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Save Me From Tomorrow
by PE
“If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I would give the same answer as most: nuclear war, global warming and Windows.” - Dave Barry
With sea-level rise estimated at 40mm/yr in this part of the world (global av. of 3mm/yr) Tom Curren, Stephanie Gilmore and fellow Searchers probe for playgrounds new along a shrinking horizon’s sinking atolls.
Landing on an atoll with maybe 10 yards either side of the runway tarmac, before blue, blue equatorial sea. A nation of low coral limestone atolls and carbonate sand islands, this archipelago consists of 30 atolls and more than 1,500 islands, and stretches for over a 1000km from both east to west and north to south, half a million square miles in an ocean of clear, almost sterile tropical water columns towering over abyssal trenches. So called ‘surf journo’s’ have an inglorious history on trying to find new ways of describing that colour. Let’s just say blue, not a long way from the Yves Klein kind. At the terminal building waiting for baggage is a chance to catch up with Tom. Reveals he brought two boards for the week-long trip, ‘a 6’1” CI Surftech and a 6’5” K step-up.’ Suddenly, I feel like a real twat for bringing three.
Ben Dunn, a few weeks before his WCT debut jumped on the Trader for the opportunity to sharpen his tube skills, thousands of miles from the nearest surfer. Photo: Warbrick
Meet the Indies Trader Captain, affectionately known as Doris: Leathery grid, eats ciggies like they’re going out of fashion, glazey, pterigium riddled-eyes from a zillion harsh equatorial sea-glares. Says the f-word with six a’s. ‘Faaaaaaark’. The word is that he’s the blond teenager in Free Ride riding a bicycle through the paddy fields and getting shacked on the red stinger tail at Racetracks, which is instantly pretty rad, if you ask me. ‘We got no faaaaaa-gn paper charts for this area, or if we do, they’re from faaaaaa-gn 1931 and shortly after that they f-kn blew it all up…so… we do it all visually.’ Doris is referring to a nuclear testing program that took place in this region several decades ago, the reparations from which have since formed the major part of the economy here.
This spot was so hard to naviagte into that nobody, except Doris and the family of five locals that live under the trees could point to it on a map. Amnesia seemed like an appropriate name. Photo: Jon Frank
Leave atoll for an open ocean cruise headed west with the trades. Promised a rough crossing, yet wind and swell are uncharacteristically light, soundings instantly showing some 5000 metres. We’re on a 24-hour crossing headed to where they are rumoured to be atolls with empty, perfect mainly right reefbreaks. The Trader has been in these waters for the past month with various members of the Rip Curl International team, on this occasion it’s Curren accompanied by Australia’s teenage sensation Stephanie Gilmore. Winner of two WCT events last year as a wildcard, and widely regarded as the best female junior surfer on the planet (she won Bells shortly after returning from this trip). Tom of course is no stranger to this vessel, having been on it several times during the early/mid 90’s early Searches through Indonesia, including those Bawa sessions. It’s more than just a touch ironic that the vessel that ‘discovered’ the Mentawais as a surf destination and served as something of an icon for the now-routine tropical surf charter phenomenon is now embarking into unknown parts of the surfing world to get away from the people it’s success attracted. On this morning, as nine boats parked up at Maccas scowl at each other from deck and consider how best time their paddle out to coincide with the others’ breakfasts, the Trader runs nobly on under a moderate trade swell in another part of the world ocean, in effort to escape the escapees.
The email code name for this leg of the trip was ‘Master and Apprentice’, and it’s a pretty safe bet that guitar skills weren’t the only thing the highly astute Miss Gilmore picked up from a week’s surfing exclusively with the three time world champion.
Day 2
Dawn emerges curiously slowly from behind the stern, an long hour of orange rays before the sun itself begins to appear. After breakfast, some twenty hours since we left port, flocks of brown boobies appear, flying in the opposite direction to us. I’m told sea birds fly away from land in the morning on their fishing missions, thus we must be approaching landfall. A couple of hours later we arrive at an atoll, where one of our target spots is located. When I get near the screen that displays our coordinates, Doris looks like he wants to punch me out and turns the screen off. I make a joke about a surf camp and he ejects me from the wheelhouse with a degree of physical violence.
