On my second morning in the Maldives, a dhoni drops me at Jailbreaks,
a barreling right-hand reef break named for a former prison on the
nearby island of Himmafushi. The wave was off-limits until the late
1990s, when the facility was downgraded to a kind of rehab center for
Maldivians caught drinking alcohol -- forbidden in this Indian Ocean
archipelago, where Sunni Islam is the official state religion. At the
airport in the capital city of Male, I was greeted by a List of
Prohibited and Restricted Items Under Maldivian Law that could have
doubled as a packing list for the surf trips of my youth: alcohol;
narcotics, illicit drugs and psychotropic substances; pork and products
of pork; spear guns; dogs. Religious restrictions aside, this is not
that kind of trip. I’m here with outfitter Tropicsurf
chasing perfect, unpeopled waves, leaving little time for the
dragon-fruit cocktails back at the Four Seasons Kuda Huraa, where
alcohol is definitely allowed.
The swell is picking up at Jailbreaks, and Tropicsurf founder Ross Phillips is dishing out advice with a quiet authority undiminished by the Aussie tick of turning declarations into rhetorical questions.
“Bit heavy on the front foot, weren’t you?” he asks, as I paddle back out after a wave.
Hypnotized by the coral just below the surface of the water, I’d forgotten to unweight my front foot and look down the line as I popped up. Phillips, 46, reiterates a piece of wisdom I first learned riding motorcycles that is also a useful maxim for living: Look where you want to go.
“I had zinc cream all over my face, my hair was crusty, and I showed up at the jetty dripping wet,” Phillips recalls. He asked to see a room, half-expecting to be escorted off the property. Instead, the concierge offered him a cold drink and a tour in a chauffeured buggy. Bowled over by the nonjudgmental hospitality, Phillips returned six months later -- dry and dressed -- for a meeting with the general manager. He proposed a full-time, on-property surf guide to help guests navigate the world-class breaks surrounding the resort. The GM laughed. He said surfers didn’t have that kind of money.
“The market for luxury surf travel was nonexistent,” Phillips admits. “People wouldn’t pay $15 for a lesson back then.”
“It kind of put us on the map,” says Randy Shimabuku, the current GM.
Tropicsurf’s map includes South Africa’s Garden Route, India’s Andaman Islands, Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands, off the coast of Sumatra -- and anywhere else in the world with waves.
“Tropicsurf helps you stay on vacation,” says Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, co-star of the 1994 surfing documentary The Endless Summer II, who averages two trips a year with Tropicsurf. “They solve all the problems, and they’ll go forward, backward and sideways to make sure you’re in the best surf all the time.”
Slim, soft-spoken and seriously sun creased after a lifetime spent braising in tropical seas, Phillips lives with his wife, Diane, in the small Queensland, Australia, town of Sunshine Beach -- at least in theory. Between trips with select clients, chasing new business and checking in on existing Tropicsurf outposts, he spent 12 weeks at home in 2013. I sensed a shift in him as the boat pulled away from the jetty. His expression, generally open and inquisitive, intensified as his eyes receded under a practiced squint that seemed to deepen the lines on his face. I got the impression that water is terra firma for him.
Our first stop was Sultans, a famous right-hand reef break, but there was a current -- and a crowd -- so we headed to Ninjas, named for its popularity with Japanese surfers, where Phillips reckoned we’d find decent waves and considerably less company.
Forecasting and crowd psychology are important aspects of good guiding. A sixth sense is helpful, too. In 2004, Gabriel McGhee, a Tropicsurf guide at Kuda Huraa, was at a break called Honkeys, a short ride from the resort. He was in the water with an 8-year-old boy out for his first surf when something in the ocean began to shift. A current came out of nowhere, followed by inexplicable upwellings, as if something were boiling just below the surface. McGhee ordered everyone back to the boat. They were barely on board when the Boxing Day tsunami swept over the Maldives; within seconds, the island in front of them, Thanburudhoo, disappeared underwater. Seventy percent of Kuda Huraa was destroyed that day, although thanks to similar widespread quick thinking, no one was killed.
