Enchanted Secrets

"That sounds great," I told him. "You want us to reveal the place, promote the place, but not say where it is. I think you'd better know that my current motto here at the mag is 'Death to Secret Spots.'"

"And my personal motto is 'death to anyone who would say death to secret spots.'" Martin replied.

"So where does that leave us?"

"I guess I'll see you down there," Martin said. "What better place to continue this discussion than on the deck of the Indies Trader, anchored off a newly-discovered secret spot. Give you a chance to experience first-hand what the Crossing is all about, mate."

"Fine," I said. "Where will I meet you?"

Martin just smiled.

And so that's how I found myself with a carload of groms driving north-west across Nicaragua, headed toward points unknown and with plenty of time to ponder the weird ethical history of surf discovery in the magazines.

In the beginning the vibe was share and share alike. "Think of all the perfect waves that have gone to waste," narrated Bruce Brown in 1965's The Endless Summer, intoning the sports first "get up and go" edict. "...and of all the perfect waves that are going to waste right now at Cape St. Francis."

Intrepid surfers did go, and as late as the early-1970s the thrill of global surf exploration was still innocent enough to share openly. SURFER's 1970 travel feature "Perils Of The Tropic" by a 19 year-old Bernie Baker, openly chronicled his back-pack and board voyage down through Central America and the Caribbean, naming many breaks that later went on to earn protective pseudonyms, including La Libertad in El Salvador. Printing misleading names of California breaks had already begun, the most famous case being San Diego's Big Rock, which was known by a number of goofy monikers like Lobster Lounge and Moidsland; the beachbreaks of Imperial Beach known as "Emerald City." But so far as the rest of the globe was concerned, the world was still big enough for show and tell. Then in June of 1972 SURFER ran a feature called "El Dorado: A True Life Adventure" by John Amsterdam. On a yacht voyage across the Atlantic, after touching in at the Cape Verde Islands Amsterdam and his buddies make their way to what is only described as "our island destination." The waves were depicted as perfect, the people friendly, the livin' easy. But despite several photos of what indeed looked like a perfect point, for the first time the destination wasn't named.

"I could go on about the place, but there's really no point..." wrote Amsterdam. "Besides, I've told you too much already. Just figure that whatever you desire is out there, at the end of some rainbow. All you have to do is find it."

And they were just passengers on a yacht. They didn't own a yacht, especially not a 75-foot, former dive salvage trawler refitted specifically for surf exploration. Amsterdam and crew would've fit right in on the The Crossing, however, where the ethic they first introduced to the surf media three decades ago has become an essential element of this most modern surfari, the first of its kind and certainly the most elaborate, comprehensive surf trip in the history.