Keeping Secrets - Joel Patterson - Water Magazine (Surfline.com)September (Summer) 2008
Talking to Martin Daly, one gets the feeling that he's a bit haunted by the mark he's made on surfing. A lifelong surfer and diver who spent his youth working on boats in the Indian Ocean, the Aussie is credited with turning our collective focus to the Mentawai Islands after photos and video from a 1992 trip aboard his salvage vessel the Indies Trader made their way into surf magazines and soon had the entire surf community licking its collective chops at the images of perfect waves and empty lineups.
Daly and only a half-dozen others had kept the Mentawais a secret for nearly a decade before the photos were leaked, and within a few years the area went from one of the most remote places on the planet to a surf mecca that drew thousands of surfers every summer who paid a burgeoning surf-charter industry handsomely to be taken out to waves with names like Macaroni's and Bank Vaults.In 1999, Daly collaborated with Quiksilver to embark on a half-decade-long exploration of the world's oceans, called simply The Crossing, which ended in 2005 and took him from Cloudbreak on Fiji to New York City's Ellis Island.
By 2003, Daly was to the reef passes of the Indian and Pacific oceans what Ernest Shackleton was to Antarctica, and as his reputation grew, so did his fleet. Each new boat was more luxurious and capable than the one before it, until the introduction of a surf charter boat so massive and appointed, Daly himself refers to it as "a small cruise ship," but most know it as "the Death Star" for its sleek profile and stealthy speed. Today the Mentawais are in turmoil. With over 40 boats running surf charters in the area and a growing number of land-based surf camps at some of the major breaks, the business of taking people surfing has become so big that outsiders--including everyone from the local and national governments to shady foreign businessmen--have begun muscling in on the action. Surf taxes, licensing proposals, international airports, and private ownership of the most popular waves have all threatened the future of the now beloved "Indo boat trip."
"I'm really not that positive about it," Daly says about his outlook for the Mentawais. "It's the bad things about Indonesia against all the things that we hold dear. It's kind of like watching a bunch of seagulls fighting over a chip. I see it as freedom versus the establishment."
With The Crossing now over, and unsure of the future in Mentawais, Daly has set his sights on new destinations, one of which--a group of islands in the Western Pacific, which will remain nameless here by Daly's request--has the 51-year-old excited about exploring again. So fifteen years after the door to the Mentawais was kicked down, Daly took the Rip Curl team to explore and document his new find. But with the lesson of Indo fresh in his mind, this time Daly's being more cautious about who he tells .... (yea, like the editor of Water Magazine! - Ed)Can we mention the name of these islands in this interview? I'd rather not. I mean, it's a bit out of reach for the average bloke, unless he's got a really good boat. It's not like the Mentawais where anything that floats will work. It's the Northwest Pacific Ocean, and the winds and weather are what's saved it all these years, but I'd still rather leave the exact location out of this.
So it's really hard to access? Really hard. Even the locals can't access it right now because the airlines are down and the shipping lines are often down. There are people living on those islands out there who don't get any supplies for months at a time. It's very remote.How did you end up there? I had always wanted to go there since the very beginning of The Crossing project. I always had it singled out as a place that looked to me like it would get some great surf. I looked at the maps, and I thought it would be a no-brainer.It was one of the few corners of the world we didn't go to during The Crossing, so when that project finished in Hawaii in 2005, I decided to go straight there on my own mission. It was on my way home to Indonesia, and it was one of the blanks I really wanted to fill in.Did you score it the first time you went? Yeah, we got fantastic waves.What kind of potential is out there? Well, I think we've only scratched the surface, really. It's a lot more challenging than Indonesia because of the sheer distance, the lack of shelter, the size of the waves, and the amount of swell. Plus, there are a lot of islands out there, and only some of them have spots where all the factors line up the right way. It's really similar to the Tuamotu Islands or the Maldives--it's the same sort of reef structure and similar surf.Does it have a big swell window? Pretty big. I mean, I don't want to get too carried away and make a guide to get there, but yeah, during the winter months it gets some swell.
What's unique about the area? The marine environment. It is the most untouched place in the tropics that I've ever been to. You put your head under the water and look around, and it's like it was supposed to be. I spent a lot of time in North Queensland [Australia] when I was a kid, and I used to go out to the [Great] Barrier Reef to go diving in all these places that no one had ever dived or fished before, so I kinda know what a tropical marine environment should look like.
One of the most disappointing by-products of spending all those years on The Crossing was observing the state of the marine environment around the world. Even in far-flung places in the middle of the Pacific, you could just feel that a lot was missing. Whether it was the bleaching of the coral or El Niño or global warming. But around these islands the environment is pristine--there are huge fish everywhere, the coral's alive, endless underwater visibility, seabirds are nesting all around. It's refreshing to see a place in such great shape environmentally.
Are there any local surfers? On the main island a couple guys are surfing, even though the surf isn't very good there, but for the most part, people haven't seen surfing.
