Oh yeah, I was shit hot. We were on a Red Bull boat trip in Fiji. Forget the usual Tavarua perfection, or Namotu alcohol based fun, on this trip we were to scour the southern atolls of Fiji, searching for unsurfed waves in that endless serif of archipelagoes that dot long into the Pacific. Surely, the thinking was, there had to be another Cloudbreak out there somewhere?
It was 2006 and I was shit hit hot, I was friends with Mick Fanning, for fucksakes. Look at us above, holding hands, after a craaazy paint fight. I couldn’t make this shit up.
The boat was big. It had to be. Red Bull had organised a star studded cast of surfers, a slew of Red Bull execs and a plethora of media hangers on to go with it. There must have been 30 guys on the boat, including the likes of Bruce and Andy Irons, Mick Fanning, Jamie O’Brien and Ian Walsh. There was only one female on board however, Andy’s wife Lyndie. Her boobs were big, and they were good, and they seemed to be getting bigger, and better as the trip went on. However that didn’t stop me from striking up a friendship with Lyndie. She was, as she is now, friendly and hot and super kind and funny. She laughed, sympathetically, at my jokes and asked me questions about my family and drank white wine with a sweet tinkly smile and each night at dinner I desperately and painfully tried to not look at her boobs, even though they were often covered with the just the tiniest flimsy of colourful fabric. It helped that Andy was often at the table and while I hadn’t learned much in my surf journalist career, I had learned that it wasn’t a good idea to look at a three times world champion’s wife’s boobs while he was sitting opposite me at the dinner table.
One night after the usual enforced six Red Bull infused cocktails (after ten days we hadn’t found a three foot Caangu, let alone a 10 foot Cloudbreak) Lyndie was laughing long and hard at one one of my post dinner witticisms. I hadn’t looked at her breasts for a good 25 minutes and felt justifiably proud of myself. Andy too was laughing, maybe, and it was then that Lyndie said, “Hey Andy, isn’t Ben funny, I reckon he is just like Napoleon Dynamite.” Now then there was a real laughter, far superior in both volume and emotional heft than after any of my jokes, the table erupting in my uncanny resemblance to the movie character.
The problem was I hadn’t seen the movie, which incidentally came out ten years ago this week. I just naturally assumed that the character must have been hellishly humourous and (no doubt) oddly attractive. Andy started calling me Dynamite, which gave me an intense rush of pleasure (oh sweet jesus, my own nickname!) and life on board was great. Sure we only surfed one decent wave in 12 days, and even then the b-grade workers couldn’t paddle out so as not to wreck the shot, but I had my new best buddies, a new nickname and all the Red Bull I could inject. It was only on the final night, when someone passed me a copy of Napoleon Dynamite, when my world came crashing down. I switched on the DVD and was pained to discover that Lyndie clearly saw me as a sexless, pale, high-school outcast with a bushy red Afro, spectacles, and a perpetual pained look on his face. Oh yeah I was shit hot, alright, for a guy that the word’s best surfers and one of the most attractive women I have ever met reckoned that I looked like the result of of geek being fucked by a nerd.
The next morning, I couldn’t look her in the face and I couldn’t look her in the boobs, yep things were that bad. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. I had been to the outer reaches of Fiji and hadn’t surfed a wave over three foot. I had made friends Mick Fanning and with Andy and Lyndie Irons, and they had laughed in my face. There was, I think, a lesson in there somewhere.
Personally I can’t see the resemblance.
Andy and Lyndie on the boat. Photo Kenworthy
