The Camel Concept

Anchor’s dragging, we’ve gotta reset it!” the captain shouted into the wind. He stood on the bow, squinting into the black gloom of the squall. The storm hit three days out of Padang, so we had tucked into a small cove, surrounded on three sides by a green curtain of trees. We tugged on the anchor line and watched white plumes blow from the almond eyes of the waves peeling into the bay.

“What the…there’s someone out there!” the captain suddenly said as he stared towards the waves. We all looked to see a gray figure streaking through the mist into a huge, dark barrel. The wave sectioned off and all that was left was a leashless single fin twirling in the wind.
“Who was that?” the captain screamed…
With the anchor set, we watched for the mysterious surfer and expected him to re-emerge from another wave. The sets kept pouring through, but each peeled without a rider. The shadows in the trees grew darker and we wondered what had happened to the guy. Just then, we heard a knock on the hull. Over the rail, a curly blonde head bobbed in the water in a dugout canoe.
“Hi, I’m Cam,“ he said, “Do you have any fruits and veggies you could trade me? There’s not much on this island.”
He climbed aboard but didn’t stay long. After a quick talk, a cup of tea, and some veggies, he was off.
“If you’re ever in West Australia, look me up,” he said with a wave and a smile as he hopped back into his canoe. As he paddled off to his camp on the edge of reality, the darkness closed in around him.

The Yellow Board

The brown water of the Batang Arau snaked through Padang and out to the harbor. The air stank of diesel fumes and resonated with the thumping bass of Indonesian techno. I had been walking along the curb, carrying a sack of fruit and veggies to the boat, when I gazed out into the traffic. Choking the street were dozens of loud and brightly painted disco buses. Beyond them a gleaming single fin whizzed by, sticking out of a taxi window. The board was at least eight-feet long and looked straight out of Barry Kanaiaupuni’s Sunset quiver, circa 1971. I’d heard rumors that a young guy called Camel was in the area. The board looked like it could be one of his. I stood and followed along the street, as the cab weaved around bicycles and buses. Outside of a tinted-glass door painted with a sign reading “No Ecstasy,” I caught up. The board and passenger were gone, but the driver pointed me to the Hotel Dipo. It was dark inside and smelled of cigarettes. A few tables with checkered tablecloths filled the space near the front window and surf photos hung on the walls. In the rear was the bar, depressingly dark and empty for that hour of the afternoon. “Why are you following me?” I heard a coarse voice say from the corner. The words came from an old salt with graying hair, a gap in his teeth, and an empty Bintang bottle that glowed in the afternoon light. On the floor was the yellow single fin, but the guy was too old to be who I was looking for.

“Sorry, I was looking for a guy called Camel,” I said. The man introduced himself as Moose. As he began to speak, the wrinkles around his milky eyes deepened. He had been running surf charters out to the islands since the beginning and knew a lot about Indonesia and the people who go there. He’d bought the yellow board from Camel the last time he’d seen him. Moose started into his fourth beer and told me about that day.

“I took a charter out to One Palm at the start of the season and he was there camping in the jungle. Sad story though. He’s had all the diseases – typhoid, dengue, four strains of Malaria – I think he’s got a new strain now, one that might finish him off. We scored a big swell out there, one of the best in years. One Palm was perfect. Our crew surfed it alone for two days before Camel made it out, riding a bodyboard. He was too sick and weak to stand up. So he rode prone, then crawled back across the reef to his camp in the jungle. I offered him a lift back to port and hospital but he refused and said he wasn’t yet finished with One Palm.”
“So, that’s the last you heard?”
“Yep, he crawled into the shadows and I haven’t heard any more about him since. I really hope he’s okay, but I don’t know…”

Moose tipped the last bit of beer back in his hand. Sunlight passed through the bottle and reflected green across his face. He nodded his head and made no attempt to speak more. Standing up, I thanked him, and hurried out of the air-conditioned room, back into the warm smell of chillies and diesel.

The Cave

I found Camel 3000 miles away, on a gray, windy afternoon in Western Australia. The parking lot on the point was nearly empty, blown clean of trash and sand by a strong spring breeze. At the far end of the car park was a white Toyota van, the lone occupant shuffling a pile of surfboards under the front bumper. I climbed out of my car, zipped up my jacket, and walked up to say hello. In the rear window was a sign, crudely written with a marker advertising the sale of surfboards of “all shapes and sizes.”

Rap music, loud and obnoxious, spewed from a stereo with oversized speakers. It was powered by a pair of wires that connected it to a car battery with a set of alligator clips. The wiry, curly-haired owner moved to the beat while tightening a sarong around his thin waist. His skin, though tanned from a life in the sun, still looked young and full of life. He had the kind of face that changes little as the years go on, and had pure gray-blue eyes that seemed to stare not at you, but into you. It was the man born as Geoff Goulden, but better known as Camel for his curious extended neck, long surf sessions, and determination. There was a rumor that at 8ft G-land, he slid into the tube and pulled a camera from his wettie. He snapped a shot from the inside looking out, then advanced the film and shot two more frames before re-emerging into daylight. Camel retreated back toward the rear of the van, motioning for me to follow. “Come hang out in my van and talk, it’s got the best view in town,” he said. I climbed inside the rear of the van that was open to the sea and padded with mattresses and blankets. There were cardboard boxes that smelled of fruit and damp wetsuits; surfboards were tied to the ceiling. Camel had created a cozy cave where he could wait in warmth until the conditions got just right.