How many places with good surf are left in the world where local people still haven't seen surfing? A lot, I reckon. On our way to the Pacific from Indonesia we drove right across the top of West Papua New Guinea and there were a lot of places where people had never seen surfers before.
Can you talk a little bit about what you envision as the future of surf travel in the Western Pacific? I think the best thing to say about the area is that I just love going there. [Indies] Trader 4 has been there for a few years and [Indies] Trader 1 has been up there twice, once with Rip Curl, and as you can see in the photos, we've scored some pretty amazing surf there. But before the Rip Curl guys left, people were sending e-mails to Mick Fanning--who was supposed to be on the trip--and others, saying, "This place is absolutely terrible. It's no good, and there's no waves. Martin Daly's an idiot, etcetera." So Mick ended up not going on the trip, but when the rest of the Rip Curl team got there and the surf came good, they were heroic.
Do you find that type of stuff happens to you regularly? I mean, you're the guy out there on the frontier. You're finding waves where people are convinced there's nothing, right? The best quote I've ever heard was from a young pro surfer working for Rip Curl. We were at Macaroni's in 1993. He said to me, "There's no f--king surf here. You're a f--king idiot. As long as my ass points to the ground, there's never going to be a wave in this place. Take me home!" The next morning, when we woke up, it was about as good as Macaroni's has ever been. If you've ever seen the movie The Search 2, there's the first-ever footage of Macaroni's in it, and that was the morning after the mutiny by this guy and a couple of his mates.
That's still happening, too. I was a lot more tolerant then, but these days my tolerance is fading. I get a lot of people out there who totally get it, and then there are a lot of people, who, unless it's served to them on a plate, they just aren't prepared to put up with the waits, the bad weather, and the floggings that it takes to make it all come together.I guess it's just human nature. Our society these days is all about "now, now, now" and "gimme, gimme, gimme" and instant gratification, and that's the fault of the surf-travel industry to a certain point. All someone has to do these days is put their hand in their pocket, come up with a few thousand dollars, and the next thing you know they're having their hand held and being led to perfect waves. It's taken an incredible amount of work to provide those services, and I think they're undervalued now. I think it's all far too cheap.Will there be a correction in the price of surf travel? I think so. Fuel prices are going through the roof; even the price of rice has doubled. This will have to be passed on. I think the whole surf travel thing has gotten overamped. For me, it's sometimes a case of "Oh my god, what have I done?" When you do something, you want to do it better and better each time, and you want to fine-tune it. I mean, when I first started it was like, "How would it be if initially we had cold beer on the boat all the time? How cool would it be if we had air conditioning? How cool would it be if we had a boat that would go a bit faster? Bigger cabins? A better tin boat? A Jet Ski? A helicopter?" Well now it's all happened, so I guess I've sort of taken it to its obscene end, if you know what I mean.So what do you do now? Pull it back and get back to the basics of going surfing with a few friends. I'm 51 this year, and I've been thinking that maybe I should slow down and smell the roses a bit. I've taken this to where it's going to go for this period, so maybe someone else can grab the reigns and take it to the next level, but I think I'm just about to the point where I'd like to spend my days with less stress and more waves, and I'd like to spend more time with my family.
Are you planning on doing advertised surf charters to this new area? We'll see how we go. I'm not really sure at the moment. The world is a pretty uncertain place, and the surf travel market in the Mentawais is drastically cut this year. It seems to me there's about a 30- to 40-percent reduction in numbers of surfers traveling there, which in a lot of ways is fantastic.
In my business you have a sort of never-ending dilemma. If you're full, you're stoked because you're making a living, but when that's the case it makes the lineups too crowded. When it's quiet out there, we're stoked because we get more waves, but that means less income. Now that I think of it, it's actually a win-win situation, really. You're either making money or surfing perfect waves alone.
"I remember when I first went out to the Mentawais how far away from everywhere I felt,
and that's the same feeling I get in these islands we took the Rip Curl guys to.
I feel responsible somewhat for exposing the Mentawais to the world, but if I hadn't done it,
someone else probably would have ten minutes later."
- Martin Daly
What do you attribute the downturn in people signing up for boat trips in the Mentawais this year to? People are scared; economic doom and gloom, stock market uncertainty. The US is arguably in a recession, and I think people are just holding their credit cards close to their chests at the moment.
What's your view on how the Mentawais surf experience changed in recent years? It hasn't changed at all when there's no one around. The magic's still absolutely there, and it's not as crowded as everyone says. We surf by ourselves all the time out there. A lot of people take it all for granted, and when they fly in they don't realize they're going to one of the most remote places in the world. They see it in the magazines, they see it fully marketed and prostituted--as we do--and they think it's this well-trodden, safe area.
I remember when I first went out to the Mentawais how far away from everywhere I felt, and that's the same feeling I get in these islands we took the Rip Curl guys to. I feel responsible somewhat for exposing the Mentawais to the world, but if I hadn't done it, someone else probably would have ten minutes later.
