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

“I was fucking trapped up there, man,” he half-joked, trying to find a dry corner to get comfortable.

Thankfully, our travails would soon pay off. In search of a specific left-hand point, that we eventually found but never scored, our pot of gold came in the unlikely form of a beachbreak. Initially, it reminded everybody of a warm-water Baja Malibu. Celebrating Daniel’s Aussie heritage, Brett named the spot simply The Beachy, and the first session of the trip was spent alone and in playful head-high peaks.

Back on the boat that evening, everybody lounged on deck under the open sky, watching shooting stars sprint across the black backdrop. We chuckled about the man we met on the island that bopped around with a peg leg; lost to a tiger shark he’d explained. Lying on his back Brandon pointed out the “party star.”

“You see it?” he asked, over a bowl of delicious noodles and rice. “It twinkles differently than everything else in the sky, faster, like it should be raging in a club or something.” “Oh yeah, the party star,” recalled Brett, “we saw that last year, remember? I wonder what it really is?” About midnight placid turned to pouring rain, and for the second night in a row misery ensued. Just as everybody onboard started to shiver and count the hours until sunrise, over a small set of battery powered iPod speakers “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone…” began to play. If we weren’t laughing, we’d be crying, I suppose.

“I’d never slept standing up before,” Daniel sarcastically recounted the next morning. “It was actually quite comfortable.”

Unbeknownst to us at the time, the recent rains had coincided with an earthquake in central Java that tragically killed over 6,000 people. With nobody back home sure of exactly where in Indo we were, after two weeks without hearing from any of us they’d pretty much written us off. “You’re alive!” was my fiancé’s first response when I finally found a phone to call home.

Just as Travis’s text message had predicted, the swell came up the following day and The Beachy was showing shades of Puerto Escondido, only better. Digging out our bigger boards, another sleepless night and single scoop of peanut butter for breakfast somehow made sense. Feeling more like Mainland Mexico than Indonesia, for two days we indulged in wide-open sandbars without another surfer around for who knows how many miles. It’s said you never leave perfect surf, but Travis, Brett and the boys hadn’t come here to surf over sand, they were after the next G-Land, and the reef-fringed corners of an offshore island was on their mind. The decision was made; we pulled the picks and pointed our shitty ship out to sea. A short putt from where we’d been, on our forth night in country, we anchored on the lee of the island and inhaled a hearty supper of noodle-surprise. We’d finally learned our lesson and weren’t taking any chances with the rain. Sleep was a necessity this night. We tarped the whole boat. Dry and feeling restored the next morning, we paddled to the island to check the surf. A prehistoric looking monitor lizard slithered into the bush as we walked around surveying the barrier reef from all angles; a few little corners here and there, but hardly Desert Point. It was disappointing, but patience was on our side.

Over the next week, we settled into a routine of island hoping and riding various weird waves that wouldn’t quite qualify as perfect, but were fun just the same. We traveled mostly by night, which meant we could try and sleep while heading to our next destination, and most importantly, daylight hours were spent solely looking for surf. There was a lot of paddling over reefs, tromping through jungles and wandering on beaches. All we had onboard was a two-man, dug-out outrigger and a captain that refused to park the boat anywhere even remotely close to the surf.

“What am I goddamn, fucking shark bait?!” shouted Brett after one particularly long, frustrating channel crossing. “This guy’s a…he’s a…God, he’s such a…” “A pussy?” poetically surmised Brandon. And thus, in a moment that that went down as “The Mutiny on the Tampon” in my journal, the illustrious title of S.S. Vagina was bestowed up our fine yacht.

While we probably would have ridden more waves had we been on a high-speed catamaran, the waves that the Vagina did take us to were hard won, plus we actually got to meet the locals. In one rustic village—a cluster of less than a dozen mud-floor, tin-roofed shanties, where malaria undoubtedly flew through the air—Brett spent some time one morning cleaning and bandaging the infected foot of a small girl.