This article ran in the Fall 1994 issue of The Surfer's Journal. It has been slightly edited and shortened. Surf and lineup photos by Bernie Baker.

I pulled it from the frosted grass with a ripping Velcro sound and shook the powdery dandruff of frost away. Neoprene rigor mortis. I threw the suit onto the fence with disgust and sat down on the porch where a slowly spreading pool of morning sun was beginning to warm the day.

I tried to recapture the lush warmth of the tropics and the sensual tingle of duck-diving through an equatorial reef wave. It had only been a few days, but I just couldn’t feel it anymore, not here in the stubborn cold of midwinter California. The ocean was gelid and opaque, the days short and the sun thin, and my shaping room was chilled as a tomb, the planer a frigid handshake.

Just as each journey has its own unique flavor, so too does each have its own aftertaste, one of bittersweet longing. I was no stranger to mourning a surf trip. It was always best to just ride it out, surviving a while in that sorrowful limbo of neither Here nor There. So I sat on the porch in the wan January sun and waited for my wetsuit and planer to warm up, telling myself whichever thawed first would fate the design of my day. In the meantime, it was time to sift through the adventures of the past few weeks in the South Pacific, where I had traveled and surfed with some of the most remarkable people I had ever met.

The best way to savor the glory of the tropics is to realize how cold planet Earth really is. Frozen at both poles, with the temperate regions under the polar influence for at least half the year. Even on the seasonless Equator, the warmth is but a mere peeling of the onion-skin layers that make up the Earth and sky. A few thousand feet up the air is cold. A little further up; freezing. Thirty or forty feet below the warm surface of the tropical sea the temperature drops sharply into arctic bitterness. Take into further consideration the infinite and primeval cold of Space, and our thin peel of warmth seems even more precious.

The tropical belt of the Pacific is peppered with hundreds of islands and atolls strung out in groupings not unlike the constellations in the night sky. Flick your eyes half a glance down a map from Hawaii and you’ll see a sweep of pinpoints straddling the equator, known as the Line Islands. Nearest the equator is Christmas Island, a 140 square mile coral asteroid 1,000 miles from the nearest city. It was here that the crack members of the Chouinard Energy Center gathered at the behest of the founder himself, Yvon Chouinard.

Christmas Island is the North Shore of fly-fishing. The same lucky combination of angles and vectors that created surfing’s Mecca on the northwest comer of Oahu also blessed the Christmas atoll with a huge but shallow interior lagoon. Thousands of acres of knee-deep sandy shoals are filled with the Holy Grail of fly-fishing, the bonefish, also reverently known as the "White Fox of the Flats" by the bonefisherman that converge on Christmas Island each year lusting after the wily fish.

Yvon Chouinard had made half a dozen fishing trips to Christmas. He’d surfed a right point that peeled into the main harbor; it was reliable, it was on the leeward side of the island and, most importantly, it was empty. Naturally, he was eager to share this find with his friends, so he rounded up all the usual suspects and auditioned them with a fly-rod on the sand in front of his beachfront home in Ventura. Rell Sunn and Sam George were shoo-ins. Sam had cribbed on the test by fishing the previous summer with Yvon in Wyoming, and Rell is a born fish-killer. Bernie Baker was in, too. He nodded sagely at the right moments during Yvon’s fish stories, and whether or not he’d actually heard the sweet music of ‘singing reels’ before, he’d already been to the atoll ten years previous. Information is a commodity with Bernie, no different than pork-bellies or cocoa futures, and no wagon train ever had a more valuable Indian scout than we had in Bernie Baker.

I was born without the fishing gene. My hunting urges had always been sated with the relentless tracking of the elusive well-shaped wave on the Central Coast. Tricking some pop-eyed cat food to the surface had never seemed to be as sporting as outwitting the stampeding herd of whitecaps off San Simeon. I auditioned for Yvon's Christmas Island adventure nonetheless. He handed a fly-rod to me, and I gave it a few half-hearted flicks. He was explaining the ‘zen’ of the rhythmic casting, but what I produced was a flailing line that was more “A Weed-eater Runs Through It” than the elegant looping of fly and leader that he’d demonstrated. Clearly, I was failing. “Look, Yvon,” I said. “I’m no fisherman, but . . . ” I cast around desperately for some indispensable talent to offer. “Wait a minute, isn’t there a strong Australian influence on Christmas Island? I mean, they use Aussie money, right? Well, I speak ’Strine. ‘Howya’ goin’ mite, see any of those bloody goanna-fish 'round here?’ See? You’ll need me to decipher out the finer points of Australian culture, like the difference between a salad roll and a toilet roll.”

