The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  By the end of the 1960s, Kuta had become the southeast terminus for the Euro-Asian “hippie trail” (it was one of the “three K” destinations, along with Kabul and Katmandu), and the first surfers were beginning to trickle in from Australia. Even for the experienced traveler, Bali was overwhelmingly exotic. Small “prayer baskets” of flowers and incense were laid out daily by the thousands, on front steps, sidewalks, street corners, and countertops. Terraced rice fields covered the hills like multiacre pieces of Art Deco emerald jewelry. The light, even at midday, had a filtered softness, and the air was perfumed with frangipani and tuberose, wood smoke, incense, and clove cigarettes. Ten thousand stonework temples covered the island, many of them huge and ornate and covered in fanged, grinning, pop-eyed demons.

  Kuta Beach had some nice sandbar waves, and the first visiting hippie-surfers—maybe a dozen altogether, on their way to Peshawar, Goa, or Istanbul—were content to rent a thatched-roof beachfront losman, spend a few rupiah on some imported Thai stick, and wander into the Kuta shorebreak once or twice a day to catch a few waves and cool off. The first hardcore surfer to arrive was Russell Hughes of Queensland. Traveling through Europe in 1969, one year after placing third in the World Championships, Hughes decided on a whim to fly from London to Bali. He stayed at Kuta, and traveled a few miles across the isthmus to Sanur, another blossoming tourist village. Hughes would have certainly taken notice of the cliff-fronted Bukit Peninsula, immediately south of Kuta and Sanur, dangling off the end of the island like a pendant and ripe with surfing possibilities. Metaphysically, however, the Bukit was on the wrong side of the tracks. As every Balinese knew, the friendly gods all lived in the mountains, while demons and monsters lived in the sea—especially near the Bukit, which was nearly surrounded by water.

  Hughes rode some fine waves at Kuta and Sanur during his month-long visit. He also spied enough fringing whitewater off in the distance to convince him that the A-grade breaks were yet to be found. After returning to Australia, he began quietly telling a few others. Filmmaker and publisher Bob Evans flew in with a small crew of surfers for a two-week visit in August 1971, but didn’t explore much beyond Kuta. Then Tracks cofounder Alby Falzon, wrapping up his Morning of the Earth shoot, arrived for a planned six-week stay. A New Age early adopter, Falzon wanted to round out his film with some hot never-before-seen waves and maybe add a dash of Eastern mysticism. His travel companions included Rusty Miller, a former top-ranked surfer from California, and fifteen-year-old New South Wales junior champion Steve Cooney. Flying over the Bukit, headed for Dempasar, all three surfers went goggle-eyed as they pressed against the windows and watched a cascading series of left-breaking reef waves funnel along the northwestern edge of the peninsula.

  The Kuta surf was enough to keep everyone happy for the first two weeks. Then Falzon hired a bemo and ventured by himself, aiming for a cliff-top temple on the Bukit called Uluwatu. Leaving the temple grounds and walking a short distance to the west, he tracked a small but gorgeous little wave as it wound off toward Kuta. This was the spot. Two days later, early in the afternoon, Falzon, Miller, and Cooney unloaded their boards and camera equipment from the bemo, and with the help of some puzzled but agreeable local villagers made their way down a winding mile-long dirt trail that connected the Uluwatu temple road to the coast.

  Arriving at the cliff top, their first view of the surf was heart-stopping: a blue panorama of six-to-ten-foot lefts, spread across a wave field so big that everybody swiveled their heads to take it all in. The surf here didn’t break uniformly from start to finish. After watching for a few minutes, it became obvious that there were at least three spots shingled together: the uppermost wave peeled off nicely before shutting down into a middle section, which in turn eventually spilled into the longest, fastest, hollowest part of the break, conveniently located just below where everyone was standing.

  They stood for awhile, wonderstruck—but slightly freaked out. The nearshore reef spread out in dark patterns just below the water surface with no clear channel to the lineup, and the whitewater noise ricocheted off the cliffs and seemed to come in from every direction at once. The only way to the beach was through a cave. Miller finally picked up his board and led the way. While Falzon shot film from the beach, Miller and Cooney inched across the reef, waited for a lull, and paddled into a dreamscape of long, perfect, sun-kissed Indonesian surf. Cooney took off on a double-overhead wave and glided down the line for a hundred yards. Miller caught a bigger one and went even further. “That day was absolutely magic,” he later said. “We went up there and found this wave, surfed it, didn’t get hurt, didn’t smash up our boards—this was before leashes—and later on we all just felt that the gods really were with us.”

