Table of contents for Issue 586 in Tracks

A friend recently invited me to join him on a surf trip. Actually he was re-inviting me. Two years prior he’d booked out an entire camp in mainland South Sumatra and asked friends to come along and celebrate his 40th birthday. We all know what happened next. Like many surfers I was in a mood to travel. To dance to the rhythm of a different culture, to delight in the unfamiliar, and most importantly to ride Indian Ocean swells sculpted by one of those miracles of nature – an Indonesian reef. So I took my friend up on the offer and tacked on an extra week in Bali. In Bali, I made a dash for the Bukit and slipped into an easy Uluwatu rhythm – high tide at Temples and…

This issue features a pictorial tribute to the renaissance of the twin fin. It would be remiss of us to include a twin fin theme without acknowledging the role played by Mark Richards in making the twin fin a major thing. While MR still has a host of desirable twinnies in his range, his personal favourite is the Super Twin, a design inspired by the shape he won four world titles on, with a number of contemporary tweaks. “The Super Twin is my favourite ‘go to’ board. It has similar performance design features as a state of the art Thruster in terms of rails, rocker & concave bottom. Just not quite as streamlined, slightly more user friendly with a little more nose area & less rocker.” “It’s designed to be…

ARTIST: JOHNY VIEIRA @wavesbyjohny • TITLE: JUNGLE III Surfing has evolved to reach a wide spectrum nowadays. Commercially, technologically, big waves, wave pools, surf tourism. With my art I try to focus on the essence of surfing, the connection between the human and nature in its pure state, far away from civilisation, where we are able to feel how small and fragile we are. Where we feel the power of nature and at the same time we feel part of it. It’s about reconnecting with the essence.…

FERI’S WIRY ARMS GRIP THE WHEEL TIGHTLY AS HE SLIPS INTO A KIND OF TRANCE TO NAVIGATE THE POTHOLE RIDDLED SERPENTINE THAT WINDS THROUGH THE SOUTH SUMATRAN JUNGLE. Weaving between trucks laden with palm oil, he snatches his moments to overtake or pull back, each action boldly decisive and deftly executed. We have faith in Feri to deliver us safely to our lodgings at Mandiri Beach on Sumatra’s south-west coast, if for no other reason than the fact he has the look of a driver with superior confidence and experience. Six hours seems like a long time in a car, but there is much to see on the road to Mandiri. Once you exit the urban cacophony of airport town, Bandar Lampung, the landscape quickly gives way to the lush,…

I remember the first time I heard quite a few new slang words. Hip, cobber, frothing, schitzo and jeckled; which all seemed to be self-explanatory. Others like pash, bail, bludger, gnarly and ripper, not so much. Sometimes hearing new slang words triggered other thoughts. ‘Deadset’ made me think of sunset at a cemetery, ‘Reffo’ conjured thoughts of my footy referee. When a kid told me something was ‘Gas’ I thought about the gas main at home that had the word ‘gas’ on it. Exposure to the distinct jargon was always a big part of becoming a surfer. Growing up in the 70s there was ho-dad, wax head, Gidget, trog and westie. I recall discovering that getting inside the hollow part of a wave was called getting ‘tubed’. Cheyne Horan came…

01. Lightbox SURFER: CRAIG ANDERSON PHOTO: RESPONDEK Some 50 years ago, Gerry Lopez pioneered the method for making stand-tall entries into tricky hollows with slack-limbed nonchalance. Pipeline was the stage for Lopez’s most celebrated performances, but he later took the same lick of melted butter act to waves like Padang and Grajagan in Indonesia. It seemed Gerry was always searching for places to engage in Zen and the art of tube riding. Like Lopez, Craig Anderson brings a certain delicacy and sensitivity to the tube-riding aesthetic. In this moment, when faced with a force far greater than himself, Anderson relinquishes all tension and instead of trying to match or even channel the power of the wave he succeeds in becoming more like another molecule in its makeup. Like all humans,…

ASK BRISA HENNESSY WHERE SHE’S FROM AND YOU MIGHT WANT TO PULL UP A CHAIR. The 22-year-old Costa Rican surfs under the blue, red and white-striped flag of her jungle birthplace. But the places and waves that have made her range much further than Central America. “It’s a loaded question for sure, I feel like I’m from everywhere,” she laughs when Tracks poses the inevitable. “Around the world, people always ask me where I’m from. I’m like, do you have a minute?” We do, in fact; but probably not much more than that. Tracks has caught Brisa during a rare quiet moment between World Surf League (WSL) events in the mad international schedule that 2022 has become after two years of COVID hiatus. She’s in an Australian hotel, grinning into…

