’ and two of his friends showed up and expressed surprise that I didn’t have the replacement bolt for them. They suggested that I pay them to drive to Zihua and look for it. I actually laughed at this. I don’t need you to drive to Zihua and find me a replacement part, I told them, I can do that just fine by myself. They seemed annoyed at having arrived for nothing, but with nothing else to do, they left, leaving Mark and I to the work. A friend of Mark’s, from Troncones suggested that the best money I never spent was in not letting Beto’s friend work on my car.
Mark and I removed the brake calipers to get behind the rotor, followed by the rotor to get at the wheel studs. I tapped out the broken stud with a hammer and investigated replacing the stud with a hex bolt of the same length and thread pitch. Unfortunately, the hex bolt lacks the flanged head of the actual wheel stud, which means that it would not actually sit firmly in the rotor, which seems like a recipe for disaster. Although the car can run just fine with four out of its five lugs in place, we didn’t need to drive it right away for any reason, so chose to search Zihua for a replacement the next day. Mark had to do some shopping in the city, anyway, and generously offered to drive me into town.
You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into, when you invited us over for a drink the other day, I joked.
Yes I did, Mark said, I’ve been overlanding for a while now, mate. This is just how it works. Mark’s smile is infectious.
The needed part was both easy to find and dirt cheap. Forty-two pesos ($2.22USD, as of 16 June 2016) and one streetside taco later, I had two replacement studs and was back in Mark’s driveway to finish the job. Obviously, it couldn’t be as simple as just fitting in the new stud and replacing the tire, though. Despite coming off easily, the brake pads were now too tight to go back on the rotor, so we had to remove the bracket from the calipers, drain a little bit of brake fluid (5-10mL) to loosen the calipers and replace the bracket to get the whole pads/bracket/caliper ensemble back onto the rotor. Once done, though, the rest of the rotation was a breeze.
Make your next job a little harder, Mark joked.
I’ll see what I can do to the head gasket, I replied.
Yeah, but make sure that when it goes, it happens in a really remote place miles from anywhere.
Where the only people I can see scare me.
We laughed and after a couple of beers in his pool, each carried on with the rest of his day. I am sure that this is only the first of what will be any number of automotive adventures in our future. I’m happy to get as many as possible out of the way in a place like Troncones, where we have access to parts and the good fortune to meet helpful and knowledgeable people.
I’m sure that tomorrow will be another adventure.