The thought occurred to me last month in Bali while pathetically trying to do battle with Putin’s alt.army.

As ubiquitous local surf instructors from Canggu to Kuta Reef and Balian to Bingin employed the double wedge technique, propelling every Nikita and Svetlana down the face like human torpedoes in order to keep stupid old bastards like this writer off every set wave. As this shitstorm of frustration came crashing down around me, the thought came seeping out of me like pus from an infected reef cut, that we have come full cycle.

That the global staph of the soul from which surfing will hopefully recover actually had its beginnings – or at least its gestation – here on the Island of the Gods in the immediate wake of the Morning of the Earth tsunami. And like most things in surfing, the tragic ending had its roots in only good intent. While I don’t intend to join in the current commentariat pile-on over the lamentable state of ‘Big Surf’ and what has caused its near-demise, I think it might be interesting and perhaps even educative to view surfing’s overtaxed present and dubious future through the misty lens of the Bali experience, how surf colonisation created Big Bali and now we’re suffering the consequences. Bear in mind that I’m still in Bali as I write so this could be the Bintang talking, or maybe the dodgy arak, but here goes.

While Bali certainly didn’t kick-start the surf industry (in fact it was quite a late adopter) and can’t lay claim to the origins of surf travel either, this tiny, overcrowded island has in many ways been an incubator for both, not to mention being the canary in the coal mine for them on the way down. Because surf had to find Bali ...