Here's the scene: a long, long reef on the north-west of an island in the Pacific. It's a long way from home - it's taken me five weeks to get here (you can get here faster, but you'd miss a lot). Somehow I've managed to time my arrival just as a clean typhoon swell is gliding in from the north, and the reef is going off. If it didn't section so much it'd be G-land, but it does, so you have to imagine a stretch of reef about the length of Ocean Beach with a peak every couple of hundred yards - each one of them glassy, head-high, and eighty degrees warm. We're about a half mile offshore, the water is a clear light blue, and the shore is covered with palm trees. Oh. And each of the peaks is completely empty.

When I asked at the hotel the previous night for a boat to the reef, there were some misunderstandings. "Surfing?" they said. "Here?". Yes, here, I said. Tomorrow. "Wouldn't you prefer the island tour?". No. "The island tour is good". No doubt. "We will do the island tour". No. I want to go to this reef, get out of the boat, surf for about three or four hours, and come back. "Get out of the boat! That's very dangerous. The island tour is not dangerous". Etc. This went on for a while, but I felt by the end of it I had got the boat organized. In the morning, I got up at dawn, went down to the little hotel desk and asked about the boat. "For the island tour?". NO. So I pulled the board out of the bag and some kind of magic happened. "Oh, you want to go SURFING!". Yes! Here! Today! (If possible - this is the islands, after all).

So we walked across the road to the dock, me carrying my nice yellow Evolution 7'5" with the fake Aboriginal body-art on it, and about every ten yards we would stop and the conversation would go: "Is he going surfing? HERE?". Then a minute of fast local language. Then "OK. I'm coming too". By the time the boat took off, I had a small crew of local observers crammed in with me, all in various states of betal-nut induced happiness, looking forward to a morning of doing nothing except watch the stranger throw himself onto their reef.

We got to the channel, checked the map, watched the break, and I paddled out. I caught a few waves and was getting used to the idea of three hours of solo time in crystal clear warm water, when a tiny fishing boat came out through the channel, dropped anchor, and, amazingly, a surfer jumped into the water. The Hawaiian-looking guy paddled up and I said hi, very cheerfully, having not expected company this morning. "Where you from?" he said. "San Francisco" I said. "Well brah" he said. "We got a good thing going here, you know. No crowds, no people, you know, not like San Francisco, all them people there, we got a good scene, don't want it overrun, you know, don't want the mainland here". All this with the classic Local Stone Face.

You have to remember that this is maybe three days travel from San Francisco if you don't sleep on the way and have a few thousand dollars to burn, and the surf is inconsistent, and the reef is several miles long and has about fifty peaks. If every surfer in San Francisco suddenly decided on the same day to blow their years surf-travel money on the off-chance that his fickle reef was going off, there would STILL be room to surf.

As localism goes, it was unnecessary. But I guess if you're the only surfer within 500 miles, you have to practice when you get the chance.

Anyway. When I explained that I was traveling by myself, that I didn't represent any of the surf media, that I wasn't about to tell everybody where his island was, he relaxed. And it turned out he was running a little surf camp of his own, and suffering from Tavarua-itis - which is a disease that surfcamp owners get when they want exclusive rights to a wave, but can't get them - they just pretend to be exclusive and hassle anybody who comes along and surfs without staying at their place.

So what the hell - I ended up staying at his camp for a couple of days, enjoying the super laid-back vibe, the wonderful, pounding rainstorms, and Joe's extreme form of Brah-speak, which tended to go something like this: Me: "Joe, where's the coffee?" Joe: "brah, you know. You know. Brah. It's like this. The thing is, I was telling this island BROTHER, the other day, shit man it was HEAVY what I was telling him, it was INSANE what I was telling him, and I mean INTENSE - was the day after the reef just went OFF brah, we were standing in a TYPHOON BRAH, I'm saying twenty feet on the outside…" Me: "Joe. Where's the COFFEE?"

The reef was good for another day, and then got blown-out and small, and although I was on and around the island for another three weeks, I never saw it really work again. But if you find the hotel, they'll probably know what to do when you ask for a surf trip to the reef.

(My email is: jdj@pacificwaverider.com)