More than a decade on, Galactik Tracks still feels like a trip that was written in the stars. What began as a run-of-the-mill Ments mission — a boat, a crew, and a camera — turned into one of the most iconic surf adventures ever captured. Rasta, Ozzie, Ando, Dingo, Ry, Morat, and Benny weren’t just chasing waves; they were chasing freedom, creativity, and something otherworldly.

As we gear up to re-release the Galactik Tracks film, created by Tom Jennings, we’re looking back at the voyage where a flash of green light in the sky led to one of the last true frontiers of Indo perfection — and the kind of trip that could only happen once. Check out the original mag feature, by Ben Whitmore, below.

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It started out like any other trip to the Mentawais. The brief – get a bunch of amazing surfers on a boat, write a story about the trip and make a movie. It’s the same formula magazines use year-in, year-out in order to fill their pages with Indo goodness and possibly even score a free trip to the Ments.

But for this venture we somehow wrangled some of the best free surfers on the planet to jump on board and that’s where the formula changed a little. Rasta, Ozzie, Ando, Ry, Dingo, Chris “Morat” Del Moro and Ben Godwin have all made free surfing their vocations. All have travelled down very different paths to become professional free surfers and occasionally those paths have crossed here and there. But rarely, if ever, have all their paths intersected at once. However, by some galactic intervention they did for this trip. One commonality they all share is that they’re all free spirits who have turned their backs on competitive surfing – so it was clear the stars had definitely aligned to get them all on the one boat at the one time.

To begin, we converged on a different Padang to what any of us had witnessed in the past. Post-earthquake, most buildings were still standing, just slightly scarred and perhaps a little wobblier. We later climbed aboard the Mangalui and set out on the 12-hour crossing to the Mentawai island chain, stopping briefly to jump over the side for an Indian Ocean rebirthing which, after 30-odd hours of transit, was just what the doctor ordered.

We had heard word that swell was on the way, nothing life-changing but there would defi nitely be something worthy for our eclectic entourage to tear apart, and as you’d expect when you’re travelling with a cast of long-haired professional free surfers, there was plenty of equipment to choose from.

Between them, Rasta and Morat had brought along blow up surf mats, alaias, twinnies, quads, single fi ns, mini mals and even the odd thruster. Whilst the rest of the crew travelled with bulging coffin bags that had been meticulously packed with as many surfboards that could safely fi t between sheets of bubble wrap, Ozzie took a different approach. Two surfboards sat strapped together with the same type of packing tape you’d find wrapped around your mince at the local butcher. A third board arrived solo. All three however travelled naked, vulnerable to the perils of careless baggage handlers. Remarkably, all three still managed to make it to the boat in one piece.

After a quick arvo surf at two-foot HTs to wash off the stench of travel, the goofy footers out-voted their natural-footed counterparts and plans were made for a first surf at Thunders the following day.

These guys have spent plenty of time up in this part of the world, Ry and Rasta in particular had been up here 20-odd times each – they know the landscape well. When the sun rose the next morning and we squinted into the morning light to get our first glimpse at the Thunders lineup, our eyes were immediately drawn to the shoreline, where previously a thick and thriving jungle had stood. Now we were peering into a vast area of almost nothing; all that remained were a few trees that had withstood the force of the 2010 tsunami and rubbish the ocean had picked up along the way. The reef at Thunders had changed slightly too. This morning, the waves were around six foot; below them lay the remnants of the rainforest that had stood on the shoreline. The wave was still perfect but as your scribe discovered after getting his legrope tangled amongst the trees and copping a two-wave hold down, it was also a little dangerous.

With their left foot forward, Dingo, Rasta and Morat managed to direct the ship to a more friendly and super-fun Roxy’s.

With half of the crew wanting to go left and half wanting to go right, it was clearly going to be a never-ending battle to decide on our next stop. Whilst Dingo dominated the Roxy’s lineup, Ry and Ozzie again worked on the Captain for an about-face, and this time our destination would be Macaronis – the left with the most famous backdrop on the planet, and Ry’s favourite wave.

As you grow older, you slowly inch further away from your grommethood and all that goes with it. The days spent at the beach where you lived in your wettie make way for a quick half-hour surf in your lunch break, and your once sun-kissed skin turns an anaemic-looking see-through. On a boat trip in Indo though, all that changes and apart from the smell of the Deep Heat to aid weary and aged muscles, your grommet hood briefly returns and pigment is pumped back into your skin.

