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They call it the shoulder season out here at the Kandui Resort, but what it really is, is the Mentawai’s best kept secret. For most surfer’s skill level, particularly those who have real jobs and families and lives and can afford to squeak out some time and dole out some mad money, an off season crusade is the sensible way to do the Mentawai. Kinder, gentler waves, but with all the thrills you need, and all without the high season crowds and withering heat and boat wars. Come June, Lances right will be hosting sixty surfers in its line-up, most of them really knowing what their doing. Think about that. On the other hand, now, the days pass slowly this time of year out on these islands and with so many of the boats up on annual dry dock, the half empty land camps reign supreme. You will pass your day with sunrise strike into perfection by dinghy or Jetski, back on land for a summercamp lunch, back out to another spot for the afternoon, then back for another summercamp dinner theatre of the video display of the day’s antics. Surf star for a day, everybody gets their fifteen minutes of fame. Then it’s off to dreamland and the all tossing and turning that an equatorial sunburn can muster. Ditto for the next day. And the next. It’s a far more relaxed pace than the Fury Road desperation and madness found in July. 

However, for first timers, there is a harsh reality that comes with riding the dream waves of the Mentawai this time of year. A price to pay that is not financial. It sets in after you have had your first wave and you find yourself back out in the line-up for more. Because at this point, both you and the wave and your new board know exactly who each other are. Before your second wave you have learned some things. Like the fact that, despite the perfection, these waves are dangerous as hell. Find yourself sitting too deep when a set approaches and if you are not paying attention, you’ll find your feet dragging along the live reef as sharp as broken glass. Get greedy and do one too many cutbacks and you can be eaten alive by the reef’s end gurgles and whetted coral stumps. A bad wipeout here onto these scalpels means deep lacerating, trip-ending injuries that have been compared to shotgun wounds. And the fact that every take-off demands absolute commitment over a kaleidoscope reef just waiting to chew you up is plenty daunting for the uninitiated. Yet despite all this, you’ve paid for all this with cold cash and so you wait for that second wave. And when it comes, you paddle hard and the wave lifts you and it begins to draw and bend and taper into the channel. And if you got your shit half together, this is your entire world now. Your new board releases and you floor it. And in what feels like slow motion, you can feel the wave lunging and pitching and enveloping you. So you keep your eyes on the exit and you drive and drive and the wave drives back, grinding around you, giving you everything its got. You match it until you feel something else. You feel it in your scalp, in your quivering legs and deep in your lungs. You feel that you are actually going to make it to the shoulder. And then you do. With speed to burn and a heart rate to match. And you don’t know whether to laugh, scream or cry. So you just eject, rocketing into the lip of the wave, leaping off your board into the sky, suspended for an instant. Feeling like you are going to stay suspended forever until you pierce the surface in an explosion of fizzing, gin clear bubbles.

Also, something very peculiar happens to just about every surfer that comes to this place this time of year. Like Ulysses sirens, the crystal clear waters and the perfectly shaped waves inevitably call surfers out into the line-ups without their surfboards. A pair of swim fins, a worn out dive mask, that’s all it takes. It’s the same pull that makes you want to stand behind a waterfall. A moving picture of moving water moving utterly right before your very eyes. From swim level the waves of the Mentawai * come at you like a running Cheetah, perfect in their economy of movement, sure of their result. The spinning cylinders filling you with elation and desire even though you are not there to ride it. You find yourself teasing its perfection, ducking under the guillotine lip at the last possible moment, avoiding the blade of the lip by millimeters, feeling the drag and pull of each wave, you slip into a miraculous union. Despite the power and the chaos, you are safe here underwater. It’s like standing next to a stampede and watching the bulls thunder by. Only surfers can get to this place and see this and play with it and most importantly, understand it. And what photos and films of surfing from underwater will never capture are the sounds and sensations that come to you when seeing it live. The tug of power, the muffled roar of the impact, the wind chime of reef creatures stirring in the passing turbulence, the hiss of surfboard fins as they streak by, their contrails left on the concave face and the pressure of held air your in your lungs. And then it comes to you. You are swimming on the other side of the mirror, swimming in the very molten blood of our planet. An atavistic connection with the living mass of our origin. Playing with moving cylinders of water so perfect that it’s like being in a glass blowing factory, except that you are inside the glass. Shoulder season in the Mentawai. It’s the type of home that really makes you understand why you left all responsibility behind in the first place.

* Although commonly referred to as the ‘Mentawais’ the correct name for the string of surf-blessed islands off west Sumatra is ‘The Mentawai’.