The namesake wave on the island of Bawa is located in the tiny Hinako Islands chain, 5 miles off the west coast of Nias and a 50-mile sail from Lagundri Bay. It houses a small village with a shallow natural harbor on the leeward side, a swamp in the middle, and dense jungle everywhere else. On the exposed southwestern tip, swells pour into the sharp coral reefs out of deep water.
The spot is best known for the footage of Tom Curren riding a 5’7″ Tommy Peterson Fireball Fish in giant, blue-green, Sunset-like barrels, as seen in the 1994 surf movie Search 3: Beyond the Boundaries. Those sessions were the catalyst for what became known as the “retro revolution” and the lighting of the long fuse that would bring the fish back into mainstream surfboard design. (This is ironic, given that the three-finned Fireball wasn’t technically, or even remotely, linked to Steve Lis’ original Fish design.)
According to Ted Grambeau, the photographer on hand, Curren wanted to ride a 6’8″ Channel Islands semi-gun that he’d lent to Chris Davidson. However, Davo had got himself into “a bit of mischief” on Nias the night before, says Grambeau. With Rip Curl owners Doug “Claw” Warbrick and Brian “Sing Ding” Singer on board for the trip, Davo, just 18, was keen to make amends. So he grabbed the Merrick and jumped overboard to surf before the anchor dropped.
Curren took his time, eventually picking up a 7’10” Dave Parmenter gun and then paddling out to sea, way past the inside bowl where Davo, Byron Howarth, and Frankie Oberholzer were sitting.
“I was gutted,” remembers Grambeau. “I couldn’t even see him, let alone shoot him.”
After waiting an hour, Curren scored a 10-foot bomb, backdoored the inside section, and returned to the boat. That was when he picked up the Fireball Fish, which originally had been made for the Gold Coast’s Jay Phillips but ended up in Oberholzer’s hands.
“I’ve seen him do that so many times—grab borrowed boards or ride strange designs and make them work,” says Grambeau. “But when he grabbed the smallest board on the boat for the biggest waves we’d had, I was like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’”
Grambeau had no idea that the waves Curren would ride over the next few hours would become iconic—and that the resulting footage would become the spot’s cultural touchpoint.
“It was a lot of luck,” said the late Sonny Miller, the film’s director, in an interview with Surfline years after the fact. “It was one of the greatest days that that piece of reef had ever broken, without a doubt. We were blessed. It was like winning the lotto or being at the Super Bowl by ourselves.”
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Miller’s account, while honest, isn’t exactly correct. By the time that The Search showed up, a small crew of English and Irish surfers had done multiple winters camping in front of the wave.
“We’d heard about Tom visiting and then saw the footage, but when we arrived for the late season that year, the only thing that had changed was that there was a platform on the coconut tree that Sonny must have built to get a better angle,” says Martin “Minzy” Mynne.
Minzy first traveled to Nias in 1989, along with brothers Jake and Robin Kent and their father, Gareth, all from St. Agnes, Cornwall. While at Nias, they were shown photos of the waves in the nearby Hinakos by a kneeboarder from New York named Jim, and they decided to organize a local fishing boat to take them on the 12-hour journey to the island chain to check it out.
“Motoring around the corner of a small island, we came across what can only be described as the most amazing waves any of us had ever seen—150-meter-long, 4- to 6-foot reeling left-handers, fully barreling from start to finish, and not a soul in sight,” says Minzy. “This continued for a week solid until we were broken—out of boards, food, and water.”
Their original plan was to move on to Sumbawa, but after seeing the developed photos on a visa run in Penang, they decided to organize another boat back to the Hinakos, this time for two months.
“The first time we rocked up to [the spot now called] Bawa,” Minzy says, “it was 6- to 10-foot A-frame peaks rolling into full double-up, stand-up barrels, with only dolphins for company. We called it Dolphin Point, and for the next decade, our crew from St. Agnes would spend our European winters camping there alone.”
It was a trip they’d repeat each year, with various cast members. They lived off fish caught in the bay, ate provisions tied to a suspended rope to avoid the rats, smoked weed smuggled in a bodyboard, endured multiple capsized boats, and surfed an endless supply of empty perfection.
However, they always camped in the Indo off-season, which is why the island was deserted when the Indies Trader arrived with Curren and The Search in August 1994.
Despite the worldwide notoriety Curren’s Bawa sessions brought to the wave, it remained relatively untouched for a time. I stayed in the village for two months in 1996. The journey was still arduous, and I remember walking through the dense jungle and finding an old coconut hut set up as a “surf camp.” It was populated by two Kiwi brothers, a Frenchman, and, to my surprise, eight lads and one girl from Cork, Ireland. One of the friendly Irish surfers, with long blond hair, a trusty 7’4″, and a love of the bigger outside sets, was Graham Collins.
“I’d started surfing in my teens, after my grandmother left me and my brother money in her will specifically to buy surfboards,” says Collins. “There were no other surfers in Cork, except Minzy. He’d come over from St. Agnes, and he spent years exploring the coast near my home on his own. I swear, no other person has discovered and surfed more waves in Ireland than him. There’s still waves here, 30 years later, that only he’s surfed.”