Do you ever regret that? I don't regret any of the experiences I've had, though I sometimes regret ...
You know, there's a fundamental difference between Australians' attitude towards surf travel and Americans'. We tend to be more secretive and selfish, while the US surfers tend to tell all their buddies about it and brag about it. There have been some cultural clashes out there. For example, my agent Anthony is involved in the Kandui Surf Camp, and he said to me, "Hey dude, we're gonna get a Web cam on Kandui!" And when I replied, "That really sucks!" he had no idea why I would say that. He just thought I was being a negative idiot. An Australian would think, "That sucks." And any American would think, "Hey cool, I can look at Kandui in the morning while I'm eating my Corn Flakes from my kitchen in California."As Australians, we've had a tradition of feral surf travel and discovery--in Indonesia particularly because it's so close to Australia. Some of these guys get malaria and live on the beach for years, and I think that because it's so hard to find the things they have, and because they put so much effort into the search, they somehow find it more valuable.
So what's going on in the Mentawais at the moment? It's getting really heavy. Basically, it's come down to the business end of surfing versus the surfers. There are people out there--and I like to think of myself as one of them--who own and operate boats and live the surfing lifestyle. And then you have this non-surfing, capitalist-pig element that is just there to take money out of our thing, and they're making things really hard right now. They're trying to impose taxes on every surfer who goes there, they're colluding with the Indonesian and Mentawais governments, trying to put up fences and get exclusive rights for all the waves. Surf camps are trying to get rid of charter boats. I see it as freedom versus the establishment.Surfers don't like regulations and rules. I mean, that's the whole reason we like surfing, right? Freedom. That's the whole idea of a boat ... it's a freedom machine. And you can't just tell people who have their lives and their dreams invested in something to simply go away, because they're not going to agree.I have to go to a meeting with the boss of the Mentawai Islands and others on Sunday to try to straighten things out. They had a demonstration against me in Padang last week, calling for my deportation because I disagreed that a boat should have to work underneath a land camp and give them a large chunk of their profit for doing nothing.Other than the freedom to explore, what advantages do boats have over surf camps based on land? The good thing about boats is that when you leave a break, it's the same as it ever was. The environment is still intact, and it's like people were never there. But as soon as you put a surf camp on an island, it's changed forever. There are always people there, it's always creating rubbish and pollution. It fundamentally impacts the area.Are you doing a lot of business in this new area in the Western Pacific? Not really. It's a bit of a disaster in some ways. It costs a lot of money to get out there, and it's really hard to access. People don't understand that if you want to get away from everybody, you've got to go to the ends of the Earth. I just figured the people who wanted to go would put their hands up. It's going to take a really big effort to develop anything out there, and I wonder whether it's a good thing to do or not. I'd like to establish a low-key deal where we just go out there and do it without whoring it out to the rest of the planet.Do you still have much exploring left to do out there? Oh yeah ... heaps. There are some really good waves out there. But if you want to get really good waves, there are lots of places to go, like the Mentawais, Mexico, Nicaragua ... it's instant gratification pretty much guaranteed in those places. But if you want to go to the more out-of-the-way places, you've gotta be prepared to harden up and put some effort in. From the photos it looks like that zone is full of right-handers. Yeah, there aren't very many lefts over there. Which is great, because there's too many lefts in the world anyway if you're a natural-footer. Indonesia is the land of the lefts, so it's nice to spend some time surfing some rights. I saw a video of G-Land flipped so it was a right instead of a left, and all I could think was, "You bastards!"
Looks like some shallow reefs in some of the spots you guys surfed. It's not any shallower than anywhere we surf in Indonesia, it's just that the water is so ridiculously clear that it can be head high and look three inches deep.
Do you have more surf industry-sponsored exploration trips planned? No. It became a bit of a moral dilemma.
What was the dilemma? Selling out. What for? Would I be doing it for my own ego? I'm not as hungry as I used to be. It's one thing to take guys out to surf an established, well-trodden spot, but when you start selling your secrets ...I see what you mean, but the whole concept of Martin Daly has a duality to it. How much do you tell? You're a guy who's privy to a lot of secrets. Yeah, but I'm a guy with 60 employees. That's a lot of mouths to feed, and I have a certain obligation to expand the business and make it work. I have to weigh that against the desire to keep secrets.What's the next region you want to explore? There's a lot out there left to explore. I'm sort of addicted to going places that haven't been surfed before. That's why I do it. But the compromise is that you have to pay for it. That's the reason why I've worked with Quiksilver to do The Crossing and Rip Curl to do The Search, where those companies partner up with me to fuel my passion to explore. There will be a time in ten or twenty years when there'll be nowhere left to go in the world that hasn't been surfed before. That said, I think this is a great opportunity for everybody to savor the moment and go have a look around before it's all finished.
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