Second Session

By late afternoon the numbers had thinned. Only a committed few chose a second session as the swell continued to build, the kind of decision that separates the observers from the ones who came to surf.

What arrived in the winter of 2018 was no ordinary train of swells. The forecast had been building for weeks and those of us who had been watching it knew this was going into new territory for Nias. Mark Healey had already broken several boards on the first pulse of the swell. Rather than step back, he had his girlfriend fly replacement guns from Hawaii to Indonesia. That says enough. Very few surfers have ever had the need for a Hawaiian gun at Nias. This was no ordinary swell. Having that huge board would prove a masterstroke, the difference between catching the biggest waves ever surfed at Nias and getting pitched over the falls to certain doom.

The light at that hour does something particular to heavy water. What had been dark and opaque through the morning shifted into something almost luminous, the wave faces catching the late sun, reflective and gold, the surface of each set drawing clean lines across the frame. As a photographer, that quality of light is worth waiting an entire day for.

Here he is on the red board, dropping into one of the largest sets of the afternoon, a late-pitching lip overhead as he finds his rail and drives toward the bottom turn. He makes it look unhurried. It is not.