From sun-up to sun-down our photographers were beached … beached as. Not a moment passed where all seven surfers exited the lineup and gave them a chance to recharge. Instead they clocked in and clocked out after two-to-three hour sessions of around 100 waves each. At one point Ry barely had the strength to pull himself back into the boat. With one or two other boats lurking, Maccas is considered un-crowded and at three to four foot, was too fun to sit back and watch, so no one did. As we chugged away for a late session back at Roxy’s, Ry pleaded to turn around, “are we really leaving this place?” he chanted over and over. He begrudgingly surfed the three-foot right in hope that we could return for one last day at Maccas and it worked, we bunkered down for the night at Roxy’s and would wake up back at Ry-Land.

That’s where our trip took a slightly galactic turn.

It was 4am and I was up on the deck early to make sure I got in for the first pot of coffee. As he did every night, Chris “Morat” Del Moro swung silently in his zip-up hammock that he’d strung to the boom. It was pitch black and we were en route to a morning anchor at Maccas, but as I took my first sip of a fresh brew, the sky lit up bright green. My eyes quickly adjusted and spotted an object as it flashed in an arc across the sky in the opposite direction to our heading. Then another explosion of lime-green and it was gone.

Captain Matt spotted it from the helm and it was almost as though his 20-odd years of experience out here had taught him that a paranormal event like this was a sign of things to come…

Day two at Maccas was more or less the same as day one. Ando, Ozzie, Benny and Ry took to the sky on almost every wave they paddled into. Ben Godwin earned the nickname “Backwards Benny” after seemingly surfing backwards more than he did forwards with his combination of reverses. At one point he even managed to duck his head under the lip whilst going backwards before spinning around seamlessly into his next turn. Meanwhile Rasta and Morat perfected their switch foot surfing and although they surfed with their wrong foot forward, it put my usual arse wiggling to shame.

In light of the neon green sign in the sky we had witnessed earlier, Captain Matt sat us down for a quick pow-wow. We’d all seen the swell charts back on land and knew we were in for a late spike that would set off all the usual Mentawai suspects, but every one of these surfers had been there and done that. They’re free surfers after all and adventure is the name of their game and Matt had just the adventure in mind. In the wheelhouse, he unveiled a treasure chest full of charts that he’d

been keeping for an occasion such as this one. With the proposition of uncovering new waves, he held the key to the final frontier of surfing in Indonesia.

We had no idea what lay ahead. All we knew was that our destination was a few days sail from the Ments and the only knowledge that waves existed there were reports from years ago when a couple of surfers had taken the gamble and scored somewhere in the vicinity. The unanimous decision amongst the surfers was to raise the sheets and check it out – a gamble that would put this story and a movie up against the likelihood of finding un-surfed perfection … the odds were in favour of the house.

We started chugging along stealth-like under a mask of darkness. No one really wanted to be conscious for non-stop rocking and rolling over swells, but we had a few days of it to lock in for.

The conscious hours however were a blur of creativity. Cabin fever will do that at the best of times, but when you have a boatload of uber creative types, there was bound to be lots happening. As I lapped the Mango for around the 350th time, Rasta sat above the wheelhouse in a downward facing dog. Ozzie twanged along on his uke, providing a mellow melancholic soundtrack to our search for paradise. Morat played along with Ozzie on various instruments he had brought along for the trip. Some weren’t instruments at all but he certainly turned them into one – there was the 20 litre water drum bongo, the empty wine bottle clapping sticks, then there was the makeshift didgeridoo that had been hand crafted from a length of PVC pipe and paint. The rest of the crew opted for a less creative vice. Three seasons of Underbelly hosted the bloodiest of marathons down in the cabin. The lads emerged every so often for a refuel of Timmy the cook’s chef work or just to grab a lungful of fresh oxygen before retiring back to the Underbelly wars downstairs.

Slowly the surfers emerged from their den of violence and blatant nudity, and before each of them had time to adjust their bleary eyes to the sun, Morat had put a pen in each of their hands.

“We’re going to draw a name from a hat and which ever name you pull, you have draw their portrait,” he declared. The result was a combination of accurate and amazing portraiture and fat-bellied stick figures but hey, it killed a few hours.

Matt did us the courtesy of stopping every six hours or so to give us break from the rolling ocean. It gave us a chance get wet, recharge and prepare for the next leg. Between where we’d come from and where we were headed lay scores of shipwrecked vessels. Some were small local fishing boats, others were large commercial ships. Their skeletons lined outer reefs and small islands as a result of the 2010 tsunami. The fate of the crews from those boats was brutally evident. Ry grabbed a snorkel and mask and swam up onto an uninhabited island for a closer look at one of the wrecks. “I opened up one of the hatches to have a look inside and the whole thing is full of massive sea snakes,” he squeaked upon his arrival back to the Mango.

The few days at sea also gave Craikey a chance to pursue another passion – fishing. When Ry unpacked his board bag, he also pulled a rod, reel and tackle box from underneath his boards. The Mango has a choice of about 10 rods and all the gear a fisherman may ever need, but Craikey preferred his own.