  Falzon and his crew spent two weeks camped at Uluwatu, in the upper reaches of the cave, returning to Kuta occasionally to shower off and resupply. Not once did the surf drop below four feet, and it got as big as twelve feet. The wave’s character changed with the tide and swell size, but the overall quality varied only slightly. Because Rusty Miller had spent several winters on the North Shore, he was the first person to sense the magnitude of what they’d discovered—all of Indonesia, he realized, likely had this kind of surf.

  Hawaii had more size and power, but it was often rough. A Pacific Ocean swell on its way to the North Shore is often crossed by one or more swells, making the waves uneven, and Pacific tradewinds along the Tropic of Cancer can blow hard enough to fray the water surface. Even with the wind and crossed-up swells, there’s nearly always something exciting to ride on the North Shore. But days can pass by during the winter season—weeks, even—before conditions get smooth and clean.

  The Indonesian surf is different. Waves here mostly originate from weather systems born in what mariners have long referred to as the Roaring Forties—a storm-friendly corridor of the Indian Ocean, between latitudes 40°S and 50°S. Because the Indian Ocean is less than half the size of the Pacific, a swell rolling toward the equator is less likely to be corrupted by other swells. And because Indonesia is closer to the equator than Hawaii, the wind is generally much calmer. Finally, for reasons having to do in part with Indonesia being geologically much older than Hawaii, the reefs are longer and better foiled than the Hawaii’s reefs.

  To a degree not seen anywhere else in the world, the surf here is smooth, finished, and well-ordered, in addition to being big and powerful. It was just a matter of time before Indonesia replaced Hawaii as the world’s ultimate surfing destination.

  Beyond Bali

  Decades later, when surfers were wired-in and a lot faster with their credit cards, the sport developed a swarming reaction to the latest perfect-wave discovery. One week after a 2006 contest webcast from an incredible never-before-seen Mexican pointbreak, no less than a hundred surfers flew in to catch the next good swell. Reaction times were a lot slower in the 1970s. Nearly a year passed from the time Falzon shot Uluwatu until he debuted Morning of the Earth—with the break, and Bali itself, remaining unidentified—and Surfer didn’t publish its first Uluwatu feature until late 1974, at which point a “crowded” day still meant a dozen people in the water.

  Even with a faster rollout, though, it’s doubtful surfers would have rushed off to Bali. For Americans, it was an expensive, three-stop, twenty-four-hour flight. Indonesia was the first Asian country to make a real impression on the sport, and that also took some getting used to. There was a language barrier, and a few cultural oddities—teeth-filing, public cremations—that helped weed out less-adventurous surfers. Even the surf press took time to come around. An early Surfer article on Bali was titled “Evil Waters,” and it luxuriated in talk about sharks, running sores, earthquakes, and dangerously shallow reefs.

  Still, from 1971 forward, surf tourism went up annually, and by mid-decade Bali had become the destination of choice among the world’s best: Nat Young and Wayne Lynch visited early, followed by Terry Fitzgerald, and Gerry Lopez was on record as saying he’d gotten the “ride of his career” at Ul
uwatu. New breaks were also discovered, including Padang-Padang: just one mile down the coast, it was a shorter wave than Uluwatu, but threw a tube as hollow as Pipeline.

  Few surfers, at this time, thought beyond Bali. Few tourists of any kind did, for that matter. Bali was just one of nearly three dozen provinces in the Republic of Indonesia, but for all practical purposes, it was a country unto itself. The rest of Indonesia was a Muslim majority. The Balinese practiced a homegrown version of Hindu. To the Western world, Bali meant flaming sunsets over golden beaches, postcards of bare-breasted native women, and touring dance troops. Indonesia by and large meant Java, which in turn meant Third World urban poverty in Jakarta, coup attempts, student riots, Communist purges, and a stone-faced dictator in sunglasses and a military dress uniform.

  More to the point, for surfers: the international airport at Dempasar was a short drive from Kuta, Uluwatu had been labeled “the best wave on the planet,” and there were another eight or ten high-quality surf breaks on the Bukit alone. Bali was exotic and friendly, and everything—losman rentals, bemo rides, Bintang beer, magic mushroom omelets, hour-long “happy ending” massages—was incredibly cheap. Why explore further?

  Because for some tiny fraction of visiting surfers, the thought of all that perfect empty Indonesian surf was unbearable.

