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Wave-chasing surfer and explorer from Sydney, Australia, best known as the captain of the Indies Trader fleet, and for opening the Mentawai island chain up to the surf world at large; described by 

 magazine as "burly, outspoken, and as impenetrable as the steel hull of his ship." It is often said that Daly has discovered more high-quality surf breaks than anybody in the world.

Daley was born (1957) in Sydney, and began surfing at age eight, at Narrabeen, on an old balsa board. In his teens, while living in Queensland, Daley got crewing job on fishing boats working the Great Barrier Reef. Daly later said that watching Alby Falzon's 1972 surf movie 

, set partly in Bali, inspired him to look for warm, empty, exotic surf in Indonesia. "That was the whole focus of my life during my late teens," Daley said. "But I didn't actually get there [Indonesia] until I was 23."

In his teens and early 20s, Daly moved from New Zealand to the Philippines to Singapore to Bali, mostly working as a commercial diver for oil companies. In 1983, he and a group of friends began exploring the smaller islands along the Indonesian chain, in a 60-foot salvage boat borrowed from Daly's boss. By the end of the decade, back in Australia, having bought the salvage boat and refurbished it as the 

, Daly had earned an underground reputation as the man who knew where Indonesia's best secret breaks were hidden. In 1991, Daly took on his first pro surfer charter, ferrying Tom Carroll, Ross Clark Jones and Martin Potter out to Enggano Island, 90 miles off the coast of Sumatra. The surf astounding, photos leaked out, and while the exact location of this incredible new surf zone was kept secret for a few years, eventually the nearby Mentawai Islands became the hottest surf ticket in the world. A soon-to-be-booming Sumatra-based surf charter industry was born, with Daly at the fore.

In 1999, putting in motion an idea Daly and former pro surfer Bruce Raymond came up with a few years earlier, Quiksilver hired Daly to captain the 

 for promo campaign called "The Crossing." Years later, Daley said he explained the idea to Quiksilver executives in meeting thusly: “You guys are going to pay me to drive my boat around the world and go wherever I want and look for surf.” The Crossing campaign lasted six years, with the Indies Trader visiting 27 countries, and covering 160,000 nautical miles. By that time, Daly's own charter business had 60 employees.

Since the mid '90s, Daly has occasionally been taken to task for exposing, crowding, even exploiting the surf breaks he discovered. "I do feel partially responsible," he told surf writer Ben Marcus, "because it was me that opened up most of those spots."

Daly has always worked on and off as a treasure diver, and in 2017 claimed to have discovered evidence—small pieces of wreckage—that aviator Amelia Earhart crashed in the Marshall Islands, rather then in the open ocean. "One of the world's great mysteries finally," Daly wrote on Facebook, but the Marshall Islands theory was soon thrown into doubt.

 listed Daly at #18 on their "25 Most Powerful People in Surfing" feature.

Daly, Martin

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

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The Sunday Joint

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

The Sunday Joint