He’d spent hours upon hours getting his fishing gear dialled at home in WA and wanted to try his luck outside of the fish-starved Mentawai region.

Apart from a couple of rainbow trout that he pulled from the water, Ry’s luck seemed a little encumbered. As we motored along, suddenly the sound of a whirring reel would break the silence and

Ry would spring into action. He’d fight for 15 minutes to bring his catch into the boat, where Rasta and Morat – the dolphin whisperers – would hover over his shoulder, willing the fish to break off and go free. Time after time, Ry would fight to pull one of these things back to the boat and then just as he was about to land it, they’d break off and go free. Rasta seemed quite pleased with Ry’s frustration and there was even an accusation that Rasta may or may not have tainted the boat’s lures with insect repellent to insure his brethren below the surface had ample warning that those shiny hooks glinting at them weren’t actually a meal.

According to the maps, we were in the vicinity of the island. Matt had sworn us to secrecy so it was aptly named, “The Island of Nowhere”. We made landfall during the night and got our first glimpse as we rose. Excitedly we all rushed from the cabin expecting national geographic-like grass-skirted women and perfect lefts rolling down a reef … no such luck. We found out quite quickly that although we were in the area, finding waves was going to require a more thorough search. A few hundred metres from our anchor we saw some swell cresting onto a shallow reef.

Who knows what it gets like or if you’d even consider it a wave but after two days of not surfing, Dingo was about ready to implode, in fact we all were. Rasta and Morat went for a belly mat, our fi lm crew and I had the obligatory editorial cup on one footers but still managed to get faded by an over excited Dingo.

Now that the punishment of the long sail had eased, the real search began. The merciless trade winds were up, which was not a good sign. To make matters worse, we got word over the satellite that there was a storm brewing and waves back in the Ments. Once surfers of this calibre realise they’re missing quality waves, it’s time to go into damage control. Matty stuck to his mantra that waves were coming, winds were dropping and there were happy days ahead. I fought alongside him on the side of optimism but quietly was shitting myself that we may find nothing, the surfers would sacrifice me to the gods and that if I did make it back home alive, I would have to explain that my two-week endeavour to Indonesia was a fruitless one … but surely unemployment would give me plenty more time to surf, right?

We jumped in the Foxy, the Mango’s younger, smaller and speedier cousin, and ran a reconnaissance mission in and out of the many channels the Island of Nowhere had to offer. The setups were endless but with no real swell, it was hard to tell what they’d do once a swell actually arrived.

Day one of searching was a bust. We’d found a few one-footers that looked like they had potential but with Maccas fi ring hundreds of kilometres away, the novelty of the land of the unknown had worn thin.

“Waves are coming, the wind is dropping, happy days ahead,” Matty kept chanting.

“How long would it take us to get back if we took the Foxy,” Ry questioned…

“Gulp.”

Day two and the wind had dropped slightly. The expected swell was due to hit today, so I figured once the lads caught sight of a wave, we’d be safe. Then the captain of the Foxy, Frank the Tank, steamed off searching for a rideable wave.

He was as nervous as I; the surfers had been watching non-stop Underbelly so if a mutiny were to occur, I was sure it would be a bloody one. But then suddenly Frank’s voice boomed over the two-way radio. “I’m headed back … I’ve found something.” When Frank returned, we made a mass exodus from the Mango and raced ahead with him in the Foxy. Finally, a lump of ocean was hitting a reef and it actually resembled a wave.

In one swift motion, Dean Morrison managed to rid himself of any excess clothing, wax a board and leap over side into the lineup. The only real way to check this wave out was to sit at ground zero and paddle into a couple. The reef was shallow – real shallow and as the swell broke across it, a bowly right-hander would run down its length. At last. It may not have been breathtaking island perfection but not only was our crew of free surfers happy, they were ripping it apart like a local beach break back home. We surfed “Rip-bowl-o-rama” for a few hours. We didn’t know if anyone had ever surfed this place before or if we were the first. The only living creature we saw in the area was a little reef shark swimming through the lineup or the odd sea snake.

There was a little area on the map that looked like small chunks of the island had broken off and formed little islands of their own. The following day, the swell was predicted to really kick and the trade winds were due to lull as a low-pressure system passed overhead. “Tomorrow is the day,” boasted Matt. With that he kicked over the engines and headed for the little island cluster on the map. Surely there would be waves somewhere in amongst them.

In an ever-evolving world of technology, finding new and un-ridden waves is both easy and difficult. It’s easy because there are scores of websites with maps and GPS pins dropped telling you exactly where every secret is located. It’s hard because every other man and his dog are on the same site. This particular day was powered simply by the spirit of adventure, the allure of travel and the willingness to put it all on the line just to go and have a look.

