There’s a very specific flavor of surf edit that always hits deeper than the others. Perfect waves, no recognizable lineup, landmarks or geotags and a caption that tells you precisely nothing. For a few days — a couple of weeks if everyone involved has any self-control at all — that wave belongs to everybody who’s watched the clip and nobody who could actually find it. Eventually, though, word gets out.
That’s the arc Harry Bryant’s mystery river-mouth wave from last year’s ROASTED clip has just run. Though being the AI-powered internet age, it happened on fast-forward. The story, as it’s been told, has all the ingredients: his filmer of a decade, Dav Fox, apparently spends an unreasonable amount of his spare time doom-scrolling weather models and Google Earth. A wave that hadn’t broken in six years. A coastline with no guide, no English, and nobody within a few thousand miles who had any idea who they were. Or as Harry called it, “a hidden oriental river mouth that’s absolutely dripping in duck fat.” It’s a good yarn; Bruce Brown wouldn’t be rolling, but applauding in his grave, and for a while, that’s all it was. One of the world’s most captivating modern surfers, on a dreamy wave (riding a unique shape), at a location that apart from the deepest comment corners and subthreads, nobody would confirm, or deny.
Then last month, Surf China Co. posted the same footage and put a name on it: China’s Hainan Island. And just like that, the secret had a Google Maps pin. Now the exact spot wasn’t named, and Hainan isn’t exactly a secret. Photographer Warren Bolster and journalist Matt George first visited in the early 1980s. The WSL have held comps at the longboarding left of Riyue Bay since 2011. Last year, a new park powered by PerfectSwell technology was installed. It’s also not small, and its coastline extends 1,000 miles into the South China Sea. Yet, as Matt George wrote in the ’80s, somehow it has remained “Exotic, remote, empty.” Util now, at least
Secrets have a half-life, and they are getting shorter.
If surf history proves anything, it’s that a secret spot is basically a loan with a very aggressive repayment schedule. Somebody always talks. Sometimes it’s an accident. More often, it’s a brand, a mag, or a filmer who does the maths and realizes the story is worth more told than kept.
The Snake, or Africa Kirra, is the best-known case study. When footage of Mick Fanning surfing an empty, reeling, sand-bottomed right in the Namibian desert dropped in 2017, the internet briefly convinced itself that untouched perfection still existed out there, waiting for the right golden-balled Australian to trip over it. We’d later learn the wave had been ridden for years by Grant “Twiggy” Baker and his crew of hardened South Africans and overseas mates like Greg Long.
“I shat myself when that came out. I thought it would just be a brief internet thing… I thought, oh my god, what have we done?” Twig said, though the fact that he effectively sold the naming rights to Rip Curl, for a fee somewhere between 100 grand and a million bucks, would have softened the blow somewhat. This year it was announced that the wave was to host the international version of the Capítulo Perfeito invitational barrel riding event. The cat, if it was ever in the bag, is now well and truly out.
And then, every so often, the secret actually holds — proof it’s possible, if not exactly common. Tony Hinde and Mark Scanlon ran aground in the northern Maldives in 1973 en route from Sri Lanka to Réunion. Scanlon eventually sailed on. Hinde stayed, married locally, took Maldivian citizenship, and sat on the discovery of a lifetime for 15 years before quietly opening a surf camp at his favorite of the lot — Pasta Point, now the very much not-secret Cinnamon Dhonveli.
Secret, or nah?
Yet surfers can’t help themselves.
It started with Cape St. Francis and waves like Skeleton Bay, the Snake, and now Hainan Island weren’t exceptions to the rule. The wave is never really the point. The pattern is the point. Surfing has spent sixty odd years mythologizing the discovery story: the idea that somewhere out there is a wave nobody’s touched, waiting for the right hunch, the right weather chart, the right amount of nerve and not enough sense. It’s the entire third act of The Endless Summer. It’s the plot of every surf film made since, with the serial numbers filed off. The secret wave is one of the last corners of the sport that still gets to feel like exploration instead of content strategy.
The problem is that surfers have two types of secrets. Ones that are too good to keep. And ones that aren’t worth keeping. A secret wave is only worth anything while it’s being kept, and literally every financial incentive in modern surfing points the other way. Even the surfers who genuinely want to protect a spot are usually one enthusiastic caption — theirs or someone else’s — from blowing the whole thing wide open. Harry and Dav didn’t post the location, they just surfed it. And now the world is finding out where it is.