These three kids from Amnesia had never had a ride in a car or on a bicycle before, let alone a jetski. Doris, stoked to share a thrill. Later, in what must have been a red letter day for them, they also got a surf lesson from Tom Curren. Photo: Sparkes
Arrival at a spot Doris refers to as Amnesia, off an oval island a few hundred meters long. Stunning lagoon inside the reef at the end of which the seabed suddenly drops to deep so that Trader is anchored literally just yards of the beach. Shoreline white sand, dense coconut palms and pandanese trees. Family of seven brown skinned inhabitants line the beach and stare at our vessel, this island being a full day’s boat ride from the nearest shop or car. On shore we ‘globalize’ them. They’re offering coconuts, they want Coca Cola and Marloboro’s in return. Difficult to imagine what an ice-cold can of the black doctor in the little red ambulance tastes like to them, but perhaps like-a-thousand-angels-crying-on-your-tongue comes somewhere close. Snorkelling back to the boat I see a small white tip reef shark on the edge of the reef slope. I stick me head down and shout, junior shark pretends not to notice. Too small to eat me but thoughts of mamma find me kicking hard for the Trader.
‘Steph surfs too good for her own good,’ observed Curren. ‘She surfs like a guy,’ observed everyone else. Weeks later, Steph went on to ring the Bell and slide into no1 spot on the Women’s WCT, her rookie season. Photo: Warbrick
Day 3
Wake up in the lee of a long atoll a short cruise away, the anchorage at Amnesia not being suitable for overnighting. Through a narrow gap can see whitewater hitting other side indicating an increase in swell. It’s windy from early today, before dawn even. Skip says when it’s overcast cloudy and windy usually a sign swell is gonna come, and turns out to be quite correct. By the afternoon, swell is well on the rise, some 5ft sets. An outside peak, hollow, then a steep racy wall and then inside bowl bending all the way down the reef. Curren loosens up with high snaps in pocket, all languid hips and the trademark turns. Stephanie promptly paddles out and rips it up too, displaying a sweet carving top turn, mixing it with fins-out lippers, etc, prompting the inevitable yet accurate ‘She surfs like a guy’ compliment from all corners. At dinner time a skein of green and purple sea snakes come and wriggle furiously in the light off the stern, thin, pretty, yet curiously evil.
Curren’s early Trader missions in Sumatra lit up the surfing world and part launched today’s modern fish phenom. A decade on and in another ocean, the inimitable flow showed no signs of dimishing, be it riding 1ft-ers on Claw’s plank, threading barrels, hitting lips or strumming the axe. Photo: Warbrick
Day 4
This being the peak swell day, we head to a spot known as Nirvana, quite possibly the most scenic tropical surf spot on the planet. A tiny round island of palms and breadfruit trees fringed in brilliant white sand, flanked on one side by a mesmerising turquoise lagoon, the edge of which a shallow right runs sweetly for several hundred yards. Absolutely incredible. Tempted to say like school book drawing but actually you’d struggle to replicate this scene with a biro and imagination. We anchor end of right in 150ft of Yves Klein water through which you can see all the way to bottom, making out bits of coral. Doris says he’s never seen anything like it.
Curren paddles out. With the low tide waves are bumpy, mediocre, Curren takes off, threads a baz, pumps, pumps, ducks, disappears, comes out, big figure like knife thru butter. ‘How do ya make concrete out of pig shit? Tom fargen Curren mate,’ observes Doris, which I’m hoping is a brand new way of describing a Curren ride after twenty-odd years of a range of well-documented attempts. As the tide rises, waves are getting better and better. Steph is blazing again, liquid carving top turns, powerful gouges under the lip and then wraps and compresses, it’s pretty impressive. ‘She surfs too good for her own good,’ remarks Tom. After a surf I paddle to the island for a stroll. It just takes five minutes to walk around it, my presence sending flocks of brilliant white terns on the sand skyward at the sight of a strange pale bipod walking their beach. Really white dazzling little ones lift up effortlessly on the brisk trade breeze, squarked on me disapprovingly. With the only footprints on the sand being of the ornithological variety, I can’t but wonder who was the last human to disturb the terns on this beach, and indeed who’d be the next.
Leaving port for the 24 hour sail to the other atolls reveals this grinding left right in town, proving that not all the region’s treasure is buried. Photo: Warbrick
Day 5
Had a series of horrible nightmares last night, freaky. Doris explains there are tales of places round here where the entire crews of boats moored nearby have had horrific nightmares, supposedly the sights of bloody massacres. There are also stories of an occupying army brutally slaughtering and then eating local inhabitants en masse around these islands during WW2. The swell has already dropped so we head back to Amnesia, which still has fun, 4/5ft surf. Later, back at anchor in our overnight mooring some locals came out from a nearby island in a tiny, unlit dingy and traded 2 litres of gasoline, and 4 DVD’s for some of those glass fishing balls that wash up in this ocean, and promises of fresh lobster to be delivered tomorrow. The DVD’s they got were: Poseidon, a woeful Tom Hanks ro-co, and some surf vids. Doris couldn’t bring himself to part with the Simpsons. Putting out across the lagoon slowly, cautiously to a foreign vessel, beholding the invaders wide-eyed before bartering for desired effects has been the established practice in this ocean since the first European sailboats centuries ago. There are a group of five foreign teachers living on an island on the other side of this atoll, one has asked if we would take some mail back to town, where he wasn’t planning on visiting for several months. Then, almost as if a foil for the impression of incredible isolation you feel out here we’re told that looking to the north at dusk, you can occasionally make out the light and smoke trails of cruise missiles being tested on remote atolls, fired from military bases on a continent several thousand miles away, that journey around a significant portion of the world’s ellipsoid taking approximately thirty minutes.
