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Gone Feral from the Weather Kitchen
Words by Michael Kew
Photos by Dustin Humphrey
In the beginning…
Dustin Humphrey had no idea. Eleventh-hour enlistment by the brothers Turner amid one of Humphrey’s sporadic SoCal visits led the Bali-based photographer to the Los Angeles International Airport, himself weighted with an unusual amount of heavy clothing, booked to fly in an unusual direction. Fresh on the recovery heels of a staph infection inside his brain, surfer/filmmaker Timmy Turner, perhaps best-known for his rough-hewn forays in hot Indonesian jungle, found equally fresh allure in the green-wooded shores of the Pacific Northwest. Last September, Turner unveiled his new slant: to bust feral and go film once again, exchanging reef cuts and malaria for grizzly bears and hypothermia. Earlier, Timmy’s doctors had ominously warned him that, should Turner return to the tropics any time soon, staph would relapse.
“I was sitting at home, wondering what to do—I had to do something,” Turner said. “So I went for the other extreme.”
In a big country previously un-renowned for its surf, the canadian government recently declared Tofino ‘Canada’s surf city’.
Claiming many superlatives, at its bare essence, Alaska is extreme. Actually, it can be a bit too extreme, as Turner and crew quickly discovered firsthand that The Last Frontier is probably one of the world’s sketchiest surf destinations, even in late summer. After all, there is a reason the Gulf of Alaska is often called “the weather kitchen.”
“I was staying with those guys in California,” Humphrey said, “and I had the time, so at the last minute I jumped on the trip without researching what they were getting themselves into.” The merry crew winged it to the storied Alaskan capital of Anchorage. From there they drove five hours to Homer, directly to the 36-foot powerboat owned by Turner’s cousins, which they would drive by sea from Homer to Seward. When the boys set sail, conditions were nice and beautiful, but the boat broke down not long after port faded astern.
“That was kind of a bummer,” Humphrey said. “We ended up being towed by a sailboat all night long, all the way to Seward, and we were freezing. I was starting to wonder what I had gotten myself into.”
They reached port successfully, fixed the boat, and decided to go look for waves out off surf-rich Montague Island.
“Little did I know that Montague has some of the heaviest weather up there,” Humphrey said. “We made it out there okay, but then the weather turned bad, really rainy and cold. We couldn’t find any waves, really, and the captain wasn’t too interested in finding waves—he kind of had some tall tales of waves that he had found up there, so to all of us it sounded like a good idea.”
Yet come their first nightfall at Montague, the crew was buffeted by 100 mph winds, more than enough to create a bit of undesired anchor-dragging.
“We were getting blown out to sea,” Humphrey said. “We woke up in the middle of the night and were literally a mile offshore, and we were stuck in a little bay. I don’t know how we didn’t hit land. All night, we just got our asses kicked. It was heavy. Nobody had control of the situation. It was just us and Mother Nature. I’ve been on boats a lot—I worked on fishing boats when I was younger, and I’ve been on about 50 Indo boat trips—but I’ve never been scared like that.
“The next day, we boated back to land and filled up on gas, but by that time none of us really wanted to go back out there again. So we called it quits and went to Canada.”
Plan B: South by Northwest…
In a big country previously un-renowned for its surf potential, the Canadian government recently and proudly declared Vancouver Island’s little Tofino to be the nation’s one and only “surf city,” on par with California’s Santa Cruz, if Santa Cruz existed as it did circa 1971, but with cleaner water and fewer helmeted surf-kayakers.
Comparative to 2007’s Santa Cruz, scads of folks surf Tofino. Lately the town’s surf scene has exploded, credit due to the mushy beachbreaks, the friendly, woodsy community, the creation of several surf schools, and the general consensus that, hey, there are some pretty fun waves on Vancouver Island. But, luckily, with most of its swell-exposed coast lacking roads, the island’s best surf is accessible only via sea or air, and nobody knows this better than two of Tofino’s favourite surf sons, the brothers Bruhwiler.
“A lot of these really good waves that we get involve a bit of a mission,” Raph Bruhwiler said. “We grew up here, and we’ve been on boats since we were little, so we know what we’re doing, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend that anybody just come up and jump on a boat and head out. Because up there, you’re out there.”
Fortunately, Timmy Turner left his home in Huntington Beach for Alaska clutching the phone number of Raph, who became instrumental in facilitating what for Turner and posse became a rustic familiarization tour of British Columbia’s southwestern most wilds—essentially, an all-access pass for a much different strain of “feral” adventure, considering what Turner and his own brother had done in years past out Indo way.
“Yeah, it’s real wild up there,” Turner said. “When I rang Raph from Alaska, the first thing he told me was that the waves had been going off all week, and that we really needed to get down there and score some waves with him. So we did.”
Soon the crew had corralled two jet skis and an aluminium skiffload of food, beer, clothes, surf gear, tents, a gun, and a crossbow, all fueled for a real-time glimpse into the Bruhwilers’ surf normality—in Tofino terms, to get the goods, you must go out of bounds. And the Bruhwilers do.
