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The resort became base camp for a week of lapping Bali, the boys surfing everything from the reefs of Ulu to the nameless black-sand barrels on the island's east coast. "We tried to surf two sessions in the morning when it was clean, and then another one in the afternoon. We got so crispy fried," said Marzo, whose first overseas trip had been to Bali four years ago at age 13. Typical of the fast-tracking of today's über-grom, the young Hawaiian's probably surfed more of the planet at 17 than the average surfer will by 70. "Yeah, after Bali I went to J-Bay when I was 14, and I got it all-time."

While the boys had encountered plenty of surf, the bulk of the footage so far had been shot above the lip, and three-foot Keramas does not a movie make. They were missing juice. They were missing a story…but it was only a day away.

"I was 16 and on my first major trip overseas, heading to France on my own. It was a disaster. I missed my connecting flight from Singapore to London, and from then on I'm just grovelling. I finally got on another flight and made it into Biarritz at about 9 p.m. but there was nobody there to pick me up. So I got a map of Biarritz and got a taxi driver to take me to the beach and find me a hotel. He took me to the most expensive hotel in all of France and, me being on a budget of 10 francs a day, I spent a month's budget in a single night. The next morning I found a surf shop, but it didn't open 'til 11 a.m., so I had to wait three hours for someone to show up. Eventually someone came down and got me. With the little money I had left I chipped in with Shane Herring and Todd Prestage and bought a car—which was where I slept for the next six weeks."—Jake Paterson

"It was kind of spooky, actually." This is how Clay Marzo described the experience of surfing perfect G-Land with just four other guys out. "It was kind of strange with no one out there. There was so much space. You'd see your friends as you flew past and that was about the only time you saw anyone. We had the whole reef to ourselves."

Turning G-Land into a boat trip, the view the Young Guns crew had steaming into Plengkung wouldn't have been too different from the one Bob Laverty and Mike Boyum had in '72: lurching 6 to 8-foot lines marching into the bay without a soul in sight. Here it was, a modern-day surf trip powered by satellites, re-enacting a surf trip 35 years ago powered by a 15-horsepower outboard motor.

"Boating over to G-Land in the off-season was a real long shot," quipped Warren. "Forecasting 10 days out is a lifetime, but Ben Matson saw it coming and told us to keep it on the boil. We're glad we did."

"Empty G-Land" is a term that last appeared in the surfing vernacular sometime in mid-'70s, but this is exactly what the boys encountered. Scoring epic G-Land in February is about as likely as walking into the camp to find a Sumatran tiger playing Texas Hold 'Em with a Javanese rhino. In February the camps are still two months away from opening and the wet-season onshores are blowing straight into the bay. The camp is looked after by a couple of caretakers who keep an eye on the place The Shining style, with just the monkeys and rhinos and tigers and ghosts of the jungle for company.

"It's me new favourite wave!" barked Craikey with his trademark Kalbarri drawl. Surprisingly, considering his love affair with all things left, Craike was surfing G-Land for the first time. He and Marzo, the two goofies, had a field day.

"Clay is like one of those Gremlins," says Shimooka. "Add water and he turns into a completely different animal. He's very humble on land, but he's extraordinarily confident in the water. Clay does this thing where he rubs his hands together when he's excited. He paddled up to me after getting a sick one that day and goes, 'I think I'm in heaven!' He did that, like, six times that day."

Jake Paterson, since his retirement from the tour at the end of 2006, has been having trouble letting go of the dream. His debut as a contest director at Quiksilver's Bali contest saw him make it all the way to the semi-finals of his own event. On this day, the chaperone wasn't about to sit in the boat and work on his tan. Snake's done plenty of time in the G-Land lineup, harking all the way back to Quiksilver's inaugural event there back in 1995. "To have the place empty out there, I thought I was back in a heat with [Shane] Beschen," he said. "Those young guys just frothed so hard out there—they caught everything that moved. I figured it was part of my job description to sit out the back and wait and just pick the eyes out of the sets—just to show 'em, ya know."

With mechanical sets and no crowd, there was nothing to curb their natural urge to catch all things moving. "My eyes were roooooted," said cheeky young Aussie Garrett Parkes, whose snowy little frame wilted under six hours of tropical sun. "I couldn't even surf the next day, that's how bad they were." As he was severely dehydrated, serious consideration was given to putting Parkes on a drip when they got back to Bali later that night. "His eyes were just pink and lifeless," recalls Carey.

Despite all the boys scoring more tube time in six hours than they'd had in the previous six months, it was Dane Reynolds who stamped himself as the new top dog of this pack, pig-dogging a ledgey double-up for the wave of the day-and the movie. Defying physics—considering that there was a mile of reef and only six guys in the water this day-Reynolds actually managed to fade a couple of his co-stars. "They were getting too many waves anyway. I had to stop 'em," he laughed with his trademark faux 'tude."I was charging just way too hard; G-Land wasn't ready for that s--t." Reynolds was cutting loose, knowing this would pretty well be his last freesurfing trip in 2007 before buckling down for the gruelling slog to qualify for the Dream Tour.

And so the project had its trophy day. "A couple of Bintangs, a big smile, now back to the real world," as Ry Craike summed it up. By "real world" we weren't quite sure whether Craikey meant the resort life they were quickly becoming accustomed to, or simply a week in the desert in his outback home. Either way, they all would return to the real world happy.

"The cool thing is, these kids appreciate what they have," says Paterson. "We were in the trailer park in Yamba for half a week and none of the boys really gave a s--t. They worked their arses off the whole time, and they were pushing things pretty damn far in the water. It's scary where things are heading. We may have broke the bank trying to pull this off but you watch these guys and you realize they deserve it."

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