It was the late ’70s, a payday Thursday. I was 16. My grumpy old boss handed me the little yellow envelope and I kissed the ammunition factory goodbye. I swung my leg over the pushbike and started the half-hour pedal home. I was riding, free as a bird in the back streets of Footscray. As I passed the local newsagent I slammed the brakes. I wondered if there were any new surf mags. I walked in and there she was – the latest Surfer magazine, hot off the press. The owner looked at me with his big Italian eyes and said, “Good-a one here, Surfers Magazine, all the way from California.” He followed with, “She is a-bloody expensive!” That issue was $5.95, normally $3.95. It blew the budget out but I needed my fix. I needed to be transported far away from the western suburbs of Melbourne.
I sat on the footpath flicking pages, got to the middle of the mag and there it was – the most perfect, pristine righthand tube peeling down this palm tree point. l’d never seen anything so beautiful. In the photo a local fisherman was sitting in a dugout canoe, protected by his grass hat, staring at it. He seemed as mesmerised as I was. I got home and cut the image out and stuck it just above my pillow on the wall. The image typified what surfing was all about for me, and it whipped my dreams upside-down for years.
The year was 1978, and the shot by Erik Aeder set in motion an Indo fantasy across the globe. Early Indo pioneer, Peter Reeves, who’d been sneaking around Bali since ’76, had also seen the image. It cast such a strong spell on him, he and buddy Dugga Warren chartered a boat to find it. It was – of course – Lagundri Bay on the island of Nias, off western Sumatra. Reevesy and Dugga planned to go for a month and stayed for three, in the one and only bungalow on the point. They surfed nearly every day on that trip, and would go back, feasting on its fruits for the next decade.
I never made it to Lagundri, which disappointed me. By the late ’80s it seemed like the crowds had overrun it, and like most of the pristine places, it’d lost its innocence. I wrote the dream off.
By the early ’90s I was working at Rip Curl, and one Friday afternoon I cracked a beer at knock-off with Doug Warbrick and some of the other staff. He started talking about some footage he’d just seen of Tom Curren and Frankie Oberholzer getting ten-second tubes in some secret island chain in Indonesia. He went on and on then stared off into the distance and said, “It was like Nias around every corner.” My heart jumped with a mild electric shock. Something inside said, “This time you’re going.” I soon learned the islands were called the Mentawais.
There was still a bit of secrecy around how to get onto a boat and get out there. It seemed like the only two boats working out there were expensive and booked solid by the big surf brands. I’d left Rip Curl by this stage, so I couldn’t swindle any favours there. Then in February 1994 I met a guy from Avoca named Bruce Turner and the conversation soon moved to surfing. I told Bruce about the Mentawais and how I’d been trying to figure out how to get out there. Bruce smiled and said, “I’m booked to go.” He had a surfer/sailor mate from Avoca up there, working for a charter company owned by a bloke named Paul King. There were spots open on the boat. I said yes in a second flat, no details required.
Fast forward three months and Bruce and I were standing in a hotel doorway in Jakarta. After a fun night bumping around all the wrong places, we boarded a SMAC Airlines flight for a dodgy, bumpy plane ride to Padang. We were picked up on time and driven straight to the harbour to board our luxurious yacht and sail into the sunset. Well that’s what we thought.
We arrived to a see an old, blue ferry, with locals loading bags of rice, diesel, chickens, pigs… you name it. My buddy, Paul Hart looked at our driver unloading the gear towards the ferry and said, “I can’t see the yacht.” The driver in his broken English said, pointing out to sea, “Your yacht out there. No worry, not far. You take ferry and you see yacht.”
The group dynamics seemed good, not a big mouth galah amongst us. Humble until we rumble vibes. Bruce brought the Ox Brothers – Greg and Chris Graves – and builder mate Mick Walsh. I brought a couple of Torquay boys – old mate Paul Hart, John Egan and a couple of other blokes, Jeff and Kevin.
The ferry had a unique scent and it sounded like bombs going off every time we lifted over a wave. Things started to get a touch rough as we hit the open ocean. Then things started to change dramatically. A massive storm hit; sideways rain and the swell jumped. The old girl was in the fight of its life. I looked outside my little round window and saw nothing but white water, a relentless sea attacking the entire boat. Our buddy Johnny was snoring after necking a bottle of whisky, while Paul and I shuffled out of our tiny room to check out the storm. We passed Mick vomiting off the back, while Bruce and the Ox brothers were all sitting there on the back deck wrestling with their seasickness, listening to wild cracks of the ferry, waiting for one of these 20-foot waves to snap her in half. I went back to my bunk, putting a rough survival plan together. If the old girl broke in two, I’d whip the pocket knife out, cut the triple board covers free and jump overboard with them. I finally fell asleep contemplating if it was better to drown peacefully in my cabin or float in open ocean for days before dying from dehydration.
