Lance's Luck

In February 1991 there was little to suggest that a sea captain down on his luck was about to make the greatest surf discovery of modern times. Lance Knight had been plowing the Yamba-to-Lord Howe Island run in an old cargo ship for years off the New South Wales north coast, delivering supplies to the tiny island community and enjoying the odd sly surf during lay-overs. When he lost his job and his girlfriend in quick succession, rather than writing a plaintive country ballad, he thought he’d go to Singapore, look for a boat to buy and duck across to Nias, off the west coast of Sumatra, and try and score some surf. ‘I was really stressed out, so I thought, I’m out of here,’ he recalls.

Lance had met legendary surf explorer Peter Troy on a trip to Lord Howe and had been spellbound by his stories of discovering the famous righthander at Nias back in the early ’70s. ‘That inspired me a bit and I thought I might see if I could find my own Nias,’ he says. He’d got hold of marine charts of the area and started looking at a promising island chain to the south of Nias, called the Mentawais. He flew to Sibolga in western Sumatra and, after a typically hair-raising overnight bus ride, arrived in the town of Padang. ‘Almost as soon as I got off the bus in Padang, this truckload of soldiers pulled up and insisted that I jump in with them,’ says Lance. ‘I didn’t know what they wanted, but they were very insistent, so I hopped in. I thought, Uh-oh, what’s going on here?’ As it turned out, Lance had arrived during Padang Tourism Week, and a gala launch had been marred somewhat by the complete absence of tourists, so the soldiers had been ordered to drive around until they found some. ‘They drove me down to the beach and there was this huge reception, with dancers and politicians and dignitaries all gathered around under these big banners,’ he says. ‘I had to sit there, in the front row, through all these speeches and dances, as the honorary tourist.’

After this auspicious start, Lance spent the next two days walking around town, trying to find a fishing boat to take him out to the islands around 100kms off the mainland. He befriended a local rock star named Henry, and together they hit the town, where screaming girls mobbed them wherever they went. Henry introduced him to an Iranian doctor based in Padang, Dr Manoo, who had been conducting medical clinics in the Mentawai Islands for years as a one-man humanitarian mission. For $50 Lance was able to hitch a ride on Dr Manoo’s next flight out to the islands. Equipped with one board, a backpack, a bag of rice and a water bottle, he found himself deposited on a grassy airstrip on the sheltered, waveless side of the island of Sipora.

‘Dr Manoo went off into the village, and I was just sort of left alone,’ says Lance. ‘I started walking along the beach. This old guy came paddling along in a canoe and pulled into the beach. I couldn’t speak Indonesian and he couldn’t speak English, but we communicated by sign language, and I offered him some money to give me a ride.’

The old man transferred them to a larger boat and gave him a tour of the island, stopping to allow Lance to surf as they went and sleeping in huts on the beach. ‘I only knew him as Mr Brasur. He had this old outboard, there was no cover on it, just a bit of string to pull-start this thing,’ says Lance. ‘And down the middle of his canoe he had all these bottles, bits of plastic, anything that could hold petrol – no caps on them – and he had a bit of garden hose. When one bottle would run out, he’d just shove it in the next bottle.’

Eventually, after a few days, they were approaching the southern end of the island when the weather turned ugly. Lance was hoping to get around the corner to a bay that he hoped would offer a wave, but his host insisted on pulling in through a gap in the reef to the little village of Katiet to take shelter. ‘As we started coming in I saw all the spray coming off the back of the waves. We were looking into this incredible right-hander,’ says Lance. He was surrounded by curious villagers on the beach as he pulled his board out of its cover and donned his helmet and rash vest. ‘All these men came over and picked my board up, feeling it, tapping it, looking around it, running their hands over it – all the canoe builders – because they build canoes there. They couldn’t believe it. The way they were looking at this thing, they’d definitely never seen a surfboard before.’ Alone, in the middle of nowhere, confronted with heaving 6ft waves barrelling over shallow reef, surveying the line-up from the channel, Lance took a while to work up the nerve to take off. ‘By this time there were people up in the trees. All the young guys had climbed this huge tree that used to be in the keyhole. There must have been 100 people up in this tree, screaming. Every time I got a barrel these people were screaming. It was just insane.’