  * * *

  The first off-Bali surf expedition was in the works by mid-1972, even before Morning of the Earth began proselytizing on behalf of Uluwatu. That summer, while flying over the Plengkung jungle on the southern tip of Java, a wandering trustfunded Southern California surfer named Bob Laverty looked down to see a half dozen rows of whitewater spoking into the far end of a huge bay. Back in Bali, where he’d been living for the past few months, Laverty thought about what it would take to access those waves. Pioneering Uluwatu had been a fairly easy jaunt from Kuta Beach. This would be a lot more involved.

  Laverty bought a British Admiralty coastal map of Java and located the bay where he’d seen the waves. Then he talked to Bill and Mike Boyum, the footloose sons of a navy fighter pilot and both members of the small but growing community of Kuta-based American expat surfers. Were they up for a real adventure? Laverty unrolled the map and pointed. It was just sixty miles, he explained, from Kuta, across the Bali Strait, to the bay. Maybe they could hire a boat, Laverty mused. The Boyum brothers shook their heads; a sea journey with no confirmed docking point was too risky. The overland route was nearly four times as long and dangerous enough—driving in Indonesia was done at high speeds and close quarters—and it would likely involve some beachfront bushwhacking. But it was the only choice. Mike thought it over and passed. Bill was in.

  Laverty and Boyum left early in the morning. Each had a new Suzuki trail bike, a backpack full of water and food, and a surfboard strapped over one shoulder. An armed guard at the Bali Strait frowned at their boards, and momentarily dropped his hand to his revolver, but they smiled and nodded and rolled slowly aboard the waiting ferry. They were aiming for a fishing village called Grajagan, at the far end of the bay, and arrived just as the midafternoon muezzin call to prayer was wailing out from the local mosque. An hour later, each surfer wheeled his bike onto a dugout fishing boat hired on the spot to take them across a lagoon, which left them on a jungle-edged beachfront, about ten miles from the long point Laverty had seen from the plane. The hard-packed sand was perfect for their fat-tire bikes, and they gunned down the coast, shouting as a pack of flamingos winged off to their left, then cursing as the beach gave way to a slippery bank of dried broken coral shards.

  It was now late afternoon. They were close enough to see whorls of spray coming off the waves, probably two miles away. After pushing the bikes into the foliage, they continued on foot; when the coral beach turned into soft, powdery sand, too deep to walk through at a decent clip, they moved into the shadowed edge of the jungle. It was slow going. The sun went down, and they hadn’t even covered half the remaining distance. Finally, in near-total darkness, hoping they were close to the break but not entirely sure, they groped their way onto the beach and fell asleep, exhausted.

  Boyum and Laverty woke up the following morning, gritty and tired, and looked out to sea. The new wavescape was on a different level altogether than Uluwatu, which had already changed their conception of expanded-terrain surf breaks. Sets rolled in from the other side of a low headland, so there was no telling exactly where the lineup began, but they were looking at something like a mile’s worth of hollow, double-overhead lefts. Like Uluwatu, the wave didn’t peel off uniformly from one end of the reef to the other, but instead divided itself into two or three overlapping sections, with the longest, hollowest, shallowest portion at the end. It was thicker and more powerful than Uluwatu. Just as well-shaped, but with a certain rawness—almost like the North Shore. There were no cliffs to worry about, and no rocks sticking up anywhere along the reef, which for the moment looked to be fairly well-submerged beneath the morning high tide. Laverty and Boyum paddled out to a likely-looking spot more or less in the middle of the lineup. “And for three days,” Boyum later wrote, “we surfed our brains out.”

  They called the spot “G-Land,” which was easier to say than Grajagan. They spent two more nights on the beach and had nothing to do between surf sessions except keep their redrimmed and slightly hypnotized gaze focused on the endless march of waves. On the third day, sunburned and out of water, they walked slowly back down the point, pulled their motorcycles out of the jungle, and retraced their path back to Kuta.

  It was a rushed, underplanned adventure that could have gone disastrously wrong. Malaria, reef cuts, road accidents, heatstroke—nothing touched them, and over dinner with friends that first night back in Bali, Laverty and Boyum planned a return visit. It didn’t happen, at least not for Laverty. Two weeks later he had an epileptic seizure while surfing Uluwatu and drowned.

  * * *

  What happened next at Grajagan was just as audacious as that first helter-skelter visit. The Boyum brothers purchased a 24-foot Radon fishing boat, which got them from Bali to G-Land in just a few hours. It also doubled as a floating campsite. Finding a safe harbor, though, was a problem. Now and then—and without warning; there were no reliable area surf reports—a swell would get big enough to churn through the anchorage zone. Mike Boyum then thought of building a treehouse camp on the edge of the jungle in front of the break, which would be safer and more comfortable, and free up the Radon to serve as a Bali-based supply boat.