Minzy took Collins under his wing and showed him his discoveries, including VHS tapes of his winters on Bawa. As soon as Collins finished high school, there was no question where his first overseas trip would be. That journey from Ireland took six days and involved stopovers in Moscow, Azerbaijan, and Kuala Lumpur before multiple overland buses and ferries to Sumatra and Nias, with the final leg to the Hinakos aboard a fishing boat. He’d do it each year thereafter for seven seasons, bringing his local mates along. Many of them effectively learned to surf at 8-foot Bawa.
Life on the island wasn’t exactly easy. Minzy and Collins are quick to mention the never-ending battle with rats over food. To get fresh water, they would walk to the well in the middle of the island, then sieve the dark, brackish liquid through rash vests into their kettle before boiling it for three hours. Campers drew straws for spearfishing duties and collected driftwood for the open “kitchen” fire. They slept on their board bags wrapped in mosquito nets to ward off the ever-present threat of malaria.
“It was so hardcore, remote, and dangerous,” says Minzy. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘What the fuck were we thinking?’ But we were young, and with those perfect, pumping waves, you just did whatever you could to stay there. The rest of Indo would be 3-foot, and we were surfing perfect waves three times overhead.”
To Minzy’s point, Bawa had a claim to be Indo’s premier big-wave location. The chain, sitting at the western edge of Indonesia, caps the brunt of southwest swells. Minzy believes there must be an offshore canyon that further amplifies swell before it hits the reef. The general rule was that Bawa would be twice the size of Nias. Asu, the left-hander, faced the opposite direction, meaning one of the waves was usually offshore. The Cornish lads chose the off-season partly to escape the brutal English winters, but also because the issue was too much swell in the dry season, rather than a lack of it.
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Eventually, the wave began to draw slightly more attention. In the early 2000s, I did three or four Tracks magazine boat trips to the island, aboard the Mangalui Ndulu, captained by Matt Cruden. Each time, we scored multiple 8-foot swells at both Bawa and Asu. Crowds were small enough, even if the camp at Asu provided better, though basic, accommodation. The 10-foot rogue peaks at Bawa and the end section at Asu, known as “the Nuclear Zone,” weren’t for everyone.
One of those trips, in 2002, was surfer-shaper themed. Darren Handley was on board with his riders Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson, as well as shapers James “Chilli” Cheal and Mark Phipps and surfer-shaper Dylan Longbottom. Seeing Parko and Fanning surfing perfect 10-foot Bawa remains seared into my brain. Phipps still calls one wave from that visit the best he’s ever ridden.
“Some of those sessions at perfect Bawa remain among the best Indo sessions of my life,” says Parkinson. “We’d all seen the Tom Curren footage, but I’ve had at least half a dozen sessions as perfect as that. It was a mix of Indo perfection with real Sunset-style power. And, from memory, we usually surfed it alone.”
Those trips were organized by the surf photographer Simon “Swilly” Williams. In a neat twist, Swilly was a St. Agnes local who had moved to Australia in the 1990s. It was Swilly’s slides of Nias in the 1980s, shown at the Driftwood Pub, that had inspired Minzy and the Kent brothers to go to Sumatra in the first place.
The wave continued to appear in the odd magazine feature and movie, but its remoteness and size kept it relatively untouched. Then, in March 2005, an earthquake measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter between Nias and Simeulue, hit the region. More than 900 people died on Nias, and there was an uplift of up to 10 feet in the surrounding coastal areas.
Lagundri Bay was one of the rare exceptions where the raised reef improved the quality of the wave. Both Bawa and Asu were negatively impacted, which effectively ended surf media’s interest in the spots. Bawa, never a perfect wave to begin with, became even more sectiony, and dry coral heads popped up on the inside to make it yet more difficult, though it remains a swell magnet and can still handle real size. Asu became less hollow, and the Nuclear section was made far less radioactive. Asu’s modern surf camps now attract intermediate surfers looking for fun, uncrowded waves, many of them often riding the type of hybridized fish designs made popular by Curren’s sessions.
Recently, Minzy and the St. Agnes crew, including the Kent brothers, James Hendy, and Rab Dakin, went back to Bawa for the first time since the earthquake. They discovered the remnants of their winter home, though the hut on stilts that used to be located right on the beach was now 130 feet inland. Their collective muscle memory, however, was able to locate the reef and tricky keyhole that gives access to the wave, and they surfed 10-foot Bawa again, 30 years after their first trip.
“We were willing to risk all and jump in a local fishing boat to search for our dreams,” Minzy says, thinking back to how it all began. “Some places were easy, some were out of reach. If you wanted it, it was there to be found.”
Curren was a little more obscure in a piece he penned for Surfer magazine about his famous sessions, titled “Who Are These Children?”: “What they seek is beyond our ability to appreciate. So wave them goodbye. Wonder at the distance between them and us as they search out the ultimate peak in waveriding. From where we sit we can only watch their trajectory, and try to not get whiplash.”
[Feature image: photo by Ted Grambeau]
