This was written around March 3, 1998.
Sometime in 1994 I met my friend Axel on a little island called Nias off the west coast of Sumatra. To get to this island you ride a boat for 12 hours, and it costs something like $8. You're assigned a 3 foor by 6 foot rectangle on plywood, with a low ceiling, and neighbors on either side. The natives play cards on the trip over, or walk around the boat. Some of them try to sleep through the trip, like I did. I usually have little trouble getting to sleep.
Axel is German and is about 3 years younger than myself. He arrived on Nias a day or two before I did. On Nias at that time you stayed in "Lossmen". These are wooden houses built right on the beach. Rent is $.25 a day, plus what they can earn as profit serving you meals. Your landlord will get annoyed with you if you don't eat at least 1 or 2 meals at your lossman. The food is fine, and quite cheap.
Nias is supported by coconuts, mangoes, and fishing. The lossmen are usually two story affairs, and the tourists get the second floor, usually with a balcony. The entire construction is pretty rickety. There is just 1 large space usually, and rooms coming off of that. The individual rooms don't have balconies. The large space will have a table and chairs or benches, and commonly hammocks. From the chairs you can lean over a rail and look at the ground and the beach and the people passing by.
It's a white coral sand beach. Kids walk up and down the beach trying to sell things to tourists. They sell books often, or wax for waxing surfboards. They don't really want to just sell you a book, they want to trade 2 or more of your books for 1 of theirs, or trade 1 for 1 plus money. In any transaction they want their library to either remain unchanged in size, or to increase. If you offered to buy their entire library for $50, they'd probably turn you down, even though their dozen used books, brand new, might costs less than that. They enjoy the trading probably more than the money.
Fishermen walk along the beach selling their fish. You can get a four foot fish for under $10. It will feed 6 people. You buy it from the guy, then you get the house to cook it for you. They take care of all the side orders, like rice. All in all it's a very inexpensive and convenient system.
Anyway I met Axel at one of these lossmen. He was travelling with another German guy. I got to be good friends with both of them.
Nias Island is the cite of some really fantastic surfing. There is some annual surfing competition that is held there. The organization of the underlying coral creates a nice long right handed break. This means that if you are riding a wave, the wave is on your right hand side. At least I think that makes it right handed. From the point of view of people on the beach, though, you're moving to the left as you're coming closer to shore.
One of the neat things about the lossmen is that they have an assortment of surfboards that you can use, for free. I'm 6 foot 3, and weigh around 200 pounds, so I always had trouble finding a big enough board. In fact I could never find one. Axel is smaller and lighter though so he could make do with just about any of the boards they had there.
What I'm building up to is Axel and I tried surfing at Nias.
For those of you that don't know about surfing, let me offer a little explanation. A surf board is about 6 or 7 feet long, 2 to 4 feet wide, and is flat and about 3 inches thick. It tapers to a point in the front, and narrows in the back, but not quite to a point. The design seems to be to make it as dangerous a weapon as possible to some unlucky swimmer in its path. Aside from the sharp point, there are two or three fins coming out the bottom of the board, right at the back. These are about as wide as your palm, and are almost razer sharp, and act like a butcher's knife cutting through the water.
When you're surfing, you've got your surfboard floating on the surface of the water (the boards are made out of styrofoam covered with fiberglass, so they're light and strong) and you're standing up on it, a little to the rear. The board is sliding down the moving slope of the wave as it is breaking, or you're sliding sideways across the wave. The idea is to be on the board at the right place so that when the swell, which has been building and moving for maybe thousands of miles, hits the shallow water close to land and starts to build up into a wave, you can capitalize on this event and get a free ride.
It's not actually a free ride though. You've got to work pretty hard to get to be in the right spot. In fact, knowing where you should be to catch the wave is a big part of the difficulty of surfing itself. Did I mention that surfing is difficult? It's very difficult, and very tiring. It can also be dangerous. Surfing depends on waves being big enough. The bigger the better, up to a point. You've got the pounding waves, these hard, pointed boards, and the razer sharp fins. Plus you've got lots of other surfers that are trying to do the same thing as you are, namely get a free ride.
You start on shore with your board. The board usually has a rubber rope attached to it that you attach to your ankle with a velcro strap. This is needed because if you screw up while trying to surf, you could become separated from your board. For example a wave could hit you and drive you down into deep water, while your board floats like a cork up on the surface, and gets carried along in the white water. Without the rope, you'd be forever chasing after your board once you wiped out.
So you've got your surfboard attached to you, and you head out into the water. This is where the work comes in. The waves are crashing, one after the other. In general there seems to be a massive movement of water and suds heading towards shore. You've got to fight this current. You're really fighting the whole ocean here. I think the ocean doesn't like having solid things floating in it, that's why there are these big waves, pushing everything out on shore. It's like the ocean is trying to rid itself of these annoying impurities.
Part of learning to surf is to build up the paddling muscles needed to move around on your board in the water. When you're not actually standing on the board, you're usually lying on your stomach along the board, with your legs straight behind you and up, out of the water. Only your arms are in the water, as you paddle. This position is very tiring for the novice. You've got your weight on your chest, so it makes breathing harder. Likely you've got your back arched, and this requires muscular effort. And then there is the paddling itself, which is like swimming. Your legs play no role whatsoever in surfing until you're actually standing up on the board, at which point it's a matter of keeping your balance and guiding the board where you want it to go. This is the fun part, the whole reason for doing all this in the first place. I imagine it's quite a rush.
