Sommaire pour December 2016 de Surfer

It was around midnight when I heard the pattering of paws on the Spanish-tile floor, just a few feet from the couch I was attempting to sleep on. I was staying at an eco-lodge on a densely forested Costa Rican bluff where you can rent casitas with fewer than four walls, allowing for a more “natural” surf-trip experience. In daylight hours I’d seen a tarantula scamper through the living room and a large brown toad soaking in the basin of the outdoor shower. In the bright sunshine, I’d simply shrugged and continued putting the fins in my board. But in the steamy jungle night, trying to sleep on top of sweat-soaked sheets, it’s hard to avoid thoughts of menacing creatures inching closer in the dark. I could hear cupboards opening,…

One thing is real, one thing you can count on: something happens when it’s waves that you are doing it for. Because searching for waves, you always end up with so much more then what was expected. So here I sit, in the airport in Bali with a great mix of a crew, like a little surf circus heading to a new stop. I look around and I have to say it’s quite the unusual circus crew: 2 little surfer girls, a photographer dad, a big-wave Surfer Lady, a cool dude with long hair and headphones, a videographer with a cheeky grin, a stylish Italian model-looking-man with a hat who looks like he came straight from a Milano catwalk, a couple who arrive with spear guns and fins that don’t…

Situated between Nias and the Mentawai island chain in the northeast corner of Indonesia, a remote tropical island hosts a bevy of endless air sections and yawning, turquoise-blue tubes. Young rippers Seth Moniz, Kai Hing, Shane Sykes, Griffin Colapinto, and Imaikalani DeVault recently ventured there and made the isle their own high-performance playground, as evidenced here by Hing. But along the way, the group realized that this wasn’t going to be a typical Indonesian wave fest. “The name of the island we visited roughly translates to ‘The Cursed Land’ in English,” says DeVault. “According to local legend, cannibals were exiled to this island from Nias, and there are lots of ghost stories about the place. We heard one about a guest who stayed at our camp, got possessed, and needed…

The founding fathers of surf adventure travel are a mixed bunch. Mellow to manic, decent to debauched, an icon for every taste. Bruce Brown traveled clean, maybe a booze-up here and there, but law-abiding even in lawless places. Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson were mostly PG-13, although it’s not hard to imagine them ducking into a bawdy house or outrunning the law on some laughable local misdemeanor charge. Peter Troy is another story. Or a thousand more stories. Compared to the others, Troy was black ops. Charming, friendly, easy to connect with, a true friend, a good husband, an excellent surfer. But ankle-deep in the shit more often than not, and neck-deep on occasion. Shackleton meets Bodhi, as written by John le Carr—. In the article you see above, we…

From the sky above, the water of Papua New Guinea’s Chambri Lakes took on the dark translucence of black tea even as the winds of an approaching storm whipped its surface into a thousand wakes. This deceivingly rough water complicated the landing for pilot Mark Palm. A wheeled plane is governed “strictly by wind,” he said, but the pilot of a seaplane has to consider the velocity of river and ocean currents, the possibility of submerged objects, as well as changing surface conditions. Wind shear, water in the sky, water below—this particular flight already brought on the feeling of bobbing in a violent eddy. But now conditions on the “ground” proved problematic too. “I have to dip down and make sure it’s not too rough,” Palm said, banking the plane…

A couple months back, I got a phone call from a guy— let’s call him Mr. Muir—who runs a surfy nonprofit focused on environmental causes. It’s an organization you’ve probably heard of, trying their damnedest to preserve great surf spots around the world from threats you had no idea even existed. “You want them on that wall; you need them on that wall,” as Jack Nicholson would say. Mr. Muir was frustrated and looking for a little advice from someone embedded in surf media. He explained that most of the donations his organization receives for ocean-related causes come from people who have never set foot on a surfboard, and, inexplicably, getting hardcore surfers to care about protecting the ocean has proven to be extremely difficult. Mr. Muir wanted to know…

I first heard the name Danny Fowlie in 1999, on my maiden trip to Pavones, the fabled left-hand point in the jungles of southwestern Costa Rica. Just two years before, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory for the area, following the killing of a 79-year-old American man, Max Dalton, at the hands of a group of squatters. For almost 20 years, Pavones had been plagued by drugs and violent crime, Communist agitators, shady ex-pat land deals, and mobs taking large swaths of prime Pacific real estate by force and intimidation. But that wasn’t always the case. In the early 1970s, before Indonesian surf camps, Pavones was the tropical surf paradise. Located on Costa Rica’s southernmost fringe, and accessible only by boat or chartered plane, the little jungle town…