“Where we camp, you’re pretty much guaranteed to not see another soul, and you’re going to be surfing perfect waves by yourself,” Raph said. “You’re picking your food from the rocks, you’re going fishing and eating totally fresh. Usually we don’t even bring much food because we basically live off of the ocean up there.”
Some time ago, in order to lighten the cargo factor for future runs, Raph had stashed a surfboard in a tree in front of one of his marquee reefs.
“During this trip I went back and looked at it and there were these big marks in the rails,” he said. “A bear had chewed it to see what it was—I think it had smelled the wax and thought it was food. But that’s why the board’s tied to a tree: so a bear can’t just take off with it.”
Where we camp you’re pretty much guaranteed not to see another soul, and you’ll be surfing perfect waves by yourselves.
Obviously, in matters worldwide, lighting out for waves in wilderness is not of the garden variety, especially if you live in Southern California. That is, unless your name is Keith Malloy. Already smitten with cold Canadian juice, the blond-bearded middleman of the Malloy-brothers trio immediately confirmed himself once word of Turner’s trip reached Ventura.
“I’d been up there twice before and had hung out with the Bruhwilers,” Malloy said. “I think Timmy and Dustin knew that, and they needed another surfer, so they just called me to see if I wanted to go. And I was like, Yeah, okay, I’ll be there in three days (laughs).”
And with near-constant swell coupled with seasonal offshore winds sweeping down from snowcapped mountains, who could resist?
“I’ve been to so many tropical destinations that are halfway around the planet,” Malloy said, “but these days I’d much rather do some exploring closer to home. It might require a thicker wetsuit, but I don’t have a problem with that.”
Turner agrees. “I like the cold now,” he said. “It’s good therapy for my head, too—normally I get headaches, but up in Canada, it was so cold that it was kind of relaxing.”
As aforementioned, Turner’s doctors discouraged tropical travel until at least a year from his last surgery, so in the meantime, for filming and general excitement purposes, cold lands will have to suffice.
Next up: New York during a blizzard and the goofyfooter’s paradise called Chile.
Camp out, drop in—O, Canada!
Trekking south from Alaska afforded Turner his first wave in the five long months since that final surgery, whence doctors replaced part of his skull.
“That wave was pretty rad,” Turner said. “It was this ledgy, eight-foot right-hand slab, and I kept telling myself: OK, you have to do this. I just put my head down and pushed myself over the ledge. It was kind of scary, though—it’s so cold, and there’s so much kelp—but I got back into it.”
If, like Turner, you’re accustomed to weaving an awkward camera-board through dry tubes over death coral at places like One Palm Point, there really isn’t much else to intimidate. Of course, in Canada, for anyone watching Turner, like Keith Malloy, notions of peril were never far from the surface.
“It was heavy watching Timmy surf that wave,” Malloy said. “I was stressing for him. I was paddling in after he took off, making sure he’d pop up after his wave.”
The reef is gnarly, even for a burly, gun-toting, unshaven Canadian.
There are huge forests going down to the water, bald eagles above you, whales when you’re surfing, bears ambling down the beach in the morning, right next to camp.
“It’s pretty much the heaviest wave we have around here—sort of Hawaiian-style,” Raph said. “It’s a slab, but it’s a bit longer than your typical slab. And only a handful of guys know where it is—we’re going to try and keep it that way.”
As one of Canada’s most recent and best discoveries (found by an American, actually), the wave would lay in harm’s way should its coordinates be released.
“I’ve surfed a lot of fun waves in Canada,” Malloy said, “but this wave is a legitimate spot, well-worth going out of the way for. Still, there are lots of spots out there that aren’t going to be surfed for a long time, and even if they are, it’s going to take a hardcore group of people to get out there and surf them.”
Thankfully, Vancouver Island gold exists far enough ‘out there’ to effortlessly keep the unwashed masses back inside the mushy Tofino beachbreak reality.
“I don’t ever see it getting crowded like it is in Tofino,” Raph said, “because not everybody has the knowledge of the area. And we’re not just going to give that knowledge away to anybody—it’s taken us years to figure out certain places, what swell direction, the wind, the tide, all that stuff—and it doesn’t just happen automatically.”
When camping, what does occur automatically is Pacific Northwest sublimity. After all, it’s only natural. Malloy: “The whole setting up there is the best in which to camp. There’s huge forests going down to the water, huge bald eagles above you, whales when you’re surfing, bears walking down the beach in the morning, right next to your campsite. The fishing is insane, and there’s plenty of firewood so you can have huge bonfires every night. Catching fish for dinner, pulling mussels from rocks and boiling them, to be able to get waves is icing on the cake. Without a doubt, the whole outdoor experience doesn’t get any better than it does when you’re up in Canada.”
And Alaska? Next time. Right, Dustin?
(Extra-special thanks to the Bruhwilers.)