FIRST-CLASS FERAL
Bad Odors and Great Rides On the Indonesian Frontier

Dirty Orange County surfers- sounds kind of like a contradiction of terms, doesn't it? But for Brett Schwartz, Micah Byrne and Travis Potter, there's no better way to escape the confines of Fashion Island, 405 gridlock and all the Mickey Mouse tourists than going full on feral. On his first ever Indo adventure, it didn't take Brian Conley long to shuck the "stranger in a strange land" feeling and go native.

“Uncooked foods only,” he’d explained earlier. “It’s the pure way to eat, you don’t get all the free radicals in your system, man.” On a tiny island one day, he tried to convince everybody that coconut milk was the closest thing in the world to human blood. The jury’s still out on that one, but drinking from a freshly opened coconut, I could see where such a notion would come from. Combined with the 40-pound bag of nuts and berries that he’d brought from home, his sack full of fruit provided him with enough sustenance for the entire trip, while the rest of us withered away on starch and MSG.

It had been predetermined that this village was to be our point of no return. We’d hoped to hire a fishing boat and head north from here. According to Travis, Brett, Brandon and Ben, who’d been pouring over nautical charts, weather maps and tide calendars for weeks, there could be waves not far from here, but that was speculative at best.

It’s not hard to find a boat for hire in Indonesia, and it didn’t take long to scrounge something up. In less than an hour of bantering and bartering with various captains, they found one everybody could agree upon—the S.S. Vagina. In the immortal words of Han Solo, “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.”

Pretty much everybody knew the thing would sink the minute we left the harbor, but we figured, what the hell. To be a sport, let’s call it 40 feet from bow to stern. On deck, there was a small wheelhouse, maybe four feet wide by ten feet long and about five feet high. It was the only covered area on the whole boat. The only good news was that we had a rusty 50-gallon drum of diesel lashed to a beam on the bow should we miraculously survive long enough to run out of fuel. It was a sad little fishing boat.

While the vessel was being secured, the rest of us stocked up on provisions at the only store in town: cases of bottled water, crates of Anker beer, boxes of ramen noodles, and a too-big bag of rice. It felt like we were finally getting somewhere, albeit the middle of nowhere. The highway had been hard and the thought of leaving land was uplifting, even if it was on a death trap of a boat and there was an enormous, wrath-of-god thunderhead building on the horizon.

Hurriedly stowing our food stores below deck, Travis, as the only one that could speak to the captain fluently, had the crew weigh anchor. Pointing the boat in a general direction, our version of setting a course, from behind the borrowed steering wheel of a mid-’80s Toyota Corolla, our captain headed for a minute offshore island barely within eye-shot. When bolts of lightening, piercing thunder and the driving monsoon rain started, it all seemed like such an amusing novelty, like the proper way to kick off an adventure. We even got to break out our ponchos. As it got dark, kerosene lanterns were lit and noodles were boiled.

It rained all night long. Buried under tarps and board bags Travis, Brett, Brandon and Ben had all staked a claim on the cabin roof, the rest of us sought what little shelter there was on the main deck. But as the rain poured harder throughout the night, everybody ended up relegated to the cramped quarters of the wheelhouse. Brandon, who’d carved out a particularly deep cave from a canvas tarp and his eight-foot coffin, slept through the first part of the downpour. Then, when the rain really started coming down, he found he was stuck. Finally he emerged down below at 3 a.m. to a rousing round of applause and laughter.