When you start from shore, you're dealing with the worst part, the part where the wave has already broken and so there is a mass of foamy water moving at you at high speed. This tends to shove you back towards shore. I think just the water close to the surface is actually moving towards shore. Deeper down there is probably a flow of water away from shore to balance out. So as you're trying to paddle your way out to the safe area where the water is still and the waves aren't forming yet, the waves keep breaking in front of you. Surfers have a trick of sort of pushing down on the front of the board, and ducking under the carpet of white water. You get pushed back some, but not as much as if you don't do this, and instead continue paddling along on the surface.
As you get further out, you get closer to the area where the waves are actually falling over and crashing. This is a scary place to be in any case, but having your board with you makes it much scarier. A wave could crash right on top of you and snap your board in half. Or you could get swept up in the wave and tossed down into the ground. Fortunately this range is very narrow, and you get a feel for it, and you can usually sneak through this zone between waves.
So finally you have made it out past the waves, and you find youself amongst other surfers. They're having a grand old time. This is the place to be. They will be now sitting up on their boards, just as if sitting on a stool. This is a difficult balancing act in itself. There is some system of pecking, so that surfers take turns going for waves. All the time while the surfers are out there, they're watching the swells as they're coming in, and they're noting how they are breaking. From the back a wave breaking looks completely different. You don't see much of anything--it is all hidden by the wave itself. But experienced surfers can get lots of information by looking at a wave from behind.
So they're out there in the pack, watching the waves, and also moving around. The area where the waves are breaking is always moving around, plus there may be a current that is pushing you around, so that even if you seem to be motionless, you could actually be moving out away from shore, or in closer to shore.
Also a bigger wave will start to rear up and break further away from shore than a smaller wave. Surfing is the art of being in the right place at the right time. So the pack of surfers is usually shifting around in order to follow the shifting area of optimum potential. Through some system the surfers take turns. You don't want two surfers on the same wave, because they get in each other's way. This is a cause for a great deal of anger, and can lead to fights. If a surfer is on someone else's wave, he's not making any friends.
Now, described this way, surfing has some self regulating properties. For example, until you figure out how to paddle, you can't even get out away from shore--the current overpowers you and keeps you in the shallow and safe area.
Nias has a special feature that makes it interesting. Nias has a back door. There is a shelf of reef that extends pretty far out, then it just cuts off right into deep water. When you're on shore and you're looking straight out from the shore, on your right you see this level, shallow shelf that extends maybe 100 yards out. Straight ahead and on your left, the waves are breaking normally, because the shelf doesn't extend there, and instead the depth is increasing regularly. So waves start to the left of the shelf, and move in towards shore, and to the left also.
To use the back door, you walk with your board out over the shelf, until you come to the dropoff, and you get on your board. Without any effort at all, all of a sudden you're out with the professionals, back behind where the waves are breaking. The only paddling you have to do is move off to the left, sideways away from the shelf, to get to the course the waves follow.
This is sort of cheating. In fact it may even be dangerous--anyone, regardless of paddling skill, can get himself in trouble. The way I worked it, I would wade out, drop off the shelf, paddle sideways to get to the pack, then after 1 attempt at surfing I'd be on shore, and I'd wade out to land, and walk along the beach to get back to my starting point for another try. One really annoying part about this is that the ground during the wading part is covered with really sharp things, and in bare feet it's treacherous and painful footing at best. And while you're trying to tippy-toe your way out of the water, a big wave can come along and shove you along, grinding you along the ground--very painful and scary.
All in all the circumstances at Nias allow someone to get himself into a place he has no business being.
Now lots of times Axel and I would be out with the real surfers, who are talking to each other, and are using their expertise to gauge where they should be. Axel and I would just follow them blindly. They could move around much faster than we could. My board would be too small for me, so it rode lower in the water, and was thus harder to paddle around. Even so we usually could keep up well enough.
Sometimes you're out there, and a swell is coming in, and it is blocking off the view further out. The swell looks like a raised line, stretching far left and right, moving right at you. It is higher than you, until it is right on top of you, then it lifts you up higher in the air as it moves underneath you. For that moment when you're higher up, you've got a better view of the swells coming.
It is at this instant when you can catch a glimpse of the MOTHER WAVE. It is a swell that is far, far bigger than the swells that are next to it. It really has no business being in that group at all. I don't know what strange gust of wind, or intervention by malicious dieties created this, but regardless of how it came to be, it is now there.
Now you don't have to be very experienced to know that this wave is something unusual. And you know pretty easily that it's going to break either right on top of you, or ahead of you. You know this because it is almost standing up, way out there, and this is a dangerous sign. You don't have to rely on the fact that all the other surfers are paddling like crazy, directly towards the wave itself, to know that you should be doing something.
As I said before, the bigger waves break farther away from shore than the smaller waves. As a surfer, you want to be just outside the area where a wave starts to break and fall over itself. The pack wants to stay a little outside this area, so only those surfers that are going to "go for it" need paddle a little in towards shore, and have the wave rise up underneath them and carry them along.
So you're out there in the group, happily treading water, safe where you are, with the waves giving you a nice lift as they go by, and you can hear them crash behind you, and you feel strangely at peace. It is very relaxing out there. But then, all of a sudden, a giant wave comes along, and suddenly you're in just the worst place to be. The wave will rise up and crash either in front of you, or right on top of you. So you've got to paddle like crazy or you'll be in trouble.
I don't know how many times I got caught this way. It is as if there is some intelligence acting, sending these "filter" waves every once in a while, and their purpose is to get rid of the fakes like Axel and myself, and leave only the "real" surfers behind.
I probably got only 2 or 3 good rides in all the time I was there. Most surfers are little, and as I said before I couldn't get a big enough board. So all the time I would be sunk down in the water too much, and it would make paddling harder and it would make it harder to catch waves. Or maybe I just suck at it...