We’re launching a news series on the VMIX Blog that profiles VMIXers, the talented folks who plan, build and deliver our video platform and the services we offer.

On staff, we have musicians and actors, tri-athletes and eco-crafters, local-foodies and all manner of intellectual and social activists. We thought you should meet them.
 
First up? VP of Marketing Bill Curci, who just got back from a two-and-a-half week surf odyssey among the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia. Before he disappeared under a mountain of meetings and new projects at the office, we sat down and asked about his journey.

Bill, what possessed you to travel 32 hours around the globe to throw your body and board into unknown waters?

Ha! The promise of warm, uncrowded, perfect waves. In Southern California, we do have access to Spring and Fall surf, but summertime surf is generally dismal and we’re lucky if the water gets up to 70 degrees.

Also, it’s rare to share a good break in SoCal with fewer than 30 to 50 other surfers. Indonesia is blessed with 82-degree water year round and June through August is their peak surf season, with plenty of opportunity to have waves all to yourself.

Planes, trains and automobiles—tell us briefly about the journey and your gear.

Traveling to Indonesia to surf—especially when you’re staying on a boat—requires that you bring everything you could possibly need. There’s no way to buy equipment or any necessities once you’re on the boat.  Boards—two to three minimum, leashes and fins are key pieces of equipment. Everything else is what you would expect— boardshorts, reef booties and plenty of Betadine for reef cuts.

Getting to the Mentawais from San Diego takes time and patience, the longest leg being 18-hour flight from LA to Singapore. Once in Singapore, you jump on a short flight to Jakarta and then another flight to Padang. All told, it was somewhere around 32 hours of travel. From Padang, the tour operators had arranged transportation for all 12 surfers and our gear to the harbor about 30 miles away. And arriving at 5:00 PM, we had the pleasure of driving through a strange city at rush hour, surrounded by mopeds, motorcycles and cars, careening around streets with no lights or discernible lines on the roads. So yes, planes, boats and automobiles!

We want to know about that first surf in the Mentawais. How did that go?

The trip started out big with an 8-12 foot swell hitting the islands as we arrived. As a newbie to surfing over coral reef, I was eager to get advice from the captain, Eric Foraker, who is also a surfer with over seven years’ experience in the Mentawais. His advice: “Don’t ride the waves too far; it gets really shallow,” and “don’t ride the small ones, they tend to be really shallow.” So, in general, just go drop into some bombs and hope for the best!

The first day paddling out at Lances Left, into double-overhead surf, was intense. We were the only boat out there, wind was off-shore and perfect, and the bigger set waves were doubling up on the reef and throwing out pretty square. On my first wave, I didn’t pick the right line and the wave closed out on me. That taught me two things: How to better judge where to be on the wave and, as I subsequently took the remaining set waves on the head, the perils of taking the first wave of a set!

You lived for two weeks aboard the MV Addiction with a bunch of other surfers. Fun times?

Yes! Traveling solo, I had the opportunity to meet 11 surfers from four different countries and we had a blast. On our boat, half of the surfers were from Australia—those guys are not only blessed with world-class surf in their own country but they’re only six hours from Indo. We also had surfers from France, Italy and other Americans like myself. And we all came from different walks of life—tech, construction and even one guy who runs a family winery.

What’s it like to be boated to a break rather than paddle out to it?

When you’re used to checking a surf break from the shore, it’s quite a change to only be able to check a break from behind the wave, or from the side of the wave, or just having to paddle out into it. What I learned is that waves always look smaller and easier from the boat. That, and to ask the captain for any advice he might have on where to sit or what to look out for when starting at a new break.

Surfing San Diego, CA, to surfing in the Mentawais?
What was it like knowing there would be risks and obstacles you hadn’t faced before?

The biggest worry for the trip, honestly, was whether my surfboards would get lost or destroyed in transit! It seemed everyone I talked to who’d done a similar trip either knew someone or they themselves had problems getting their boards to the destination.

I knew from experience that the surf itself, while challenging, was something I’d been preparing for. What I didn’t want to do was have to surf unfamiliar waves on borrowed equipment that would likely be very different from what I was used to riding. Fortunately, 30 feet of bubble wrap around my boards, inside a good board bag, and some good luck with Singapore Airlines kept that worry from becoming reality.

At what point did you let go of any conceptual thinking and really start enjoying yourself?

Once we started surfing all worries disappeared.  Surfing, when you are riding a wave, is 100 percent experienced in the moment. And the beautiful thing about the trip is that we were able to surf between four to six hours every day. So the enjoyment was both instant and constant once we arrived at the islands.

Did you get to savor much of the local cuisine?

The crew of the MV Addiction cooked four meals a day for us and kept us well fed with a wide range of global and Indonesian inspired dishes. Lots of curries, as well as more traditional foods with American, French and Italian influences. It’s hard to know how authentic the Indonesian dishes were for the region but our cook and sous chef were from Nias (one of the local Mentawai islands), so it was definitely highly influenced by the region. What I did experience, was delicious.

Can you pick a soundtrack – a single song or album – that captures your experience?

(Laughing) No songs, but while I was fortunate to have avoided having to be stitched up, four of the other surfers had some pretty serious injuries. That, along with having more than half a dozen broken or badly damaged boards on some of the heavier days, led our captain to nickname our group “The Hurt Locker.”

And finally, what did you bring away with you? Anything you carried back to your life, family and work that you learned on this trip?

In the water, it was critical to focus on where you wanted to go, not on the obstacles … like the dry, razor-sharp reef in front of you … that you want to avoid.  In surfing, as in life, it reminded me to keep my eyes on the goal and not give too much thought to the challenges that lie beneath the waters.

And we leave you with this video montage of Bill and his fellow surfers’ experience. We’d like to give a special shout out to Jason Torbert of Goddamn Electric Bill, who agreed to the use of his music for Bill’s video. Check out Jason’s website and consider supporting his next album if you like what you hear.