Cord Crew Score The Swell of The Season Across Indo
International freight logistics can be a bitch. But, they can also be a blessing.
Back in February, head shaper Markie ordered a container-load of fresh foam from the guys at Arctic in California. He was also kicking around the idea of an Indo trip in early summer with old friend James Hendy, a St Agnes transplant now living and working in Bali. It seemed that one was going to cancel out the other, and not in a good way for Markie’s wave count. International container shipping is a hell of customs forms and logistics to begin with, but then you can add in all manner of opportunities to delay a container. Hell, sometimes they even lose the odd one overboard in a storm. As the end of May rolled around the factory was starting to run dry on foam, and Markie got the message that the container from Arctic had been delayed somewhere en-route. With few blanks to shape and a couple of week window suddenly open before him, he looked at the charts and there it was; a massive purple blob headed for the Mentawaiis. And so was he.
“I spoke to James and it all started to line up… Then I spoke to Connor [Maguire] and then to Liam Turner who is the manager of the HTs Resort, and suddenly we had a trip. I must have checked Surfline every 20 seconds whilst I was booking my flight!”
Whilst our container of foam had hit hurdles on its journey, luckily Markie and his two coffin bags stuffed with ten surfboards somehow had the opposite experience, and had as easy a trip to the Mentawais as you could hope for. Cornwall to London, then flights to Jakarta via Doha, Jakarta to Padang and a night there before a day ferry out to the Mentawais and a speedboat to Hollow Trees Resort, where they were greeted by resort manager, Cornish expat Liam Turner.
“I could see the first swell, which we missed, and then another swell behind it, and I though that if there are two swells in a row and I get the one behind it then that’s pretty bloody lucky. By the time we were on the way I could see another swell and by the time we arrived there was another, so there were four swells in a row to begin with and we had three of them whilst we were all there - me, Connor, James, his brother Greg who joined us from Sydney. Then James and Greg had to leave, and me and Connor actually got another swell which was when we surfed Greenbush with Nathan Florence on the last day.”
Not bad for a ten day trip.
Markie got to tick “business trip” on his immigration forms, as the surfboards in his coffin bags were a mixture of new models and concepts about to be put through their paces at the ultimate test track, and orders that were being delivered to some of the team at HTs. They’ve had a quiver of Cord surfboards in the resort’s demo fleet for the last year, and have been so well received that the staff there got an order in that Markie couldn’t resist delivering in-person.
A swell chain being hyped as “the best of the year so far” in Indonesia means solid southern ocean power colliding with coral reefs. It’s an unforgiving test track and they all had to hit the ground running, with the “smaller” first couple of days being relative.
“I snapped two of my boards and trashed another one on day one and two,” said Markie. He had a couple of new variations of our ever-popular Ark model that he’s been testing for most of this year; it’s got the same channel bottom and twin fin configuration but with a baby swallow tail and a few subtle tweaks. “I bust the fin out of one on the second wave on the first big day, then rode a smaller 6’1” version of it and I got one of the waves of my life on that and I was so stoked that I straightened out to come in and all the reef just dried out in front of me and I lost both my fins on the reef. We’re going to call it the Slippery Otter because everyone said I looked like an Otter slipping around in the lineup with my impact suit on.”
Hollow Trees, or Lance’s Rights as it’s also known, is a perfectly imperfect wave, and at that sort of size most of the surfers out there were wearing impact vests and suits. Connor’s no stranger to massive slabs, albeit in colder water, and was absolutely charging, as was James who’s well acclimatised to solid Indo surf by now, but HTs doesn’t serve up cookie cutter perfection wave after wave. “There’s basically three reefs,” Markie explains, “The swell kind of comes past you heading south (?) and tickles on an outside reef that focuses the energy back in, and then it doubles up. But sometimes the double up is just like a six-foot keg and no roll in, into another six-foot keg. It’s quite random and some stretch out, and some suck back in, but it’s just mental.”
The good ones are worth the gamble though, and you couldn’t ask for a better proving ground for Markie’s designs. However, at that sort of size and degree of consequence, the rewards are balanced out by the risk to board and body.
“As a surfboard designer and shaper I’ve obviously got a good idea of how to make a surfboard work in certain waves, and at the end of the day with shapes designed for waves of consequence you have to test them at some point. I did also make a 6’2” step-deck diamond tail bonzer concave thruster out of a biofoam blank, basically like nothing I’ve made or surfed before, and I paddled it out for its first surf in 8 foot HTs. It’s moments like that when you just have to trust in your experience and ability as a shaper and surfer!” That board went well, but Markie still managed to snap it on its first surf. Eight foot HTs takes no prisoners, and collateral damage is part of the programme there.
Connor had his 6’6” model, and a 6’3” version, with him - we’re going to release that this winter. He also had a 5’8” channel bottom that he’s been riding a fair bit. He was mostly just on his 6’6” step-up though, such was the nature of the waves. None of those boards made it back to Ireland with him though, although they all survived the swells – his surfing created so much interest amongst the rest of the surfers there that a few of them bought his boards out from under his feet on departure day!
At the same time as Markie, Connor, James and Greg were taming monsters at HTs, a little further south over towards the bottom end of mainland Sumatra, Cord team rider Lucy Campbell and her partner Alex Libby scored waves through the same run of swell, before rounding it out on their way back to Europe with a session at Padang Padang back on Bali.
“As the first swell hit we took a punt and headed a couple or hours up the coast, and got some super fun, and sketchy, reefs. There’s such a huge variety of set-ups in that zone that we probably could have stayed put, but our gamble paid off and we scored waves that only work on special swells like these.”
As they transited back through Bali the next swell hit. “I normally leave my boards in my boardbag in Bali” Al said, “It’s become a place to get some good food on the way to scoring perfect remote waves. The main spots there are just really busy and intense, but I’d always wanted to score Padang Padang and so we paddled out. It’s full on just trying to get a wave there and shouting guys off, and if you show one sign of weakness then you get burned. So just getting one is a challenge before you then have to think about the drop and the barrel.”
It’d be fair to say that the rest of us back in Cornwall were good and envious of everyone scoring in Indo. It’s been a long time since these sorts of trips went undocumented or you had to wait until mates got back to hear about the waves that they got. We basically had a live feed of barrels via Connor’s sponsor Red Bull, so nobody needed to ask Markie whether he’d had a good trip or not. And we didn’t have time to, because his arrival home coincided almost perfectly with the massive ship carrying our container of blanks docking in the UK. He had to hit the ground running for the second time in two weeks, only this time he was hauling foam blanks rather than riding foam balls.
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