“BEING SWALLOWED UP BY DEPRESSION OR SPUN WILD BY ANXIETY IS AS COMMON AS HOUSE BRICKS BUT MANY OF US DON’T HAVE THE LANGUAGE OR THE KNOWLEDGE TO CONFIDENTLY DISCUSS THEM” Man Anchor founder, Steven Gamble has been roaming Australia’s east coast these last four years spreading the good word about mental health. Being swallowed up by depression or spun wild by anxiety is as common as house bricks but many of us don’t have the language or the knowledge to confidently discuss them. This worsens an already big problem. Nearly 50% of Australians will experience a mental health disorder in their life while suicide kills more young males than any other cause. The Man Anchor message is that we can all learn to look after ourselves and our mates…

I’ve known and surfed with Wayne Lynch (via my brother Butch) since I was 11 years old in the early 60s. A lot of freesurfing and watching him in events, he seemed to be on another level no matter where he surfed but I’d never seen a goofy-footer ride Bells the way he did. The first goofy to really attack the place, he took the highline for speed and had a knack for finding backhand tubes, which were always a rarity at Bells. He had the place on a string. It was a blessing for me as a grommet to be in the company of influential surfing innovators and board designers. Along with Wayne, Nat, Bob McTavish, Greenough, Ted Spencer and Baddy were all regulars in the water when I…

SOLI BAILEY IS SITTING ON THE PORCH OF HIS VILLA AT THE MANDIRI BEACH CLUB IN SOUTH SUMATRA. Low slung palms frame the view of the muscular, six-foot, sand-bottom peaks, which arch violently towards the flats and land with thunderous impact. In the adjacent paddock a couple of Brahmin cattle graze contentedly, their somnolent cud chewing in steep contrast to the heavy percussion of the ocean. The wind is up a little now and after another morning of fruitful tube-hunting, Soli is happy to let the mid-day heat wash over him and embrace the languid, post-surf vibe. And so it has gone for Soli over the past six weeks in the archipelago. Once released from the clutches of COVID, the Byron Bay-based surfer jumped on a plane with a mostly…

NO ONE HAS EVER ORDERED A NON-ALCOHOLIC BEER IN NORTHAMPTON BEFORE. I know because the landlord was at great pains to inform me of this shameful milestone in the town’s history. Considerately, he shielded the bottle from the gaze of other patrons before placing it in front of me. Perched on the pub’s sunny verandah, I looked out upon the rust freckled tin roofs and sandstone facades of the main drag. A three-carriage road-train carrying livestock flashed past in a blurred, unnatural rush of engine and animal noise. Eight hours of bitumen separated my adopted home of Margaret River from this dusty country town, situated about a third of the way up the expanse of Western Australia. “PERCHED ON THE PUB’S SUNNY VERANDAH, I LOOKED OUT UPON THE RUST FRECKLED…

WAYNE CLEVELAND IS THE FIRST TO ADMIT THAT HE IS NO CHOIRBOY. For 16 years he ran a drug smuggling operation that netted him millions of dollars, occasionally recruiting young surfers into the fold to serve as mules, until the long arm of the law caught up with him. By his own account, in 2022 he is a changed man. On paper the Wayne Cleveland story reads like a classic tale of redemption. But in the context of a modern society is redemption really attainable? Can a leopard really change its spots, and even if it does, will society accept its recompense, or are we too quick to brand offenders criminals for life despite their efforts at self-improvement and the absence of criminal activity in their recent past? At the…

Before the Internet, social media, and the age of rapid information dissemination, rumour and hearsay were the drivers of potential surf exploration, at least for the lazy ones who didn’t have the sac to actually go and look. During an extended mission to Aceh in 1995, I heard one of those rumours about the Southern Sumatran mainland. Of course, the consensus had been that much of Sumatra was blocked for swell, due to the necklace of islands placed like sentries off the west coast. Islands like the Banyaks, Simeulue, Nias, and the Mentawais (of course at this time, only Nias had any sort of surf reputation). Aceh was north of most of these, but suffers from onshores during the winter swell season, as it is so far north that it’s…