The Perfect Day: Tavarua, Fiji

“The right only breaks on a high tide,” explains Dorian. “Last year I was here for two months and I only surfed it once. The wind has to be from this weird direction that hardly ever happens, and the tide has to be high. A lot has to happen for it to be good. I don’t think Danny and Reef were expecting what they got.”

BOOTH: Straight off the boat, Reef and Dorian just charged, and Fuller was right behind them, so those three guys kind of tested the water. All three of those guys got bombs right off the bat. And then Dorian started to sit really, really deep. He found this turn on the Cloudbreak reef where there was a little bit of a knuckle that would let you in, and then you had to backdoor this 200-yard closeout section, or what looked like a closeout section. It turned out that was the easiest way to get into the wave because once the thing started barreling it slowed down and started drawing water off the reef and you just couldn’t get in if you were on the shoulder, so you had to take it deep.

DORIAN: It was weird. It was kind of like a Sebastian Inlet type of thing, where it was moving almost sideways. Like a little river bend, like a vortex in the reef. You’d take off right at the pinnacle of that and the thing would just barrel for 200 yards. It was pretty sick.

TOM SERVAIS: There weren’t any sets swinging wide, I don’t know what they’re calling the size, but I’d have to say it was 15-foot-plus and there were probably some waves that day, like Shane’s, that you’d have to call 18 feet, maybe.

BOOTH: Those guys just started going at it. Hammering strong. A couple guys broke boards, a couple guys got demolished, and then it sorted itself out. Those three guys, especially Reef and Dorian on their backhand, they just started going loony. And then Fuller got a crazy 12- to 15- foot barrel, just a frickin’ stupid one.

MCINTOSH: It’s tricky, you don’t know the lineup. It’s not Pipeline where you’ve surfed Third Reef 20 times. You don’t know where to line up, and you’re waiting way out there in the middle of the ocean. We didn’t know what was going on. All we knew was that it was big, we didn’t want to get caught inside, and we didn’t want to break our boards. Shane’s done pretty much everything there is to do in surfing, so he just sat out the back and pushed me and Fuller. He’d be like, ‘Oh, you want this one, you want that one?’ He took a gnarly wipeout. He paddled for one and tried to pull through the side, not taking off, just trying to pull out. I was paddling and thought to myself, ‘Did somebody just go over on that?’ I couldn’t tell. But then he popped up. No broken board, no nothing. I was like, ‘God, if that had happened to me I probably would have died, and he was just frothing.’

SERVAIS: Dorian’s insane. He’s one of those people you don’t have to worry about being motivated. He’s on it. A first he’d paddled out on a 6' 9", he’d just put fins in it and hadn’t gotten more than 10 feet from the boat when he saw a set, turned around and put the fins back in the 7' 3". And then he proceeded to paddle out and get pitched over on one with a big, huge, thick lip. He paddled for it, tried to turn sideways to pull back. He wasn’t very successful.

BOOTH: I tell you, he’s like some kind of mafia hit man. He’s the kind of guy you see walk into a restaurant, and without blinking an eye he blows away 20 guys, then when the cops show up he’s down the block at the café sipping a cappuccino as if nothing had happened. I tell you, there’s ice in his veins. He never even looked rattled. I think he had at least another 15 or 20 feet in him before he would have shown signs of distress.

MCINTOSH: Then the ski showed up and everybody wanted to catch a wave. There weren’t very many that wanted to paddle earlier. I said, ‘Boothy, get out there, you got a 7’ 4”.’ He towed. He got some waves. He knew he could surf.

BOOTH: Sometimes you’re just not feeling it, and you go, ‘I got a wife and two kids, better be a little bit safe today.’ The ski showed up and kind of changed the whole dynamic because it made it where everybody could kind of charge a little bit harder and know that if something really radical happened the ski could take them in. Slater had a tow board down there, so all the regularfooters were riding it, and they were doing that for a while. And then Brandon Lillard switched it to goofyfoot, and there were like four or five of us that got to have a go at it, and everybody rode four or five waves.