  Mike Boyum was that rarest of New Age gypsies, able to fast all weekend and sit in full lotus indefinitely, then turn around and skillfully wheel and deal with businessmen and politicos. The Plengkung jungle was part of a national forest reserve, which meant the surf camp had to be fully permitted, and Boyum threw himself into the project. Bribes were made—without breaking eye contact, Boyum at one point removed a gold Rolex from his wrist and slipped it onto the wrist of a high-ranking official—setbacks were overcome, and before the year was out all the authorizations were in place. In mid-1974, the Boyums and a select few other Kuta-based surfers, along with some hired Javanese, finished building a fifteen-foot-by-fifteen-foot, thatched-roof, bamboo-sided tree-house. Panthers and leopards lived in the jungle, and tigersized paw prints had been seen on the beach, even though the fabled Javan tiger was supposedly extinct. Placing the treehouse twenty feet off the ground meant everybody slept a little easier. Near the base of the tree was a mess hall of sorts, consisting of two or three single-burner LPG stoves, some Igloo ice chests, and a fifty-pound sack of brown rice.

  GERRY LOPEZ, GRAJAGAN.

  For three seasons, the only surfers at G-Land were the Boyum brothers and a few hand-picked guests, including Gerry Lopez and a hot Australian goofyfooter named Peter McCabe. When the surf was medium-sized, and the tide was in, making the waves a bit less critical, Lopez and McCabe rode together in what Lopez called their Blue Angels act, weaving and crisscrossing their way down the reef.

  In 1977, Boyum registered the camp as the Bla
mbangan Surfing Club, and began taking week-long reservations: ten surfers at a time, $200 a person, with an additional transportation fee from Bali. Lopez touted the break in surf magazine interviews and articles (“G-Land has been so good to us all these years, there’s really no reason to go anywhere else”), and the price went up quickly. By 1982, a ten-day package cost $1,000—although camp amenities by that time included bedding, towels, fresh-water showers, and unlimited cold beer.

  “EVERYONE FAMILIAR WITH G-LAND HEARD THE TALES OF TIGERS ROAMING THROUGH THE CAMP AT NIGHT. I WASN—T CONVINCED. THAT CHANGED ABRUPTLY LAST YEAR WHEN A 150-POUND LEOPARD STAGGERED INTO CAMP, LAY DOWN AND DIED.”

  —Gerald Saunders

  G-Land was transformed from the world’s best secret spot to the world’s first pay-to-play surf break. It was another hardcore surf entity turning commercial—just as Lightning Bolt had, two years earlier. Initially, the G-Land operation didn’t seem like such a bad idea. It was a remote, dangerous break, and there was safety in numbers. The guys who signed up were dedicated surfers from around the world and appreciative of the experience. But the consequences were predictable. Once the Boyum camp proved itself as a moneymaker, other surfer-entrepreneurs bribed the right officials, two more camps opened, and eventually there were up to a hundred surfers at a time cycling through the lineup.

  Lopez eventually had second thoughts about his part in G-Land’s development. “It was the perfect setup there for a few years,” he said, two decades after his first visit. “It was our surfing monastery. We never should have told anyone.”

  It’s the Destination, Not the Journey

  Surfing included both Padang-Padang and Grajagan on their 1981 list of the ten best waves in the world. The magazine went on to note that “this strand of volcanic islands [now] represents the ultimate in surfing adventure.” By this time, Indonesia had inspired a gold-rush mentality, as surfers fanned out by boat, car, ferry, bemo, motorcycle, and foot across 2,500 miles of mostly uninhabited Indonesian coastline, from West Timor to the furthest reaches of Sumatra. New perfect-wave discoveries turned up almost by the month: One Palm, Scar Reef, Lagundri Bay, Desert Point, Shipwrecks. People learned to quit describing any particular break as the “best wave in the world,” as they had with Uluwatu—there were still too many unsurveyed island groups, too much unexamined coastline. Logic said there was a finite number of Indonesian surf breaks. But year after year, decade after decade, incredible new spots kept turning up. The reports from the field eventually had a rote quality—Surfing editors were practically on autopilot for their 2007 “Discovery in Java” cover story, featuring yet another long, flawless, neverbefore-seen left-breaking tube.