|
best wave
v5: Where are the best waves you have seen? Do you have to keep searching?
Mickey Munoz: Well it is about attitude and it’s all relative. It does not matter whether it is straight up at Dohenne, which is a peak experience for your first wave.
I had never gone to Indonesia and it is the finest of the finest! I was brought up on right point breaks, I only go left if I had to, yet since I’ve been snow boarding for the last five years, which forces you to you to go left as many times as right, so it has been helping my backside a lot. Indonesia is the land of lefts and in fifty years of surfing, I’ve gotten three of the best waves I’ve ever ridden there. The biggest, knarlist, barrel I’ve ever been in.
v5: Where was this?
MM: The big barrel was at a place called Scar Reef, which is on the island
of Sabawa. They call it Scar Reef for good reason. It’s Australia’s Hawaii, cheaper and closer for them to go and the Australian’s are famous for dirt bag campers and low budget. The crew on the beach was so beat up with crutches, broken boards and festering sores! (laughs) Malaria and the worst jungle rot, Scar Reef just beats them up. It is life threatening, it makes your heart stop because it was so thick and heavy.
The other place that I really liked was Desert Point. Uninhibited swell from beyond Australia from the southern ocean, deep water comes in at literally a ten knot current. The wave comes in out of deep water and comes wheeling around this point and the current is running right straight into it, with the reef right there. All the water that is flushed off the reef, just sucking off the reef is pulled up the face of the wave, ultra shallow! It’s pretty easy since you can get into the wave and get set up, but then the wave gets bigger and hollower. I think without exaggeration you can get a two hundred-yard tube rides, completely inside a barrel and be able to come out of it.
v5: What is it like to be in that kind of barrel?
MM: It’s just a curtain that coming over you, the current is running right into it, so the
illusion of speed is tremendous. The water is coming at you and sucking off the reef, which makes the most incredible sound. Desert is one of the top five waves, if not the top wave. Shawn Briley came to Indonesia and one day we both were out at Desert and a few weeks later he told me without a doubt the best wave he’s ever ridden.
v5: How many more times did you visit there?
MM: I’ve been there twice and the last time I was there, the water temperature averaged about 78 degrees. When I was there the year before that and I rode Gianland, right after the tsunami, which killed about three hundred people. There was an Australian surfer who was staying in one of the little huts on the beach, he was sleeping at about midnight when a loud sound awakened him. His first thought is, My God, there is a 747 landing and then he went, no, it’s a tiger attack, since there is still tigers in the jungle there. Next thing he knows he is getting washed into the jungle, five of his board were broken. All of his clothes, money and passport were gone. He ended up in a tree.He was living and considered himself very lucky to have survived it. He was so shaken; he left the next day.
We got their day and half after it happened and the water was so cold, it was like June gloom. It was similar to a fog bank with the water being about 65 degrees and the surf was triple overhead waves. I think it was a little weird because of the tsunami, all the up welling, cold water, still rotting fish and chucks of coral that had been ripped off the bottom, you could tell stuff had happened there! (laughs) I had seen photos and videos of it when it’s really clean, but I saw waves that even if you could get in them you would die. They were just too thick, big, heartbreaking and shallow.
So, it was thrilling to ride that coming from Old Man’s from San Onofre. (laughs)
v5: What kind of boards do you ride for waves like that?
MM: I usually carry three boards when I travel. One is a short-long board, which is high enough performance that it’s almost like having a short board, but on a funky beach break, you can ride it like a long board. You can’t hang ten on it but at least it paddles good and is stable. For Indonesia, I carried a seven/seven pigtail gun and a contemporary balsa thruster gun, which is eight-foot long. Everyone said I didn’t need such a big board here, but I was so glad I had it, because I don’t think I could have ridden as well. I could take on all the best sets that the guys on the smaller
boards couldn’t. The bigger waves were better because they had a better shape and not as close to the reef. My second trip I never went into the water without a helmet on, and glad I had it. Some of the wipeouts are so out of control and talking to two or three people who said if it wasn’t for their helmet, they would probably be dead. You go through all this staghorn coral and the big waves break the coral off. (laughs) Like scar reef, when you get into the impact zone it’s like being in a standing wave and you can’t get out of it. The currents are sucking you into the impact zone and you can’t straighten out there because the reef is so shallow and close.
v5: A helmet and a kevlar suit.
MM: Exactly.
|