After surfing for a couple of hours he returned to the beach and was taken in by a local family, who insisted he sleep in their small timber house. Lance stayed a couple of weeks, surfing the right by himself for four or five hours a day, wearing a big straw hat in the water to ward off the sun. His host, Hosen, and his family fed and housed him, refusing all offers of payment. When the wind puffed up onshore one day, Hosen led Lance to the other side of the island, where he found a perfectly offshore lefthander in the bay he’d originally been headed to – Lance’s Left!

Lance had brought a first-aid kit with him. Each day he’d bring it out and the local kids would gather around as he applied antiseptic to their sores. At night, his hosts shut all the windows and doors of their hut and built a fire to ward off the malarial mosquitoes that infested the island.

Two weeks later, Lance was sitting on the beach when a large Western salvage ship, the Indies Trader, approached the line-up. On board, Australian skipper and salvage diver Martin Daly and his crew had been working their way through the islands, exploring for surf in between salvage jobs. ‘I saw them pull up – they anchored just out in front of the keyhole – and guys were pulling boards out, and I’ve gone, Oh no,’ Lance says. ‘I grabbed my board and paddled out to them. They were pretty surprised to see me. By that stage I was ready for some company, but I was disappointed because I knew this place was special. I felt a bit sad that word was going to probably get out.’ After a surf together, Martin invited Lance on board the Indies Trader for a beer and a meal, and offered to give him a lift to Java. It was Martin who insisted the wave should be called Lance’s Rights, as it is known today. Lance said farewell to Hosen and his family and spent three days on the Indies Trader en route to Java, then spent a couple of days in Jakarta, enjoying the charms of the big city. ‘That was pretty wild. The nightlife was unbelievable,’ says Lance. ‘Martin had this big white Mercedes and he’d drive you around all night. I’d try to escape in a taxi. I remember one night I tried to go home about midnight. The next minute the taxi got run off the road by the white Mercedes. Martin hops out with a handful of money, throws it at the driver through the window, tells him to bugger off, grabs me, throws me in the back of his Mercedes and takes me off to this other nightclub ‘til five o’clock in the morning.’
When Lance returned to Yamba, he bought a boat of his own and resumed the Yamba-to-Lord Howe run, started a family and didn’t get around to returning to Katiet for more than a decade. ‘Martin and I actually stood on the back of the Indies Trader and Martin said, “This place is unbelievable. We’ll keep this a secret.” We actually shook hands and agreed that this would be a special place, and if he took people back here surfing he’d never tell them where it was. But you can’t keep a secret like that – it’s just impossible – and I don’t hold anything against Martin Daly at all.’

Inevitably, word got out. Martin invited a few friends on an informal surf charter through the islands, including pro surfer mates Tom Carroll, Martin Potter and Ross Clarke-Jones. That fateful trip they encountered huge, perfect surf – and the photos found their way into a surfing magazine. ‘One day I pulled up at the point at Angourie and Grant Dwyer from Fandango surf shop in Yamba came up to me and said, “They’ve found your wave.”’ Lance recalls. ‘He had this magazine article and it had this big spread on the Indies. After that, every time you opened a magazine there was a picture of Katiet.’

Surfing has impacted countless remote regions, but nowhere have the positive and negative impacts of surf colonisation been more vividly on display than in the Mentawais. The power of the modern surf media had accelerated the speed with which a new surf discovery became a household name. By the end of the decade the Mentawais was the hottest ticket in surf travel, and Martin Daly was the commander of a growing fleet of luxury surf charter boats while rival operators squabbled over wave rights. The Indies Trader had been given a fancy blue-and-orange, Polynesian-themed paint job and was re-badged as the Quiksilver Crossing, ferrying surf stars and film crews around the world. And a surfer-led humanitarian aid agency, Surf Aid International, had been formed to deliver much-needed medical aid to the remote islands.

First published in Australia’s Century of Surf by Tim Baker, published by Random House.