“So, this is your job, huh?” he asked.
Phillips has a background in outdoor education and has spent the past 30 years mapping out a surfer’s skill progression on a scale of 1 to 10 -- aka kook (as in total novice) to Kelly (as in Slater, a record 11-time Association of Surfing Professionals world champion). Every Tropicsurf guide is trained using a document called “The Hottest 100 Progression,” in which each of the 10 levels is broken down into 10 component parts, which in turn are broken down into hyperspecific skills, for a total of 1,000 metrics. A guide can quickly identify what’s holding you back from the next level and then -- quietly, kindly -- hammer you until you, for example, surf the top third of a wave to generate speed, which Phillips had been on my case about all day.
“I heard about it from some South African surfing fanatics,” Barnard says. “They told me, ‘If there’s one trip in the world you have to do, it’s this one.’”
Barnard, a novice, stood up on a wave after a two-hour lesson on day one.
“That was my goal for the entire week,” he says.
But what impressed him most about the coaching was its range. Barnard’s party of 10 included both beginners and serious, seasoned watermen.
“One of the experienced surfers was skeptical about the teaching aspect,” he says, “but it was incredible. He was very positively surprised.”
“We’ve found an inverse relationship between money and surfing ability,” Phillips says. “Good surfers usually haven’t spent their whole lives in an office.”
Inside, the 15-seat cabin is packed with board bags and boxed club sandwiches from the resort. The takeoff is teeth rattling, but the engine noise seems to fade as we gain altitude. Our bird’s-eye view is of the ancient volcanic cones that form this archipelago, their coral-encrusted rims creating shallow turquoise pools. We’re flying to Sharks, a break Phillips discovered from a seaplane like this one. In 2004, he was returning from the Kolhumadulu Atoll when he looked down and saw a perfect wave wrapping around the tip of a sparsely populated island.
“We chartered a plane the next day and flew straight back,” he says. “The wave broke for 800 meters. The locals on the island had never seen anyone surf it before.”
Someone in the Tropicsurf crew thought he saw a shark (“I reckon it was just a ray,” Phillips says) that gave the wave its name.
It’s the penultimate leg of a journey that so far has included an 18-mile (29-kilometer) car ride to John F. Kennedy International Airport; a 6,831-mile flight to Dubai; a 1,888-mile flight to Male; a 10-mile speedboat ride to the Four Seasons; and a 125-mile seaplane trip to this paddle out. And then -- finally -- 200 screaming yards on a wave that seems like it will never stop lining up under my board, one ride that justifies all the layovers and delays and jet lag that have come before it. We spend three hours picking off wave after empty wave, while Phillips coaches quietly from the sidelines like some sunbaked, oceanic Yoda.
“Missed the wave of your life,” Phillips says when I finally make it back to the lineup after wiping out and getting ragdolled across the reef.
The worst part is not the saltwater filling my sinuses but the keen understanding of exactly how I blew it: underpaddling, which Phillips has been warning me about all week. I needed more speed and penetration through the water peeling off the reef; I needed a faster turn and a higher line to make it through the scorching first section. I remember looking up in time to see a 3-meter turquoise wall turn white and then -- curtains: bubbles, coral, empty lungs.
“Are you seeing the pattern?” Phillips asks.
We had planned to surf one session in the morning and another in the afternoon but somehow found ourselves alone at Sultans in double-overhead waves, conditions Phillips describes as “once, maybe twice in a lifetime.” We’ve been in the water more than five hours when I miss the big one. I make my next three waves, smaller confidence builders that are still well overhead in size, probably better than anything I’ll see for the rest of the year and by far the best waves I’ve seen without a crowd.
Surfing’s explosive popularity shows no signs of slowing down. And when you’re part of an ever-increasing pool competing for a finite resource, you need to be on your game. I’m seeing the pattern now. Later tonight, we’ll begin our 8,872-mile journey back to New York and its mostly terrible waves. But for now, it’s just three of us and Phillips, bobbing off a small palm-covered islet, waiting for something big to come along.
To contact the reporter on this story: Stan Parish in New York at sparish10@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ted Moncreiff at tmoncreiff@bloomberg.net Joel Weber, Daniel Ferrara
The swell is picking up at Jailbreaks, and Tropicsurf founder Ross Phillips is dishing out advice with a quiet authority undiminished by the Aussie tick of turning declarations into rhetorical questions.
“Bit heavy on the front foot, weren’t you?” he asks, as I paddle back out after a wave.
Hypnotized by the coral just below the surface of the water, I’d forgotten to unweight my front foot and look down the line as I popped up. Phillips, 46, reiterates a piece of wisdom I first learned riding motorcycles that is also a useful maxim for living: Look where you want to go.
Smaller Crowds
Tropicsurf was born in this island nation of 345,000 citizens (with an annual tourist influx of roughly twice that number). In 1999, Phillips was running a surf school in his hometown of Noosa Heads, Australia, and occasionally taking clients to Fiji and the Maldives in search of smaller crowds and longer rides. His groups were happy with the coaching but less satisfied with the accommodations. So when he heard the resort on the island of Kuda Huraa had been rebranded a Four Seasons, he decided to stop by after a surf.“I had zinc cream all over my face, my hair was crusty, and I showed up at the jetty dripping wet,” Phillips recalls. He asked to see a room, half-expecting to be escorted off the property. Instead, the concierge offered him a cold drink and a tour in a chauffeured buggy. Bowled over by the nonjudgmental hospitality, Phillips returned six months later -- dry and dressed -- for a meeting with the general manager. He proposed a full-time, on-property surf guide to help guests navigate the world-class breaks surrounding the resort. The GM laughed. He said surfers didn’t have that kind of money.
“The market for luxury surf travel was nonexistent,” Phillips admits. “People wouldn’t pay $15 for a lesson back then.”
Surf Safari
Today, clients pay $150 to $495 (depending on experience level, location and equipment needs) for a three-hour session with a Tropicsurf guide at 14 resorts around the world, including five managed by Four Seasons. They pay $10,000 for a seaplane-enabled surf safari that departs from Kuda Huraa and skips from break to break. They pay $130,000 for a week aboard the Four Seasons Explorer, a 40-meter (130-foot) luxury catamaran that sleeps 22 and cruises the archipelago in search of once-in-a-lifetime waves. Tropicsurf has become the defining feature of the resort where it began.“It kind of put us on the map,” says Randy Shimabuku, the current GM.
Tropicsurf’s map includes South Africa’s Garden Route, India’s Andaman Islands, Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands, off the coast of Sumatra -- and anywhere else in the world with waves.
Secret Spot
When I ask Phillips which itinerary excites him most, his answer comes instantly: a boat trip to a secret surf spot in West Papua, New Guinea, which he discovered while flipping through a scuba book and spotting, in the background of a photo, a perfect, peeling wave. He’s desperately formulating a plan to make the area an ecopreserve. On every Tropicsurf trip, from Bali to Nicaragua, experienced guides handle logistics, equipment and the do-or-die calculus that determines where and when to paddle out.“Tropicsurf helps you stay on vacation,” says Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, co-star of the 1994 surfing documentary The Endless Summer II, who averages two trips a year with Tropicsurf. “They solve all the problems, and they’ll go forward, backward and sideways to make sure you’re in the best surf all the time.”
On the Road
The morning before my visit to Jailbreaks, we boarded a dhoni with freshly waxed boards from the resort’s overflowing racks. The sun felt about a thousand yards away, but there was fresh water on board and plenty of sunscreen and heavy-duty zinc, which Phillips applied to every inch of his face.Slim, soft-spoken and seriously sun creased after a lifetime spent braising in tropical seas, Phillips lives with his wife, Diane, in the small Queensland, Australia, town of Sunshine Beach -- at least in theory. Between trips with select clients, chasing new business and checking in on existing Tropicsurf outposts, he spent 12 weeks at home in 2013. I sensed a shift in him as the boat pulled away from the jetty. His expression, generally open and inquisitive, intensified as his eyes receded under a practiced squint that seemed to deepen the lines on his face. I got the impression that water is terra firma for him.
