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May 2000.
Nothing can prepare you for that first trip to indo, let alone that first trip to the mentawais. And definitely not when it was 9 years ago, when surfing in the Mentawais was really still in it’s infancy. Yeah, there were people around 15 years prior, but not in droves. For a surfing legacy…..15 years old is pretty new really! Infancy…..
3 indo virgins we were, in transit to hook up with one of our best friends, Christie Carter, who was lucky enough to encounter the islands with no names….the kid had a vision, and surfing skill to back it up, and we were lucky enough to tag along for the ride on a 3 week surfing trip that will go down in history books. This was the beginning of WavePark Mentawai.
I’ll never forget that smell. Walking down the steps of the plane, the silk air flight from Singapore to Padang, onto the cooking runway heat at Tabing Airport (RIP). Sweating our central California asses off. And that smell……diesel, burning trash, cloves. For a surfer, those are the smells of pure adventure, as soooo many good waves just seem to be right in the middle of 3rd world chaos. Keep in mind this was the BEGINNING of the famous indo logistics…. “if it were easy, everybody would be doin it….” That phrase still holds true today. See, our flight got in 2 hours early, and our mate Carter……had no way of knowing back then, unless he were to show up 2 hours early to the airport…..and who in the hell is gonna do that??!!!! Not in the year 2000, not at Tabing Airport! So we kicked it on the curb, figured it was all part of the adventure. I got offered an indo chick, “you like? Cheerleader yeah?”, met a padang grom named Rudy, who always remembered us when we came back. And finally Carter shows his face. How could we be mad, the kid brought beers with him? It was on!
4.5 hour channel crossing the next morning, in a dug out tree (liberty), with 3 40hp motors on the back in the smoothest conditions you could ever imagine. Baby’s ass glass we call it. Flying fish, dolphins, card games, sunburns, language barriers, bintangs (the big bottles, not that canned crap), the stuff memories are made of. Just when you think “how much further ???”, you see shades of dark green on the horizon and your whole reality shifts. Tropical perfection in every form imaginable.
4 friends on a life altering trip. ½ the time spent alone on the island, in 1 of the old coconut harvester shacks……Low ceilings, no power, NO FANS, no light, NO ICE, nobody else around……the other ½ spent on an indo cargo boat, sleeping on our boardbags above the engine room, catching cockroaches in our empty 32oz bintang bottles (that worked really well!!), surfing our nuts off. Long before the surf media blew it up, long before the timmy turners and brett swartzes made their “we’re so gnarly feral movies”, and not so long after the original crew came thru and absolutely scored with no one around. It was a special trip.
“It’s rifles…..you don’t hit the breaks, you just ease off the accelerator!!!”. A quote by our mate chris Elmerick. Both the session and the quote go down in history! It’s that session that keeps us coming back after all these years. It’s that session caused me to sell my house, quit my job, and leave everything else behind……..It truly is that good……
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
We are standing by to make your dreams a reality.
