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Aaberg, Denny

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Abellira, Reno

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academia and surfing

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advertising and surfing

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Baker, Grant “Twiggy”

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Bali

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Ballard, Bill

Ballard, Rochelle

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Benson, Becky

Benson, Blanche

Benson, Linda

Bermuda

Bertlemann, Larry

Adventurous and enterprising American brothers best known for their discovery and commercialization of Grajagan, the exotic world-class wave located at the southeast tip of Java, Indonesia. Mike Boyum was born in 1946 in Key West, Florida, the son of a career navy pilot; Bill was born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Boyum family moved often, from one American naval station to another. Both boys started surfing in 1962, but Mike soon quit.

Mike, the more restless of the two, dropped out of college in the mid-'60s, traveled to Aspen, Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia, then moved to Bali in 1968. Bill flew over the following year with a full quiver of surfboards; he decided to stay as well, and convinced Mike to begin surfing again. The brothers, along with a small group of other expatriate Australians and Americans, including California surfer Bob Laverty, rode Uluwatu—Bali's best-known break—for months at a time with nobody else in the water.

By 1972, Bali had caught the attention of the larger surf world, and visitors were show up with some regularity. Laverty convinced Bill to join him on a search for waves on the edge of a jungle reserve in southeast Java, where they found flawless eight-foot left-breaking tubes a few miles up the beach from a fishing village named Grajagan. They surfed for three days, sleeping on the beach and conserving their small reserves of food and water, then returned to Bali, where, days later, Laverty drowned while surfing Uluwatu.

Mike Boyum joined Bill and a few others for the next few Grajagan trips, and it was Mike—one of the most charismatic surfers of the age, charming and persuasive; described by photographer Jeff Divine as "a surfing prince"— who conceived and developed the G-land Surf Camp, building a small row of wooden-stilt huts along the perimeter of the jungle in 1974 and hassling endlessly with the Indonesian bureaucracy to maintain a Grajagan surf resort exclusive. The camp became a commercial interest in 1978. By allowing 10 surfers in at a time, and charging $100 a day per surfer over the course of a four-month surf season, Mike Boyum was grossing roughly $250,000 per year by the early-'80s. When the Indonesian government found out that Boyum had also branched into drug trafficking, they pulled his permits. Boyum then turned his attention to the Mentawais, a wave-rich island chain and he and Bill had briefly checked out a few years earlier.

In 1984 Boyum was arrested, extradited to California, convicted on drug charges, and served one year on a work-furlough sentence. In 1985, along with fellow surfer and smuggler Peter McCabe, he was arrested in New Caledonia, again on drug charges, and imprisoned for nearly four years.

Upon his release, Boyum was mostly on the run. In 1989, while living in the Philippines under an alias, he discovered the perfectly shaped right-breaking wave that would later be called Cloud Nine. Boyum had long been a believer in fasting as a way to improved health and spirituality; on June 14, he died on the 43rd day of a fast at Cloud Nine. He was buried overlooking the break.

Bill Boyum had meanwhile moved to Hawaii to raise a family, but continued to make regular visits to Grajagan; Cyrus, his youngest son, later helped help run the G-land camp. 

Mike Boyum is the subject of the controversial 2009 documentary 

Boyum, Mike and Bill

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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The Sunday Joint

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