Our first stop was Sultans, a famous right-hand reef break, but there was a current -- and a crowd -- so we headed to Ninjas, named for its popularity with Japanese surfers, where Phillips reckoned we’d find decent waves and considerably less company.
Amateur Oceanography
Earlier, I’d listened to Phillips and resident Kuda Huraa guide Matt Lindsay pick the optimal window for a surf outing. The conversation combined amateur oceanography -- tide charts, wind reports, weather and swell forecasts -- with intimate knowledge of each local break and an educated guess as to where the masses will be. I swore I’d never wake up and drive straight to the beach again.Forecasting and crowd psychology are important aspects of good guiding. A sixth sense is helpful, too. In 2004, Gabriel McGhee, a Tropicsurf guide at Kuda Huraa, was at a break called Honkeys, a short ride from the resort. He was in the water with an 8-year-old boy out for his first surf when something in the ocean began to shift. A current came out of nowhere, followed by inexplicable upwellings, as if something were boiling just below the surface. McGhee ordered everyone back to the boat. They were barely on board when the Boxing Day tsunami swept over the Maldives; within seconds, the island in front of them, Thanburudhoo, disappeared underwater. Seventy percent of Kuda Huraa was destroyed that day, although thanks to similar widespread quick thinking, no one was killed.
Hyperspecific Skills
We arrived at Ninjas in time for a set of shoulder-high waves that broke cleanly for more than a hundred yards with nobody else in sight. I’d flown to the Maldives with my regular surf-trip crew: a close childhood friend and my cousin Chris, who taught me to surf 10 years ago. After his third or fourth wave, Chris paddled back out and pulled up next to Phillips.“So, this is your job, huh?” he asked.
Phillips has a background in outdoor education and has spent the past 30 years mapping out a surfer’s skill progression on a scale of 1 to 10 -- aka kook (as in total novice) to Kelly (as in Slater, a record 11-time Association of Surfing Professionals world champion). Every Tropicsurf guide is trained using a document called “The Hottest 100 Progression,” in which each of the 10 levels is broken down into 10 component parts, which in turn are broken down into hyperspecific skills, for a total of 1,000 metrics. A guide can quickly identify what’s holding you back from the next level and then -- quietly, kindly -- hammer you until you, for example, surf the top third of a wave to generate speed, which Phillips had been on my case about all day.
Surfing Fanatics
In June, Frederick Barnard, a partner at Johannesburg-based Avance Asset Management, booked a week on the Four Seasons Explorer as a 40th-birthday gift to his brother.“I heard about it from some South African surfing fanatics,” Barnard says. “They told me, ‘If there’s one trip in the world you have to do, it’s this one.’”
Barnard, a novice, stood up on a wave after a two-hour lesson on day one.
“That was my goal for the entire week,” he says.
But what impressed him most about the coaching was its range. Barnard’s party of 10 included both beginners and serious, seasoned watermen.
“One of the experienced surfers was skeptical about the teaching aspect,” he says, “but it was incredible. He was very positively surprised.”
Power, Finesse
Before coming to the Maldives, I had completely misunderstood the value of a Tropicsurf holiday. It’s easy to do: Instruction doesn’t photograph as well as the yachts, infinity pools and legendary breaks that dominate the company’s website. However, once you paddle out in peeling head-high waves with no one else around, you realize you could be surfing with more power, more finesse. Technique is the one thing you take home besides a tan, and the reason for Tropicsurf’s laserlike focus -- and high-mobility toys -- is that its clientele is generally short on time but long on other resources.“We’ve found an inverse relationship between money and surfing ability,” Phillips says. “Good surfers usually haven’t spent their whole lives in an office.”