Day 6
True to their word, at dawn the same guys appear with fourteen lobsters for us. We surf Amnesia all day, fun, but some funky winds, which we’re lead to believe are fairly common here, particularly during El Nino events. After dinner it’s iPod tennis round the table. Pick a tune and pass it on, sparking some pretty interesting musical insights. Tom writes down some of his fave groups for Steph who’s trying to broaden her musical horizons and become ‘the coolest chick on tour’. He reveals his favourite concert ever was U2 at Blaney Castle, (‘We drove 5 hours from Bundoran for that’) along with a Gloria Estefan gig. He also confesses to being a Destiny’s Child fan (‘I’m covering a song of theirs with a hard rock version on y new album’) but not all of it; ‘the early stuff, before they become too big,’ with a smidge of irony. Someone puts on the Pablo Cruz opening track from Free Ride, and Tom describes going to watch Free Ride when it came out over and over and over, and how the MR grower at Honolua would blow his mind each time. ‘You couldn’t see surfing then anywhere else’ he recollects, ‘so going to the movies and watching that really a big deal.’ Tom further reveals he used to listen to before heats back in the 80’s. The infamous Occy clash at Bells ’84 for example, amp up was to the then Peter Gabriel-fronted Genesis album, Nursery Cryme.
Somehow, it seems to be that bit more wholesome than one of today’s teen pros discussing the soundtrack to their myspace page.
Ben Dunn keeps one eye on some non-submerged coral spikes next to the landing Maybes lip, and other on the large bald photographer flying past his melon in the tube. All part off day’s work in the world’s most remote surf zone. Photo: Sparkes
Day 7
Swell has dropped further. With less wind, the water colour has exceeded it’s own ridiculous standards. Sitting in the lineup with hollow head high right draining playfully down the reef I’m somehow paranoid that boats are gonna appear from somewhere to invade the idyll, that looking over your shoulder that’s seems habitually when scoring good surf anywhere with no one else out. Then you realize no one is showing up today, nor tomorrow. In fact, round here, its seems pretty likely no one is showing up ever. Aside from Martyn Daly and his Trader crews and scattering of others, only very few people know about these handful of spots, in a region strewn with thousands of islands, reefs and passes. For now at least, it’s not made it onto wannasurf.com, nor is offered in a surf travel company’s online brochure.
Hawaii’s Kyle Ramey, 18-years-old and already surf tripping unchartered waters on the Search, surely every grom’s dream the world over. Photo: Sparkes
Before departure we meet Kevin, a 64-year-old American ex-pat who lives on an island nearby. He explains that he first came here in ’67 with the Peace Corps ‘Because I didn’t agree with what my country was doing in Vietnam’. (Later: ‘Peace Corps? Faargin CIA spies mate,’ Doris). Originally from Cape Cod, Massachusets. Early 80’s sailed here solo from Boston, which is a pretty decent effort. He he has a lifetime lease on an island from a local chief, a process which is pretty straight forward according to him, you just need three people to OK it and you’re in. He’s written a book about the history of the region, but explains that much of the indigenous religion or culture pre-missionaries has been almost entirely wiped out, no one can seem to remember much of it, despite the islander’s settling ancestors having been there longer than the Anglo-Saxons have been in England.
On the bigger atoll out in the surf zone, the appearance of several large white men and a strange boat is still rare enough an occurence to draw a sizey crowd of kids from the village.
Kevin reckons global warming effects are particularly noticeable here in the last few years, new sandbars appear in strange places from increased swell activity, unusual current streams. He remembers what the beaches looked like on some islands in the 80’s and how they’ve been completely changed today. Higher high tides, and loss of arable land washed away by storms is causing a major problem, with maximum elevation rarely more than couple of metres. ‘These people have survived centuries of warfare, famine, droughts, typhoons… but now threat from global warming may finally render these atolls uninhabitable.’ Currently, it’s something of an uncertain future for these islands, and despite the reparations for the military testing program due to run out within the next decade or so, many officials in government are unwilling to develop tourism, for fear of change. And while the islands’ future hangs in that bizarre equatorial early afternoon limbo of inevitability, as may well indeed do all of ours’, it’s perhaps indicative of our ultimate fate that it’s still something of a pleasant distraction to man’s boat-shaped soul to consider the bowl at Nirvana, spinning away before an audience of no one.