Yvon worked his jaw and thought about it. “Alright.' he agreed. Then to the others; “Take him for ballast.”

Christmas Island was popular with the ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ set long before rabid fly-casters began boiling their brains in the noonday sun here. Long ago, in an Ian Fleming novel far, far away, nations believed that the best way to avoid nuclear war was to explode nuclear devices in remote areas of the world, sort of like ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ but with uranium instead of Buicks. In the language of Cold War posturing, these exercises we: known as ‘deterrence’ demonstrations, but really it was schoolyard-bully brinkmanship on a grand scale, using mushroom clouds instead of Indian burns.

From 1954 to 1965, Christmas Island was besieged by capable Brits with clipped mustaches and clipped speech scurrying about in the broiling equatorial heat trying to beat the upcoming ban on atmospheric testing, as if one more atomic explosion would keep the Red Menace at bay. We found a case of books on the island written by one of the capable Brits, detailing the operation with typical droll English understatement. Assistant Chief of the Air Staff to the author: “Come in and sit down; I’ve got a job for you. I want you to go out and drop a bomb in the Central Pacific Ocean and take a picture of it with a Brownie camera.”

“Well that doesn’t sound too difficult at first sight and might be fun; what kind of bomb, sir?”

“A 500-megaton thermo-nuclear H-bomb.”

“Good God!” says the author, his pipe startled out of his mouth.

, and it proudly displayed a glorious Technicolor mushroom cloud on the dust cover in a manner suggesting the nuclear detonation was just another patriotic display of fireworks. This would all have been pretty hilarious, but it’s still happening today just a few bands of latitude further south in French Polynesia.

All of this led me to think the atoll would be be a bomb-blasted wasteland of melted limestone. Thank God I was wrong. We arrived to find palm trees and the rich, green undergrowth glowing beneath a dazzling sun, perfectly offset by pure white coral sand. The sky was a brilliant blue with light, cooling easterly trades butting around little popcorn puffs of cumulus clouds. The only signs of its past life as an atomic ‘ground zero’ was an abundance of old Quonset huts and rusting jeep chassis.

And the sight of a tropical ocean! I’d forgotten about the colors, the shimmering patina of emerald and turquoise; the last few overseas trips I’d made were to Alaska and Namibia where the icy water has the greyish pallor of mortuary marble. Here it was warm and friendly; duck-diving under waves was refreshing and not the headsplitting torture I was accustomed to.

Our path to the point was an idyllic quarter-mile strip of coral sand that cut through the village. The locals cruised by on bikes, friendly and smiling. Surfers were rare enough to warrant a little warmth and curiosity. Sam and I both bought a local fishing hat, conical affairs woven with pandanus, and in the afternoon when the others had gone fishing, we would wear them down to the point, feeling like Stephen Cooney at Uluwatu in 

The wave was a coral reef point at the tip of the harbor. Best in the four-to six-foot range, it was a hybrid of Maalaea and Trestles, as unlikely as that sounds, with a sloping high-pocket tube but a streaky fall line that demanded a driving down-the-line J-Bay style of surfing.

“You know, this is what most surfers secretly dream of finding,” Sam said one evening in the lineup, as we watched another set rifle down the point towards us. “You don’t need a boat or a helmet and you don’t have to be Tom Carroll to have fun.”

“Yeah, it’s like a coral Big Drakes,” I agreed, “but everyone always pretends they’d rather be pig-dogging over some damp razor-reef in Bali.”

“God, I’m so glad we’re not here with the usual crash test-dummies,” Sam sighed, remembering past trips and past lives.

Rell Sunn was the perfect antidote for us, the antithesis to the withering soul of contemporary surfing with its tailslides and nose-rings and Beavis and Butthead mentality. Rell walked her longboard like a panther creeping through a jungle, lithe and regal, pawing at the nose with a sense of playfulness, and then backpedaling into a flawless drop- knee cutback. To watch Rell surf made you smell 1958 Parowax and Waikiki plumeria, sweeping you back in time, much like the scent of a freshly mown lawn might remind a man of his childhood home, back to when surfing was a beautiful dance, all trim and glide and leonine grace.

Yvon Chouinard and Indiana Jones are the only two people I know who have been to Nepal. Indiana Jones, of course, is a fictional character, but Yvon Chouinard is not. Few men on this Earth have seen adventure like Chouinard, but his history can only be mined one nugget at a time; you'd have to pan and sluice and dig for years to extract just half of his adventures. What you end up with is a man who is a blend of Bob Simmons and Jacques Cousteau. Yvon was a pioneer in both rock and ice climbing back in a Golden Era when Yosemite was like the North Shore, and the ‘big wall’ climbing at El Capitan was the like riding Waimea Bay.

