This is what dreams are made of. Photo: Fielder Films // YouTube
The call of adventure is powerful, especially for surfers. The only problem is that there’s not too many places left to explore. For the McDevitt brothers, it took them all the way to a remote volcanic island in the Arctic.
“It’s easy to think that in our day and age we have the whole world at our fingertips, but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” explains filmmaker Ben Weiland at the beginning of The Search for Volcano Island, “There are regions of the planet that remain hidden from us. One of them lies in the Seas Beyond Alaska. I’d spent a decade of my life searching for waves in the Arctic, but because this area was so remote it remained a mystery to me. When a group of brothers invited me on the trip of a lifetime, I knew I had to go. This is the search for volcano island.”
The project was spearheaded by Ricky McDevitt, whose dream started when he was a kid, after seeing a film about a group of surfers who found a perfect wave breaking beneath an Aleutian volcano. Finding that wave among the over 80 volcanoes in the islands became an obsession. Ten years later, he finally pinpointed the location and found a boat that would take him and his brothers there to surf it.
Along the way, they traversed military red zones, avoided brutal storms and dodged active volcanoes. At the end of it all, they were rewarded with the type of perfect, empty wave that typically only exists in surfers’ dreams.
It’s a heartfelt piece full of character and warmth, shot beautifully. And Fielder Films just released the whole thing on its YouTube channel. Check out the full video below.
