Patagonia

“There was definitely a point when we arrived out at Balls Pyramid,” reflects Trent of the moment it really hit him. “All of that dolphin stuff happened on the way out, the dolphins just swimming around like old friends, and that was unexpected and amazing. And so, we've come off that high and then the ocean went slack, and the sun came out and the light was golden. We arrived at Ball’s Pyramid and there's thousands of birds flying around this crazy pyramid stack, and I am looking at the whole scene just hypnotised. Just… fuck. I couldn't take a photo. It was too beautiful, man. I was too scared to take a picture. I just couldn't sum it up in a photo. It was that overwhelming feeling of everything being so potent. The light was epic, the wildlife, the dramatic nature, the cliffs… just being in the presence of it all. There aren’t that many places that have that kind of effect on you.”

While doing justice with a camera creates challenges, putting it into words is something else again. The island’s geography lands it equidistant from Australia’s East Coast, the South Pacific coral atolls and the Pacific’s volcanic ghosts and depending on where you’re standing on the island you can see one or all of those landscapes. Dave might have summed it up best when he described the island as somewhere “between Forster and Na Pali.”

“It's exactly that,” nods Trent. “It's got all of those different notes. The beachbreak side looks like Forster, but then the shoreline has limestone reef on the beach. And then there's the volcanic side. The sheer cliffs definitely speak to the Hawaiian Islands. But then you've got the beautiful coral reef and it's like this fusion of every beautiful place you've been to in the Pacific, all on one island, each side of it being shaped in different ways.”

This was a surf trip first, but it never really encountered any… not nearly to the island’s potential, anyway. “We got a short period swell, which it was enough to light it up and see the shape of the reefs. There’re gems there for sure, but we never got the right winds with the swell.”

That’s not to say there weren’t memorable surfs. “That day we were headed out to Ball’s Pyramid, as we were getting ready to go the skipper said, ‘Maybe you should throw some boards in the boat. There’s a wave out there. You never know. We’ve seen it break before.’ From the exposed side, a wave was kind of hooking almost 180 degrees around the island, just wrapping. The outside would explode, and then the waves would hug the base of the cliff and run along it.” The wave wasn’t Cloudbreak, but as far as they knew nobody had surfed it. Once they got out there and killed the motor, they gave the honour of the first wave to the skipper, before Dave and Lauren paddled out and surfed together under towering, Tolkien rock.

The pinnacle of the group’s saltwater time however might have been the bodysurfing day. Both Dave and Trent are whomp people, and they found a little reef at the bottom of the island with a short right spinning across it. “The wave was the perfect speed,” offers Trent, “a little three-footer and Rasta just couldn't get out of the water. I think we swam for four hours, at which point Dave offered to take pictures of me, so I had a couple of waves. We were just flopping around having a hell time. Dave was getting pitted out of his brain, just tucking in, riding these little foamballs and popping out the other end just screaming and laughing.”

The bodysurf day was a chance to get close to the reef, the southernmost coral reef in the world, a reef remarkably alive. “It felt like it was thriving. There were tropical fish swimming through the waves, just like you'd experience in Fiji or somewhere like that. And out back there were patches of beautiful colour. Dave said he felt like he was surfing across this coral garden, just looking down at all the fish and colour below.”

The island has been a high-water mark for marine and biodiversity protection for decades now and was World Heritage listed back in 1982. But while high conservation areas on the mainland are heavily signposted with threats of fines for interlopers, the protection on the island is casual, implied. They protect it with carrots, not sticks.

“You know how good design is just invisible?” says Trent. “It's like those systems are in place and the results are there, but you don't see all those things ticking away in the background. It's evident across every part of the island. It's clean, it's pristine, it's raw. But the whole mechanism that protects it is invisible. There are parts of it that are roped off to protect nesting birds, but apart from that there are no signs saying you can’t do this or that, people just understand it.”

And this is part of island life. There are only 382 permanent residents on the island, and the numbers of tourists in and out are tightly capped. But while the island has been legally protected from across the horizon, the locals have created a closed loop system that creates the barest of footprints as they go about their daily lives.

“Just chatting to the guys at the brewery for instance, they're not interested in canning the beer they’re brewing. If they did, they’d have to import 10,000 cans from wherever, get them to the island, build a big canning operation, then someone just drinks a beer in five minutes and the can gets crushed and put in the bin, and then they've got to ship it back off the island. They just drink out of kegs and glasses instead. And there are decisions made like that across everything they do. Bringing things in and off the island, everything's highly considered, and it really stuck with me just how mindful everyone was about the impact they had on the island daily. If you had that mindset on the mainland, it’d be a very different place.”

“I could see myself living there, for sure,” half-laughs Trent, knowing that most everyone out there living on the island at some point has said exactly the same thing. “I guess I was drawn to the simple life that people live over there, and how in tune with nature everyone is and how their days revolve around the weather and the tides. I just love that idea, as opposed to every other beautiful place you've ever been to where it's just develop every spare scrap of land, oversell it, dump rubbish on the street out front and flush the toilet and it doesn't matter where it goes.”

Trent however was soon boarding the plane and flying back home to the Gold Coast. “I just wanted to run the other way at the airport. When you see what's possible and how you can exist in a different way, and you hang out with people who are living that life, and they're inspired and doing what they love, and you’re experiencing all these overwhelming, beautiful, natural things, leaving it is hard, man. Coming back home to your routines, your manmade structures and all of these things screaming at you is hard.”

He laughs. “I’m going from a million seabirds flying around Ball’s Pyramid to a million bin chooks flying around Q1.”