One night, when he was 18, he and his best mate had been driving home along a narrow tree-lined road. Geoff’s car was overheating and they stopped to fix it. Just as they fitted a leg rope in place of a broken belt, they were hit by another car. Both he and his friend were taken to the hospital where they cut open his leg and bolted it back together. The doctor told him he would never surf again, but within a year he was back in the water, keen to charge more big waves. However, after the accident, he found he couldn’t surf as well on the new, thinner boards, so he just went back to the older ones that worked. “Also, since my leg was weak, I started trying single fins and found they went really well for me” he said, “and then I started experimenting and never went back.”

For the last 10 years, he had spent almost all of his winters in Indonesia. He started out camping in the jungle at G-land until he got a job managing one of the surf camps. For a couple of seasons it was the perfect arrangement: free accommodation and lots of time to tune his barrel riding. Since then, Camel’s bounced back and forth between treks into the jungle and his home in Australia. His home that summer was his car.

Orang Gila (crazy man)

The sky darkened while we talked of the last season in Indo. He laughed when I asked if he had been really sick. “Sick…dunno about that. I had a pretty good run of the shits at Panaitan Island, but as far as being on my deathbed – no way. I was just experimenting on the bodyboard. I really have no idea how these rumors get started,” he said. We laughed at the absurdity of some of the stories I’d heard: “Camel’s got cerebral malaria, he’s got encephalitis and typhoid, he’s paralyzed, he’ll never stand again…” The truth was really that he was just surfing, alone and in the nude in Lombok.
“October and November were really good, but strange for me,” he said. “After the bomb in Bali, there were still these really nice swells but the place was empty.” He’d gone to Desert Point and stayed with his Indo friends in the village, needing to be with people after the tragedies he’d witnessed in Kuta. “It was torture though, weeks on end of 6ft Deserts and no one to share it with.”
“You were riding the bodyboard?” I asked.
“Nah, I had this board that Gerry Lopez gave me a few years ago. I rode it with no leggie, no helmet, and no boardies for a month,” he said. The local kids started calling him “Cam, the orang gila who plays with no clothes.”

Tied to the roof of the van was a pile of boards he’d been riding at the point. Most were at least a decade old, tossed away as obsolete by their previous owners. It was a small-time version of the quiver he’d had one year at G-land. That year he had taken 42 surfboards to the camp. Sometimes he would walk up to his boards with his eyes closed and select one without even looking. Other times, he would spend hours fine-tuning a certain board – preparing it for the perfect session. He said he’d ridden at least a thousand boards. From this he learned that “a magic board can come in any shape or size. You just have to have the right one for the conditions.”

“How many boards do you have now?” I asked. He held up a sheet of paper with a list of boards, numbered to 86. “I’ve got heaps of these in my Mum’s garage,” he said. I imagined a collection of old boards in a shack covered with cobwebs –boards that reflected his unique approach.

The Proof’s in the Pudding

He told me of his most extreme tail-chopping experiment, on a board he’d taken to G-land. Originally, it had been a 9’6” Rhino-chaser, given to him by Mark Heussenstam, a Californian who’d bailed to West Australia in the ’70s for the big and uncrowded waves. I’d seen the board at G-land, while it was still in its original condition. It was a beast of a board, made for really big waves. It didn’t quite fit the tube at Speedies, so out came the saw, and off came two-and-a-half feet of the tail. From a narrow pin to a wide, wide square tail. He says, “Wide tails work in the tube because, for example, a Boogie board has a really wide tail, and they go really well in the tube. And the proof ’s in the pudding, that a wide tail is good in the tube. All of them are sick tube riders, those lid riders.”

Yet more proof came during a contest at 8ft Speed Reef. Camel had been surfing between heats and watching from a boat while the contestants dueled for points. Raul Garcia, from Spain, broke his board in one heat and swam over to the boat for a replacement. To Camel’s surprise, he wanted to borrow “the beast.” The Spaniard paddled back out on the 7’ board and stroked into a set at Launching Pads. He struggled with the bottom turn, but made it under the lip. Nine seconds later, he kicked out in the channel—a perfect “10” and advancement into the next heat. Camel told the story with pride. He reckoned that the board had been in so many tubes that it knew exactly what to do. “The board steered through the tube, and the Spaniard just had to hold on for the ride!”