Yvon, like Simmons, was a loner—a self- described "geek" who invented new equipment that revolutionized a growing sport, and who then stowed the forge and tongs away to invent radical new techniques to keep up with the advancements in gear, the same leap-frogging progression that took surfing from the soup to the curl in a decade’s time. An expert blacksmith, Yvon fashioned pitons and carabiners on a forge in the back of his truck, and sold them to climbers as he traveled to various climbing areas. Since this afforded little income, he worked at odd jobs, once as a private detective, and learned how to turn squirrels and porcupines into gourmet meals.

But first and foremost—Yvon Chouinard is a surfer. The simplicity of it is like that of climbing, except for the one thing that separated riding waves from all other sports; “You can’t cheat at surfing,” says Yvon. After a stint in the army in the early '60s, he set up a blacksmith shop in Ventura at Bob Cooper’s old factory, near the cobbled points of Pitas and California Street. By the '70s, he was offering rugby shirts and stiff, rugged canvas climbing shorts that became the cornerstone Patagonia, the company he founded in 1975.

Yvon likes to connect the various interesting people he has come to know; what Sam calls, “The Chouinard Energy Center.” Athletes, artists, writers: all get thrown together at dinnertime summit meetings or outings, just for the sake of the chemistry. The highest rank bestowed is that of a "dirtbagger," meaning a self-reliant outdoorsman who can get by anywhere in the world with a backpack and a fish hook.

Dinner on Christmas Island was a thing to be savored. In the soft orange glow of twilight with the ceiling fan whispering overhead, stories were told and adventures swapped. Over lobster and the ubiquitous Spam, came the specters of sharks and avalanches and storms, of huge Southern Ocean waves encountered and desperate bivouacs high on mountainsides. Suddenly it was the world of my boyhood again, the world of Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, where Chilean summits and South African veldt was peopled with tough, resourceful individuals who didn’t have sunglass sponsors and Walkmans. With a little coaxing, Yvon would dredge up incredible tales from his 40 years of climbing and exploring. Of surviving three avalanches, one time losing a close friend that was right next to him when they were struck by the crushing snow. One expedition took him to an isolated valley in Nepal where the locals had never seen a Westerner. Yvon mentioned this as casually as if he had said, “The other day I was driving around looking for a parking spot and . . . . "

“What on Earth were you doing there in Nepal?” we demanded.

On one trip in the '60s, Yvon and his gang of Fun Hogs, as they called themselves, drove all the way to Argentina in an Econoline van to climb a particular mountain. On the way down, they surfed Chicama in Peru and skied in Chile. Months later, after thousands of miles of dirt road and rebuilding the engine twice, they made it to Mount Fitzroy in Argentina, where the weather was so bad that in 50 days spent on the mountain, only five had climbable weather. For weeks, the group bivouacked in an ice cave 9,000 feet up the mountain, low on supplies and waiting in desperation for the weather to clear. Ironically, after all the months of danger and hardship, Yvon happened to break his neck at mere sea level when he dove into a river and hit a submerged sandbank.

The stories kept coming. In Antarctica, Chouinard and his partner were held captive in their tent by a deadly windstorm, with katabatic winds blowing down the steep mountains and across the vast plain of ice at 80 to 100 m.p.h. For 54 hours, with no break for sleep or food, they struggled to keep their tent intact and upright. Each burst would hit them like a tornado, momentarily flattening the tent and blasting it across the ice. With every gust they prepared for death, only to be spared long enough in the lulls to right their tent and brace for the next round of shrieking wind.

Taking a few giant waves on the head at Todos Santos or Margaret River pales in comparison to being scattered across the Antarctic by a katabatic gale, and back on the Pro Tour sitting in the smoking section on a flight was considered Grave Physical Discomfort, so I sheepishly withdrew from further adventure-brokering.

The surf went flat, so we broke out the rods and tied lines and slathered ourselves head to toe with sunscreen. It was time to stalk the White Fox of the Flat—to take the fight right to his home in the shallows. We were tutored not only in the mechanics of stalking and casting but also in the proper state of mind one needs to achieve in order to finesse a fly into the bonefish’s Sphere of Interest. Yvon is passionate about fly-fishing, describing it as being at least the equal of Zen archery. He’s also an ardent conservationist and environmentalist, so the fishing is strictly catch and release.