Barefoot Pilots Association
The men and women who fly seaplanes in the Maldives refer to themselves as the Barefoot Pilots Association. It’s day four, and a light rain is falling as we pull up to the floating dock near the Four Seasons that functions as a small aquatic terminal for the Maldivian seaplane that will be flying us south. The pilot and co-pilot climb out of the seaplane to greet us. Neither is wearing shoes.Inside, the 15-seat cabin is packed with board bags and boxed club sandwiches from the resort. The takeoff is teeth rattling, but the engine noise seems to fade as we gain altitude. Our bird’s-eye view is of the ancient volcanic cones that form this archipelago, their coral-encrusted rims creating shallow turquoise pools. We’re flying to Sharks, a break Phillips discovered from a seaplane like this one. In 2004, he was returning from the Kolhumadulu Atoll when he looked down and saw a perfect wave wrapping around the tip of a sparsely populated island.
“We chartered a plane the next day and flew straight back,” he says. “The wave broke for 800 meters. The locals on the island had never seen anyone surf it before.”
Someone in the Tropicsurf crew thought he saw a shark (“I reckon it was just a ray,” Phillips says) that gave the wave its name.
Worth the Journey
I spend the longest half-hour of my adult life waiting for Markus Jans, the photographer for this story, who’d asked us to stick close to the seaplane after landing so he could fly over in a second plane and take pictures. At last, we furiously paddle the 50 meters from the plane to where the waves are breaking.It’s the penultimate leg of a journey that so far has included an 18-mile (29-kilometer) car ride to John F. Kennedy International Airport; a 6,831-mile flight to Dubai; a 1,888-mile flight to Male; a 10-mile speedboat ride to the Four Seasons; and a 125-mile seaplane trip to this paddle out. And then -- finally -- 200 screaming yards on a wave that seems like it will never stop lining up under my board, one ride that justifies all the layovers and delays and jet lag that have come before it. We spend three hours picking off wave after empty wave, while Phillips coaches quietly from the sidelines like some sunbaked, oceanic Yoda.
New Outpost
We fly to a second break called Farms and then -- sunburned, surfed out -- we board a boat to Maalifushi by Como, which opened in April on a skinny strip of an island in the remote southwestern Kolhumadulu Atoll. It’s home to the newest Tropicsurf outpost and is the only resort for miles, granting easy access to breaks that once required a seaplane or an overnight boat trip. If you’ve seen a Corona ad or scrolled through the island-inspired wallpaper on your iPad, you know what the place looks like. Beyond the airy, minimalist reception area, sandy paths wend through towering palms to spidery wooden docks lined with villas built on stilts over the lagoon. There’s no “island music,” no boat traffic. Even the children in the infinity pool seem to be on mute.Professional Opinion
I miss the wave of my life on my last day in the Maldives. That’s professional opinion, not writerly hyperbole.“Missed the wave of your life,” Phillips says when I finally make it back to the lineup after wiping out and getting ragdolled across the reef.
The worst part is not the saltwater filling my sinuses but the keen understanding of exactly how I blew it: underpaddling, which Phillips has been warning me about all week. I needed more speed and penetration through the water peeling off the reef; I needed a faster turn and a higher line to make it through the scorching first section. I remember looking up in time to see a 3-meter turquoise wall turn white and then -- curtains: bubbles, coral, empty lungs.
“Are you seeing the pattern?” Phillips asks.
We had planned to surf one session in the morning and another in the afternoon but somehow found ourselves alone at Sultans in double-overhead waves, conditions Phillips describes as “once, maybe twice in a lifetime.” We’ve been in the water more than five hours when I miss the big one. I make my next three waves, smaller confidence builders that are still well overhead in size, probably better than anything I’ll see for the rest of the year and by far the best waves I’ve seen without a crowd.
Surfing’s explosive popularity shows no signs of slowing down. And when you’re part of an ever-increasing pool competing for a finite resource, you need to be on your game. I’m seeing the pattern now. Later tonight, we’ll begin our 8,872-mile journey back to New York and its mostly terrible waves. But for now, it’s just three of us and Phillips, bobbing off a small palm-covered islet, waiting for something big to come along.
To contact the reporter on this story: Stan Parish in New York at sparish10@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ted Moncreiff at tmoncreiff@bloomberg.net Joel Weber, Daniel Ferrara
