Brothers Matt and Sam George found out you really don’t need much board to be proficient. Photo: Bernie Baker
Editor’s Note: “Scrapbook” is a limited series from The Inertia’s Sam George, in which the longtime surf scribe draws from a vast trove of personal stories and photos to present a collection of entertaining tales that, while spanning decades of his surfing life, are easily relatable to any of us who’ve joined him in that pursuit.
Bali, mid-1980s. Not actually on Bali during this portion of the trip, but holed-up in a thatch-and-cinderblock shack on Nusa Lembongan, the satellite islet floating dead-center in the Badung Strait, roughly nine miles off Bali’s southeastern shore. A bustling tourist destination today, there wasn’t much happening on Lembongan back then, its eight-square kilometers home to a single village of farmers and fisherfolk, and virtually no infrastructure, save for a handful of the aforementioned shacks, positioned to look across the strait toward Sanur. Most pertinently to us being a quarter-acre of distant reef, and the short, hollow tube called Shipwrecks, heaving up over the coral in front of, you guessed it, an actual shipwreck. Exotic wasn’t the word for it.
On this day — our first day — we’d piled into a local prahu, hired to ferry us out to the reef, where its infinitely patient owner would anchor and wait for us while we surfed. We saw no other outriggers, but as we approached found a single surfer sitting alone in the lineup. Had to be an Aussie, we figured. Who else would be hard-core enough to paddle all the way out here?
Stoked, we nevertheless sat in the boat watching, easing into it, wanting to assess the wave’s dynamic, but also not wanting to swarm the guy’s solo session; floating off to the side, regarding him as much as the waves. He was really tan, for one thing — really tan, wearing a pair of ratty, nondescript surf trunks as sun-bleached as the long blond hair and beard, his elbows and knees latticed with long-healed white reef scars. Full-on Robinson Crusoe — how long had he been out here on this tiny island, alone? We’d find out soon enough.
Mostly because this guy had the whole Shipwrecks scenario completely wired. So much so that our arrival amounted to nothing more than a ripple in his vibe. He didn’t ignore us, exactly — nothing so deliberate — and actually acknowledged our existence with a single smile. Then, unperturbed, went right back to what I can only describe as his kinetic meditation. That’s what his whole trip looked like. His mind cleared of all superfluous thoughts or response to outside interference, he rode each wave with the repetitive discipline of a Tibetan Gelug monk: three strokes from behind the a-frame peak, grab the brake and stall right from the take-off, collapse the back knee (he was regular-foot), left arm tucked down and outside the front knee, right hand deep in the wave face, right up to the elbow, holding himself back under the ceiling of the short, accommodating tube, then into the sunlight for a smooth, wrap-around cutback on the shoulder. Paddle back to the far side of the peak, wait for the next identical wave, and repeat. Again, again and again, as he’d probably been doing for days, weeks, months, maybe, with absolutely no variation. I found the remarkable purity of his surfing effort to be intimidating, a completely untrammeled relationship between surfer, wave and board.
But then let’s talk about that board. Clear, with no stickers on deck or bottom that I could see. The nose had been broken off about 10 inches back from the tip and never repaired, the jagged stringer poking out of the exposed foam like a cracked tooth from a smile. When after one ride he flipped the board over, as if to check something, I saw what it might be. During a much bigger swell than on this day he must’ve wiped out at least once, because his leash had apparently ripped though the rail of the board just above the left-side thruster fin, all the way to the stringer, then back, tearing away the fin and all of the foam on that side, all the way back off the tail. Picture it: this guy was riding a board with only half a tail — again, with the foam exposed — navigating his way through the Shipwrecks tubes solely on his remaining forward inside rail fin, and lonely, intact rear fin.
Oh, and his leash? With some sharp implement (a spear?) he’d punched a hole through the board on the right-side rail, just forward of his back foot placement, then tied off what remained of his leash through the puncture, with about 15 inches of urethane left to attach to his ankle. Meaning once up to his feet, he really couldn’t adjust his stance. Not that he needed to. He rode every wave identically; rode each wave expertly, on what was, quite literally, a complete wreck of a surfboard.
And I remember sitting there in the prahu, watching him, marveling at his entire presentation. Although to be honest, I was also still a little angry at my brother Matt, having discovered that, while loading our boards in the prahu for the lift out to the reef, he had stacked his board deck-down on the bottom of my new Channel Islands pintail, marring its shiny contours with a handful of tiny wax scabs. How was I expected to surf on a board like that?
