My head says yes. Half a carton of Island Brewing tins still bouncing around in there, throat raspy from two days of screaming and three packs of Sampoerna reds.
Hell the fuck yes.
Hundreds of surfers descended on Uluwatu from Friday: Indo legends, up-and-comers, tube-hounds, frothers, underground rippers, community icons — even a plumber from Sydney who ended up cleaning house. Every one of them riding pre-1985 single-fins, a throwback to the earliest days of Uluwatu.
The opening ceremony felt like a step back to that era. A Pemangku priest blessed the cave, competitors sat cross-legged as bells rang, incense burned, holy water splashed, and foreheads were marked with rice. Sitting there in the cave, energy being waved from the rock walls towards the surfers, you almost forgot the bumbling tourists outside.
Like all worship, it was about honouring the natural forces and the spirits before us. A pious surf comp, in its own way.
The gods, though, didn’t bless day one. It was the worst surf of the season — ankle-slappers down the Racetrack. But the real comp was up on the cliff: hustling for the best boards. Sure, there was an official rack by the massage balai, but anyone clued-up had their weapons stashed in warung racks up the hill.
And instead of all the action orbiting Tai “Buddha” Graham’s Single Fin bar, the stoke spilled along the whole clifftop. Salins, Ropiks, Sunset Beach warung — everyone shared in the spoils of a pumping weekend.
There were highlights even in the tiny surf: Rip Curl’s Harry Mann belting four turns on a borrowed sled against his boss, James Hendy. Buddha and Jed Smith cracked jokes in the booth — Harry should resign, Jimmy should promote him.
But really, nobody lost. Surfing Racetracks with a handful of guys instead of fighting 200 frothing learners? That’s a prize in itself. The bigger reward: making it to Sunday, when the ocean turned on with four-to-five footers, tradewinds and bluebird skies.
Single-fins are a humbler. They strip your surfing bare, force you into clean lines.
There was one particular board that changed my life — a canary yellow relic my mate Benno gave me for my 22nd, with a scrawled message in texta on the bottom:
“Happy birthday bruz, live the fucking dream.”
Thing was a friggen tank. 6’8, patched dings everywhere. Benno had found it on a nine-month odyssey around Australia, camping at Cactus. Two of his shortboards were busted so he swapped them with Paul Gravelle in Penong for a pair of 70s single-fins. He kept the better one — a 6’4 winged Burford pintail — and gave me the yellow beast so I’d stop stealing his boards.
I rode it mostly in the fast, unpredictable beachbreaks down the road. Going from a high-performance shorty to this thing was like swapping a Ferrari for a front-end loader. At first it was just novelty, but the board caught attention. Turns out it was a Tom Hoye. I took it to him and he pulled its history from a battered notebook: shaped in 1978 as a stock board for Cordingleys in Scarborough. State-of-the-art in its day.
Every one of these old sleds is a relic — a living thing that can change your whole approach to surfing.
And at Uluwatu, relics ruled again. Gaby Escudero nailed the first ten of Sunday with a double tube. Bruno Santos almost matched it with a 9.93. By then the tins were flying around the judges’ tower, Smivvy and Buddha were torching the booth with one-liners — calling an interference an “Indonesian Independence Day sacrifice” and demanding the poor bloke be made into bule guling.
Then, the OGs. Peter McCabe, five-foot-six of Aussie bogan royalty, gold tooth flashing with his Kmart prison-issue Dunlop KT26s on, dropped into the tower. The man who named the Racetrack, first to surf Padang. He got a guard of honour on the way out while Smivvy howled: “The bogans are ransacking the cliff!”
Fitting, then, that an underground Aussie took the title. Sydney plumber Joey Keogh — two weeks annual leave, flew over, flushed the field like a brand new dunny.
The rest blurs in a cocktail haze: Joe DeSantis chaired up the beach by his boys after winning the Masters. Max DeSantis backing it up with the Tracks Goodvibes award. Underground Sunny Coast charger Sienna Hanna taking the women’s. Grom Finn Murphy owning the juniors.
And then? Just a euphoric wash of tins, smokes, stoke, screams, backslaps, and cocktails — the only hangover being the kind you want to relive again and again.
