Matty Cruden has spent more than two decades sailing, surfing and exploring the Ments while captaining the Mangalui and in that time his bravest but most rewarding call was the one which defined the film Galactik Tracks. In 2011 Matty steered a group of seven of the world’s best free surfers away from pumping Greenbush and Macaronis to sail for days on end in search of a mystical right hander. What proceeded was cosmic, chaotic and magical. Rasta, Ozzie, Ando, Dingo, Ry, Morat, and Benny scored 8 to 10 foot Indo freight train tubes for two days with no one in sight.
It was the kind of call that only a seasoned Ments veteran would have the cojones to make. Matty captained one of the first ever charter boats in the area in 1994. He then went on to build the Mangalui which has been running since ’96 and founded the Latitude Zero Resort in the Telo Islands which opened its doors to guests in 2009.
In all the years he’s spent guiding world class surfers to world class waves he still ranks Rasta’s tube riding clinic at the right which defined Galactik Tracks as the best he’s ever seen.
“No one has surpassed that,” he said. “Dingo was a very close second during those sessions and the goofy’s were no slouches either.”
The decision to steer away from pumping surf was ‘brave’ according to Matty, but one that paid off tenfold.
“It was a big decision especially with that crew on board. There’s always a pressure to get those kind of guys into the best waves. But they had been coming on the Mango for close to a decade and had scored Maccas, Greenbush and Thunders so many times. They were up for something different and we thought we may as well have a crack.”
It was a move bordering on madness.
“The guys don’t understand how lucky we got,” Matty laughs now. “We went to an area where the winds tend to blow in one direction quite often at that time of year and so we were lucky that with the low pressure system at the time, it brought some rough weather but it helped keep the surf groomed.”
At that time forecasting technology and the internet was at a fraction of its current complexity. The call was a bit of a stab in the dark, but Matty had seen something there before. Not the wave in its most famous form – just the bones of it.
“I’d done trips to that area before with guests who do bits of surfing and heaps of fishing. There’s a few waves in the area but never had I seen that wave like that before.”
It all happened in a blink, or in a flash of green.
“It was literally a couple of magic days with a lot of grovelling either side of it. It’s a big gamble to sail to that zone because it takes up such a chunk of your trip.” And it hasn’t happened like that since.
“I’m not aware of anyone scoring that wave again even remotely close to the conditions that we had. That’s what has made those sessions withstand the test of time, knowing that wave hasn’t been surfed like that since. There’s waves in that region for sure, but they might only be good a couple of times per year and so the chances of scoring it are slim. If you do score it, it’s likely to be with no one else around.”
The aftermath was almost as wild as the score. Word leaked. A few other local captains pulled him aside, unimpressed.
“It’s funny because when word got around and the movie came out, a load of the other boat captains were super off me because they thought I’d taken them to a couple of the secret spots in the Ments, which at the time only a few captains knew about. But the fact is, it wasn’t event any of them. The fact they couldn’t even guess where it is just shows how fortunate we were.”
The Galactik Tracks Trip remains one of the pinnacles of Matty’s Ments career, one he believes will be hard to replicate.
“There’s so many boats and resorts these days. Add in the developments in technology and the fact everyone is a forecasting genius, it’s become more of a chess game these days. Figuring out how you can find windows and opportunities to get your guests on empty waves.”
But back then, before the satellites and the saturation, before every swell could be read like a stock chart, one captain rolled the dice on a rumour of reef and sailed a boat full of the world’s best surfers to go find it.
No guarantees. No forecasts. No backup plan.
Just instinct, luck, and two perfect days that became Galactik Tracks.
Check out the full film below or click here to cop one of our newly released Galactik Tracks tees which features Ozzie’s original artwork on the back.