In fact, none of the fishermen skulking around the huge interior lagoon kept their fish. To do so would bring on the loathsome appellation of "meat-fisher," and a tribal banishment back into the low-brow ranks of Neanderthals bait-fishing from boats on Lake Havasu.

Little groups of fishermen were spread out across the flats, all of them engrossed in the Bonefish Rapture, tube socks pulled up high over pale calves burned pink in the reflected sun of the shallows, polo shirts neatly tucked into neon Mossimos, heads topped with odd-shaped duckbill caps. From a distance they looked like some sort of oil-drilling flamingo, the rhythmic and ceaseless casting like the pumping arm of an oil well. Flies were changed constantly, the fishermen trying to anticipate the moods and tastes of their quarry as if they were desperate bachelors choosing candy for a blind date. The flies themselves were as fascinating—ingenious little scraps of common junk-drawer detritus cleverly lashed into bright fuzzy lures that have names like tourist-bar drinks; the Pink Flash, the Yucatan Special or the Red Squirrel Crazy Charlie.

Freudian overtones are everywhere when passionate men take rods in hand (see?), and fly-fishermen stalk and woo their fish just like they would women. One of the guidebooks on bonin’ stated that once a fish is hooked, “a slow, cool playing is better than an excited, hurried fight.” Once the fish is landed, there is, as James Bond once said at romance’s end, "the grisly mess of disentanglement." Once unhooked, the angler then has his picture taken with the fish, cradling his catch like a floozy in a nightclub photo. After he has had his way with it, the prize is then released to stagger back to its own kind with a sore mouth—a sadder but wiser fish.

Bernie Baker needed information. A swell he’d predicted was late in showing, and we began to doubt him and then pity him, like a shaman whose chicken-bone imprecations failed to bring rain. Bernie discovered there was a fax machine at a diving outpost on the other side of the island, so he hitched a ride with a copra truck and returned hours later, triumphantly bearing a case of Foster’s and a SurFax. The print out had a synoptic chart of the North Pacific, showing a deep, low-pressure area with isobars tightly packed like a whorled fingerprint. Hawaii had seen a 15-foot swell two days previous, so in theory a sizable swell should be just hours away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Bernie crowed, waving the fax around like a ceremonial Haitian chicken-foot, “the swell is in the mail!”

The swell finally arrived, it was indeed a magnificent sight. The highest natural point of elevation on Christmas Island is a 60-foot palm tree, so it was spectacular to have eight-to ten-foot waves peeling across the reef, seemingly towering over the low-lying island. As we paddled out, people began filing down from the village out to watch. When the waves were small (pro tour, take note) no one paid much attention to our surfing—a few kids might come down and play in a tree and occasionally glance our way. But when the swell was up, the point was lined with people, hooting at wipeouts and cheering successful rides like they were stoked gremmies watching a surf flick at the Santa Monica Civic.

A traveling surfer learns to adjust to being an alien. You don't take your home-break status with you. I’ve been a haole, a seppo, a gringo, an uitlander and a gaijin. It’s an important lesson, and the often-forced humility is a great way to take the rough edges off your character. White Anglo-Saxons seem to have become the scapegoat for all the world’s ills, but the Kiribatians on Christmas Island have the belief that ‘imatang’ (white people in their language, Gilbertese) come from Heaven, and that’s where they will go themselves after they die.

Being seen as a heavenly ghost dancing on the waves was refreshing after some of the hostile receptions I've encountered while on surfari. On the evening of the biggest waves, we were walking home at sunset through the gathered crowd, and a man from the village approached us, his small son riding on his shoulders as if he’d been to see a parade. He smiled. “Thank you,” he said in stilted but precise English, “for the surfing.”

Of all the dangers we faced on Christmas Island, from jagged coral to closeout sets to prowling sharks, none loomed in the forefront of our minds like—mayonnaise. We stayed in an Aussie-style holiday bungalow, a cement cubicle apparently built so that it could be easily hosed down in the aftermath of traditional Australian holidaymaking, which often involves spewing, chundering, or letting fly with a Technicolor yawn. The Aussies have more words for vomit than the Eskimos have for all 28 types of snow and ice. The bungalow came stocked with all sorts of Aussie foodstuffs; cases of Fosters, sappy cordial, tins of Billy Tea and corned beef, and one huge industrial-sized vat of mayonnaise. Our hired cook, whom we named "Edward Mayonnaise-hands," doused our meals with it. Refrigeration is an abstract idea on the equator, where 70 degrees is considered cool. “Mayonnaise," said Yvon levelly, eyeing the jar left festering on the counter for hours in the noonday heat, "has killed more people than World War II.”