I woke early the next morning, exhausted, feeling sick but happy the nightmare was over. The ocean was calm and I could see land. We hit port waiting for our luggage to come off. Bruce came marching over upset that the yacht wasn’t here. Then one of the ferry workers asked us to board again. Like a bunch of broken, tired sailors, we dragged our seasick bodies up and climbed back aboard the ferry. Two more island stops and 10 hours later, we finally hit Siberut.
Our trusty captain, Matt Cruden, and our yacht was sitting there basking in the sunlight. The boat was the Katika. None of us had much to say, but Matt apologised and explained he couldn’t come and get us from Padang because the storm was hitting, and it was safer on the ferry. We grabbed a few bananas for our upset tummies and set sail. I remembered a quote Jack McCoy told me once, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”
We sailed overnight and woke up in front of what Iooked like a perfect six-foot left. Matt sang out, “Welcome to Lance’s Left, lads.” The sunlight was just starting to pop over the horizon as the spray lifted like seabirds off the back of the lip. The inflatable was off the back and loaded with boards. I realised it was a lot bigger when we got closer, the swell we faced in the strait on the ferry was here, alive and well; 10-foot sets and all of us well and truly undergunned. We got some and washed away the travel sludge. The next day we surfed it smaller and more perfect, surfing sun-up to sundown, red leg tans, red eyeballs, everyone surf-stoned, melting into their beers at the end of the day.
The next morning Matt motored us around the point to a right. We arrived to see huge dead trees rooted firmly on the reef, white water rushing past their trunks like surfers waiting to paddle out. Matt said some guys called it “HTs” after the hollow trees, while others called it “Lance’s Rights” after the Aussie guy who’d stumbled on it a few years earlier. It didn’t matter really, it was perfect – big, spitting tubes and no one out.
We all stopped waxing as a set broke way outside on a bommie and rolled onto the reef, doubling up and detonating. Matt said it was a really solid eight-to-10-foot and advised us to ride the biggest boards we had. He pointed to the super shallow end section and said, “Do not fall there.” He lifted his shirt to show us a big scar from a coral encounter earlier in the season. Some of our crew decided to sit back and watch as a few of us headed out. We all struggled, the take-offs super late, very like Backdoor Pipe. We got a few but there were a lot left alone. We surfed it again the next day when it had dropped and we all scored some incredible tubes, still all alone. Not a single boat turned up. Matt said there were two other boats in the region, the Indies Trader and another big cruiser that Billabong had hired for the entire winter, but we didn’t lay eyes on either of them.
A wind shift came and we pulled anchor. Some funky wind was forecast and it was going to be onshore for a few days, so Matt suggested we cruise and explore some areas further south he hadn’t been to yet. We all needed a lay day after five days of surfing and it was wonderful to turn the engine off and just sail along the coast. As the wind came in we tacked towards a smaller island Matt had wanted to check last trip but hadn’t had time.
The swell was still big, but comfortable as we rolled back and forth on Katika’s mono hull. As we got closer to land again, out came the binoculars. Matt could see the back of a left grinding down alongside the edge of the island. We entered the bay and ran quite close to this big line of water and this left started rifling off like Cloudbreak, into this Ala Moana bowl, spitting its guts out into the channel. Matt threw the pick, but everyone was a bit slow and sleepy and decided to sit it out. So Bruce and I surfed it together, just the two of us, hooting each other’s waves in what seemed endless sets. We sit there, post-session when Matt pops up from below deck, stops and looks at us all and says, “Hey boys, you know you’re the first guys to surf this place. No one would’ve found this.” He said, “Who’s the lucky guy going to name their own surf spot?” We all threw a few names out trying to lay claim to the discovery, when one of the Ox Brothers stands up and says, “How about ‘Franklins’?” after the no-name, no-frills supermarket. Franklins it was.
We sailed on south as the swell dropped and sat at Thunders for three days, again not a soul to be seen. We then surfed Rags, and slowly made our way back to Maccas and surfed there for a couple of days before sailing home.
We were all pretty speechless when we arrived back to Padang harbour. We’d been deeply saturated in the higher power of Mentawai medicine, our cups over-flowing with reverence for the incredible paradise we were fortunate to experience in its early surfing days. Missing Lagundri way back didn’t seem to disappointment as much anymore, and almost 30 years later, for me that trip still shines like a star.
