A few thoughts on "Forgotten Island of Santosha," SURFER Magazine's cover story for April 1974.

“Probably the most perfect wave in the world,” the article said, and because it was printed in SURFER, and because I was 13 and surf-mad, this was a statement of fact, pure and simple. The rest of the article smelled kinda stale hippie, with comments about surfers being in “a very intimate communication with the sea,” and the simple native fisherman having “no measure of time”—come on now people, it’s 1974, the Ramones have already plugged in, let’s move along—but the photos most definitely backed up the “perfect wave” claim. Long, tropical, bullet-train lefts. Uluwatu was still new and dazzling. But this place was even better.

Two images from the Santosha piece were branded onto my young and still-pinkish prefrontal cortex. A small color shot of Joey Cabell on the nose, tanned, gleaming, back-arched, hair flying in the wind like a pennant. Cabell was known as the fastest surfer alive, and that very much looked to be the case. He wore a Speedo, however, and that bothered me. On the other hand, perhaps the Speedo added the .18 MPH boost needed to make it intact from one end of the wave to the other. Also, a lot of my favorite surfers cited Cabell as 

 favorite surfer, so I let the Speedo thing go.

The second shot was a black-and-white half-pager of Roger Yates, a guy I’d never heard of, balanced atop the fanging lip of a low-tide suckout—a few years we’d call it a floater, but in ’73 it was just a horrible mistake, the poor fucker trimmed too high and got stuck, and look at him now, holding form somehow in a totally futile moment, 10 waterless feet above the trough, 11 feet above the reef, which is of course predictably described as “razor sharp.” This image haunts me still. If Yates survived that crazy wipeout with a full skin, then all the lit incense on that trip, all the proffered woo-woo incantations—well, they worked, dammit, and I owe the hippies an apology.

Turns out the wave had been surfed, lots of times, probably by dozens of people, going back 10 years or more. So Yates and his friends didn’t actually “discover” it, as the SURFER article claimed. And for those who had ridden there, of course, it certainly had not been “forgotten.” But that's okay. When the “Forgotten Island of Santosha” story dropped, followed closely by a dreamy, beautifully filmed movie of the same name, it was exotic and exciting and totally new. Go ahead, call it a discovery.

What is so amazing to me, a year or so after watching the "Mick's Wave" go from where-in-the-world to Google-pinned in 72 hours, is how long Santosha remained a mystery. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t publicly outed as Tamarin Bay, Mauritius, until 1985. Twelve years!

So, yes, I lofted some of my very first cynical eye-rolls at the “Santosha really isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind” mantra that Yates and cohorts attached to their break. But I do indeed remember, and miss, a notion that nearly all surfers shared throughout the 1970s, which was to keep a lid on breaks that hadn’t yet been ID’d. An ambitious wave-hunter could always find the guy who knew the guy who knew another guy who would give up the location. But nobody, and I mean 

, saw the value in making a big public reveal. And that was a very good state of mind indeed.

THE GREAT SECRET BEHIND 1974's "SANTOSHA" STATE OF MIND

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