The diet of the native people is just as awful. “All we have is white flour, white rice, white sugar—and Spam,” said Kim, a dive guide we met. Spam and other tinned meats are the island's staple foods. Average life expectancy ranges from 50-52 years, disallowing mayonnaise roulette. What these islanders needed was not missionaries, but nutritionists, preaching about the Holy Food Group Triangle instead of the Holy Spirit.

Without a doubt, the highlight of our trip was meeting a remarkable man who lives and surfs in Line Islands. You’ve never heard of Charlie Corbett, but you probably knew someone just like him. Maybe you remember a quiet, easy-going guy at your home break that never really fit in, never jostled and elbowed and scrapped with the rest of the herd. One day, he just disappeared, but no one noticed because he left no niche in the lineup to fill.

Charlie left Newport Beach, California, almost two decades ago. Even then the Misery Index was high enough to force the more sensitive souls out towards wider horizons. Charlie tried Hawaii for a few years but grew tired of the hostile crowds. He wandered through the Gilbert and Line Islands, hopping from island to island on freighters that made monthly stops at each speck in Oceania. On the Island of Tarawa, Charlie happened upon a local girl who was being beaten by an older man. Enraged, he drove the man away and returned the sobbing girl to her family. They thanked him and asked what he intended to do with her now. “What do you mean?” he asked. “You saved her,” they replied simply, “she is yours now.” So Charlie married her and settled on Tarawa. He went into the beachcomber business, collecting and drying sea cucumbers for the Oriental market, where the slug-like creature is in high demand. For the next 12 years he began his family, ran his business, built a home and surfed nameless reef passes alone in the torrid outlands of the Central Pacific.

Charlie was on Fanning Island, 75 miles north of us, when he heard that there were some surfers staying on Christmas Island. He boarded a freighter headed that way, and early the next morning was anchored right off of the point. He was the pumping swell and being too anxious to wait for the barge that ferried passengers into the harbor, he jumped over the railing and paddled towards the lineup with his duffel bag on his surfboard.

He was there, riding alone in the six-foot waves at dawn, as we strolled out for the morning session. He greeted us enthusiastically when we reached the lineup, especially Sam, whose columns in the surf magazines Charlie had collected and memorized.

We spent many days surfing with Charlie. He was a good surfer who rode the point with authority on a 12-year-old gun that was so splotched and sun-beaten that it looked taxidermied instead of fiberglassed.

Charlie Corbett hadn’t worn shoes in 15 years. His feet were burnished leather, and he had an Aussie army hat that was rimed with a decade of salt and sweat. There was a lilt in his voice that suggested a blend of Aussie twang and Hawaiian pidgin. He loved to listen to us tell stories and hungrily absorbed new surf magazines we gave him, but wouldn’t touch any of Bernie's 

 and thus be contaminated by the images of the depraved world he had left behind. Charlie showed us his photo albums, full of faded snapshots of empty lineups and distant figures negotiating chunky reef-pass waves in the glaring mid-Pacific sun. There were photos of the home he had built on Tarawa, from trees he had hand-milled into lumber with only a chain saw; a beautiful house with a thatched roof and the soaring lines of a Japanese war helmet. At the airport, when we were leaving, he gave us each his business card, which read, “Charlie Corbett, South Sea Island Trader.”

Here was a man who had relocated 5,000 miles and 100 years distant from Newport Beach. He was living in a Jack London story while his California contemporaries still scrabbled along through the 405 HabiTrail.

If your heart beats to the cadence of the sea slapping on a hull, if the seawater in your body pulls you like gravity towards the ocean’s waves; here then is the meaning of life I learned from Charlie Corbett. Right now, somewhere far at sea, a storm is sending out pulses of energy towards distant shores. These swells are unconscious, soulless; they have no mind of where they end their journey. But one thing certain: that energy brushes many shores, and you can choose where to meet it. You decide whether to meet them at grey, oily, crowded Blackies or at a sun-dappled coral reef in the South Seas.

A month later, back in California, a letter came on a gloomy, damp afternoon. It was from Charlie and read:

Hope all is well and you have reassimilated back into the fast lane.

I dug out the mag on Africa and reread your article, and have one question; are there really perfect waves out there like Elands Bay that I must surf before I die? Like, you know for more than 20 years I have been looking for the ‘perfect wave,’ and there are a lot of them. But we must consider all the other conditions (in land and living) that come attached to them. Personally, for me, I think I have found it. But, I watch the sunset and I wonder. . . . "

"THERE ARE OTHER CHRISTMAS ISLANDS IN THE LIVES OF MEN," BY DAVE PARMENTER (1994)

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