Road to Santosha

The Kevin and Craig Show

Hippie Trail Gold

At Play in the Fields of Allah

Career Move

Grand Prix Dream

Follow the Money

Big in Japan

Rabbit's Big Adventure

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

South Africa in Black and White

Mark Richards, Gentleman Killer

Two Fins, More Wins

The Divine Miss M

The Fortune Seekers

Exotic travel and a professional surfing competition circuit—these topics never went out of style during the 1970s. Eventually the two would be reconciled, but for most of the decade they pulled the sport in opposing directions. Travel was the great unifier. All surfers loved to dream about it, plan it, do it, and tell the stories afterward. Pro surfing was divisive: you were for it or against it. Travel and competition had a geographic difference as well. Contests were focused on the surfing hubs: Sydney, Durban, the North Shore, the Gold Coast, Southern California. Travel, of course, was all about getting as far away from the hubs as possible.

The strain was mostly just continued fallout from the shortboard revolution. Everybody was still calibrating their definition of exactly what it was they were doing out there in the ocean; for a decade after the shortboard was introduced, there was a nonstop angles-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate as to whether surfing was a sport or an art. Also, there remained among most surfers a powerful tendency to divide everybody else—other surfers included; other surfers 

—into Us or Them categories. Local or nonlocal. Soulful or sell-out. Travel surfer or contest surfer. In the years to come, surfers would often be described as “tribal” by anyone looking to present them as being graced with a kind of special connection to each other and their surroundings. But that hasn’t been the case for a long, long time—if ever. At best, for the past sixty or seventy years, the sport has been an uneasy conglomerate of many tribes.

Professional surfing was, by definition, elitist. It directly affected a microscopically tiny number of waveriders. But the new '70s-born emphasis on prize money, sponsorship deals, rating points, winners and losers—these things affected and shaped how the sport viewed itself. That’s why the debate was so hot. Travel was surfing at its most democratic. Not everyone had the time, money, or ambition to go island-hopping in the South Pacific or to set up camp on a jungle-lined beach in Java. But it wasn’t hard to bring some version of the travel fantasy to life. Any resolute wave-hunter could load a duffel bag and a few water jugs into a car and spend a semi-feral week or two in a remote corner of Baja, or Western Australia, or the Natal Coast.

Exotic surf travel was a 1960s invention. Up to then, the only full-dress surf excursion was the odd steamer trip across the Pacific to Hawaii. And even that was a voyage to the great known, not the great unknown. In 1963, Australian Peter Troy set out on his first and longest transnational adventure, which he soon after described in a 

 article entitled, “Around the World on a Surfboard.” The 125,000-mile journey was filled with great waves and new friendships—and a few jaunty indiscretions, such as when Troy was jailed briefly in Brazil on a gold-smuggling charge or offered work as a Monte Carlo gigolo. 1963 was also the year Bruce Brown jetted off to film 

. Brown’s movie burned so brightly as the model of first-generation surf travel that other adventures—including a dozen or so well-reported trips that had preceded it—were by and large struck from the record.

Not until the shortboard revolution, however, did exotic surf become the sport’s holy grail. Part of it was the equipment. A new 7-foot, 10-pound spacestick was so much easier to travel with than a signature model noserider. Mostly, though, it was the tenor of the times. Just about every buzz-phrase of the period—“do your own thing,” “soul surfing,” “back to nature”—was an invitation to pack up and go, to feed your head with new places and experiences, 

 score some hot, uncrowded waves. Drugs played a part. In the late '60s and throughout the '70s, probably half of all hardcore surf travelers were moonlighting as dope smugglers, or vice-versa. Many of those who weren’t trafficking were at least encouraged by the thought of visiting places where the highs were cheap and often legal.

, anyone with a few extra minutes and an atlas could figure out that a huge majority of the world’s breaks still waited to be discovered. Surf magazines and movies provided a slow drip of faraway places: Aussie teenage phenom Wayne Lynch wearing a red fez and 

 robe, about to score some nice reef waves in Morocco; the Windansea Surf Club in the clear blue waters of Fiji; hot East Coast junior Claude Codgen flying from Miami to Ceylon to Madras and riding a break called Seventh Pagoda.

One of the most exotic finds—and certainly the most trumpeted, as it showed up in 1974 as both a 

 cover feature and a full-length movie—was the mysterious “forgotten island of Santosha,” home to what looked like the world’s longest, fastest left-breaking wave. Very mysterious indeed. Santosha was obviously tropical, and at least part Hindu, but it was impossible to locate on a map—because “Santosha” was a fictitious name. Deception wasn’t a new thing for surf travelers. Bruce Brown had filmed the dramatic Lawrence-of-Arabia-march-across-the-dunes “discovery” of Cape St. Francis the day 

 his crew had actually ridden there. But “Santosha” was a more deliberate feint. Rather than a plot device, it conformed to the belief that a surf break discovery should remain both unnamed and unmapped. Getting away from the crowd was the main reason people traveled for waves. Identifying a new break to the surfing public at large—as writers and moviemakers had done automatically until the late '60s—became the grossest possible violation of the surf traveler’s code.

 keep a break under wraps, the images and stories wouldn’t be made public at all, even with the name and location blacked out. But 

 producers, and a lot of other camera-carrying surf travelers, wanted it both ways. Let's not tell anyone where we went, and here's the 

 In this particular case, it worked . . . for awhile. Fifteen years passed before “Santosha” was publicly outed as Mauritius.

, anyone with a few extra minutes and an atlas could figure out that a huge majority of the world's breaks still waited to be discovered. Not until the shortboard revolution, however, did exotic surf become the sport's holy grail.

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

Road to Santosha

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos