WE MAY BE SLIGHTLY DESENSITISED TO THE PERFECTION OF THE MENTAWAIS THESE DAYS, BUT IF YOU FOUND YOURSELF IN MADISON WILLIAMS’ POSITION HERE YOU’D HAVE TO BE A SALTLESS BASTARD TO NOT HAVE THE STOKE FLOWING.

Ahh, the glory years of the early millennium. Running a surfing magazine at the time was far from rocket science. Simply corral the best talent you could find onto a boat in the Mentawais, have your best photographer blaze away, and your entire next issue was in the bag.

If you got real swell you could even milk the Milk Run for a second issue. And who could argue with the results? A cornucopia of sublime surf, palm tree wallpaper, red sails in the sunset. Between the Mentawais Milk Run and the annual Tahiti Death Match, they carried surf mags for years.

Within a few years it was getting ridiculous how many Mentawais stories were being backhoed into mags. Even so, as a mag editor there was never any question, you were going to send a boat trip to the Mentawais every year, if not two or three. That was a given. You simply couldn’t argue with waves like that, and if the magazine editor happened to end up on the trip himself, then it was a bullet he was willing to take for the greater cause. You couldn’t blame the onanistic fervour with which the magazines flogged the stuff though; it was painting paradise by numbers.

KAI LOOKING FOR HIS WALLET.

But then something strange happened. Readers eventually became indifferent to the perfection they were being served up. Four-foot flawless waves were no longer good enough. The same drop-perfect lineups they’d been clubbed over the head with a thousand times didn’t raise more than a dismissive grunt. At the same time, Tahiti was experiencing the same phenomenon, with mag readers yawning at shots of 15-foot Teahupoo. They’d seen it all before and now wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 20. They were becoming desensitised to the sheer volume of obscenely perfect waves being thrust at them, and the Golden Age of lazy surf mag editors was at an end. Readers, ungrateful bastards they are, started demanding stories with substance, meaning… ideas even! There were only so many ways you could tell a story of a boat trip with half a dozen 18-year-old kids whose entire trip was split between sleeping, eating, surfing and jerking off below decks. Times got so desperate for accompanying stories that we even broke Tracks’s strict “no poetry” policy on one boat trip. We sent my colleague, Ben Mondy on a Mentawais trip with Rasta and Margo, and it actually turned out to be one of his finer moments in print. Several famous bush poets turned in their graves upon publication of The Ballad Of Mungo Mondy…

Then I look out to the lineup: What the hell is Rasta on?

A custom-built pneumatic surf mat, made in Oregon.

Flying belly warp-speeds, the water whizzing by his chin,

And all the time Dave Rasta sports a crazy Greenough grin.