The Lucky Method (his first board)

By the time we had gotten near the end of the collection, the garage looked like a giant matchbox had been spilled. The single-fins had been pushed aside to make room for the channel bottoms, which were forming the base of a new pile of experimentals. It started with a kneeboard named “the slab” and continued with other bizarre chunks of glassed foam like the “stingray pin,” or a thicky with dimensions: 7’10” x 5” x 11” x 20” x 16”. These were shaped by his own hand and called “Camel Creations” or “Camel Concepts.” He said he shapes his own boards because when “you shape it and it works it’s an unreal feeling because you are really just believing in yourself.” Many of his creations had some kind of animal logo, signed on the stringer by a guy called Alas Purwo. Geoff’s favorite red hat, from the national park where G-land is found, had the same name on it. A familiar logo shined through the fiberglass on one board. It was the one from Penguin Publishers; he’d cut it from the paper bags at the bookstore. “They’ll probably sue me,” he said with a shrug and a laugh.

Paying little attention to the others, he dug until he came to last year’s Indo travel board, shaped in his friend’s factory in Bali. He pulled the odd, asymmetrical ‘weapon’ from the stack with the softest touch. He’d ridden it for six months without a leg rope at five of the world’s best tube riding waves: God’s Left in Sumba, Supersuck, G-land, Padang, and One Palm Point. He said it was the “best board ever” and related the story of a session at Padang-Padang.
“That day there was nobody out because the wind was really howling northeast and it was really choppy, but it was good and big and everyone was saying ‘no you can’t surf, it’s blown out’ But me, coming from West Australia it was like, strong wind, no one out – exxxcceeelllant. And so I went out, and got a bunch of waves really quickly and that just caused this crowd to start coming out. So they all came out, and then a water photographer came out as well, and Mikala Jones. Then I got this really good wave, it was about my seventh, and the crowd was getting thicker, and I thought, oouuuugh, I gotta get out of here, quit while you’re ahead.”
“And then I got this wave, pulled in and got a beautiful barrel. I was in there, real deep, and it was all dark and shady, and right in front of me was the photographer’s arm just in front of me and it just disappeared with the camera. I thought –oooowww. That had to be a good photo because I was really deep. It was just a highlight session because I went in after that, and Padang’s one of those spots you don’t ever want to lose your board at with the cliff right there. But I didn’t lose it; I was lucky. That’s just how I like to surf, the ‘lucky method.’ Wear no leg rope and just hope for the best.”
The board he’d ridden at Padang was sprayed his favorite yellow. Although it was 71⁄2’ long and 21⁄2” thick, it had a strange pear-like shape. The tail looked as if a dog had chewed on it, but it was the final outcome of jungle modifications with a file. The center fin – created from a piece of G-land driftwood he’d glassed “as is” – was angled and offset, “for more grip in the tube.” A guy on a bicycle had inspired the design.
“That’s that thing, you know, the ball of your foot, the power. I was just talking to a guy, a cyclist, and he’s got those shoes with the clip on it, and he’s saying, well that’s the part of his foot with the power. It’s the same as when you are surfing this board.” To compliment the center fin were two red “butterknife” side fins placed along the outside rail.
“Yeah, that’s the thing,” he said. “If you’re going left, I believe you don’t want to have all the grip on the inside. That’s the whole real thing that I’ve worked out through bodyboarding. When you’re bodyboarding and going left, you use your right leg more. Honestly, your left leg basically can trail really lightly but your right leg you stick down on the face and push hard off it into the bottom of the wave, and that’s what these are, these outside fins.”

The favorite board’s final test had come at the end of the season in Indonesia on the small, uninhabited island where Moose had seen Camel. The island is found in a national park where access is difficult and usually only by yacht charter. He doesn’t do expensive boat trips. There is no accommodation, just a few hiking tracks patrolled by some of the few remaining Javan rhinos in the world. He got dropped off on the island by a rotting boat carrying coconuts and told them not to worry. There were six surfers at the start, but after a week, it was just Camel and one other guy who was begging to leave.
“About a week into the trip, I fell off,” he said, “and that’s when I lost the board to the reef. I wasn’t using a leg rope for the safety factor. It is so shallow there, I thought that if you were going to wipe out, it would be better not to have a board attached and it made it heaps safer. With a board, it’s 100% dangerous, but if you get rid of the board, it’s just you and the reef sort of thing. That place, along with a secret reef in Oz that I surf, is the sketchiest wave. All I know is that I paddled for a wave that was about 7ft. I pulled back and noticed my heart was beating very loudly – boom, boom, boom. Since I hadn’t felt that since Australia, I knew it was the second scariest spot I’d seen. But it’s one of the world’s best waves.”

They were without help and without a boat when he’d wiped out and lost his favorite board to the reef.
“But you had food, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, at first, then we had to fully go feral and eat leaves; that sort of thing.”
He was boardless, but still in his element. He wasn’t worried at all about food or the board that had taken him so far. He said he “… just like, let it all go.” He had learned that all special boards have a life of glory but eventually just get put away.

This story was first published in The Surfer’s Journal Issue 12 No.4