The surfers woke early, skipping past the breakfast bar straight to the top deck to see if the swell had arrived. It had, but with it, so had a rainsquall and plenty of morning sickness. We were sheltered in a bay beyond an outer island out of the way of rolling swell. At the entrance to the channel was a reef that

Matt figured would be able to handle both the swell’s size and direction. As we motored closer to it, we made out a plume of white water as it exploded onto the reef. There was another right, this time at around four or five feet. It looked a little messy but with the wind dropping, it had the pedigree to get good.

Whilst Ando, Ry, Ozzie and Benny took their time to get food in their systems, assess the wave and mosey on into the lineup, Dave, Morat and Dingo waived the option of brekkie and got straight out there. For the next two hours, the seven traded blows on the outside of the reef and occasionally found the barrel. As usual Dingo was the last man standing, the other six heading in to refuel the tank and wait it out for an afternoon session. Then Dingo pulled into what looked like a fairly standard four footer. It grew as he flew down the line and tucked into the barrel. Soon he was stood bolt upright inside it.

It kept going and going and down through an inside section that we’d been ignoring all morning. “As I came through that next section, I couldn’t believe how perfect it was. It was twice the size and one of the most perfect barrels

I’ve ever had,” Dean enthused. “When I kicked off it I just started screaming out to the boys to get back out there.” Dean later described that day as “a day spent in heaven.”

Captain Matt pulled the boats back down to the inside. There was a distinct take off zone and it was twice as big. “Easily eight foot, with the odd rouge 12 footer,” the guys concurred later. The rain had cleared and the waves started to resemble oil paintings. Rasta and Dingo went wave for wave on the sets whilst the goofies timidly tested the boundaries on their backhand. Benny Godwin doesn’t get to ride too many barrels like this on his backhand at home and learnt how to do so pretty quickly. He was the first of the wrong-footers to emerge from one of these beasts despite falling three times. Each time he’d just hold on and pull up into the next section and set a new line until he was blown into the channel to our screams and cheers.

“Rasta is probably the best tube rider I have ever seen,” said Matty as we shared a coffee and watched the show. Where everyone else was taking off and racing with their heart in their chest to make the barrel, Dave was fading from take off and pulling his massive frame up under the curtain at the last second. We’d lose sight of him on the foam ball and then as with a blast of spit, he’d pop out with a Cheshire grin plastered across his face time and time again.

Dean paddled out at 7am. Somewhere around lunchtime, we arranged a plate of nasi goreng to be paddled out to him. He threw it down his gullet, washed it down with two cans of lemonade and a litre of water and got back to business. He didn’t return to the boat all day and he caught his last wave at around 7pm. None of us saw it as it was pitch black, but he assured us it was a smoker.

Later that night we established that this was almost certainly the first time anyone had surfed this wave. Matt had driven past it once on a little charter mission and had spotted a small, crumbly right, but the planets really had to align for it to fire. The rare low-pressure system that was overhead had cleared the menacing trade winds right as a swell arrived with a perfect direction. The rainsquall the night before had tenderised the ocean’s surface until it was oil-smooth … our timing had been perfect. Out of respect to our newfound heaven, we decided not to name it; instead we would simply refer to it as “That Right”.

The next morning was similar to the first. It was raining and a little sick. The swell however had kicked somewhat and the wind was a little stronger but straight offshore. Dean and Rasta were straight overboard and the rest of us watched in awe. Two waves in, Dingo’s board disappeared in a  sea of white. “Can I borrow your board?” He asked the Captain. Matt gingerly agreed but it was clear he was worried that his sled would meet its demise under Dingo’s feet.

What followed was a repeat of the first day in heaven – 12 hours of solid surfing in solid waves that no one had ever witnessed before.

Rasta claimed that “That Right” was one of the best waves he had ever surfed. Dingo claimed it as the best wave he’d ever surfed in Indo. Morat described it as the best wave he’d ever had on any surf trip. The consensus was in – and we had found a gem of galactic proportions.

And on day three, the swell was gone. The clouds had parted, the sun was out and the ocean was calm. What a way to end two perfect days in paradise. We scoured the area for more prospects. We found at least three and surfed two of them at a playful three feet just to say we did.

For an entire week we sailed around the area and saw only three other human beings. Local fisherman putted out on their long boats, which struggled to hold their weight. The boys and their surfboards were of no interest to them. Little do they know that a surfing nirvana and one of the last best-kept secrets in surfing lays directly on their doorstep. The stars had aligned for us to find it – and that lime-green explosion in the sky was undoubtedly a signal of what lay ahead.