180° South

Chris Malloy competing in the Eddie Aikau big-wave invitational contest in December of 2004. Waimea Bay, Oahu. Photo: Hank Foto

When I saw the light, I realized the impact must have knocked me out. I was still 12 feet underwater and I had to put the pieces together fast. I was at Pipeline. I’d fallen on the vertical drop and got sucked back over the falls – twice. On the second revolution I’d bounced hard off the bottom.

I pulled toward the surface, following a shaft of light that lead through a clearing in the fizzing foam, praying I’d have time for at least one full breath before the next wave hit. I broke the surface and purged a mix of carbon dioxide, salt water, and vomit all in one massive exhale. Then I drew three deep breaths. Usually oxygen makes the spots go away, but not this time. The spots were closing in. My wave had been the first of the set and the horizon was black with at least four more bombs. I had 10 seconds before the first would detonate on the first reef, exactly where I was treading water.

Over the previous 10 years I had devoted my life to surfing Pipeline and had been in this situation before and survived. I knew there was no need to panic. Then I realized that I hadn’t been in this exact situation; there was blood swirling in the foam around me and something big banging into my right leg. That something big turned out to be my left leg.

I had only seconds before the next wave broke. I had to make a choice: detach the leash from my dangling leg or keep it on. If I kept it on, as the wave broke the board would rip my left knee further out if its socket. If I let it go, I wouldn’t have a board to float on, and I was still losing blood and already dizzy. And I had to make it through at least four quadruple overhead waves still stacked out to sea.

I kept the leash on, hoping to hold it tight enough to reduce the pull on my leg. The next wave hit, and the leash ripped from my hand as I cartwheeled in the whitewater. The leash stretched and my knee dislocated again; I had 10 seconds to the next wave. I had been hurt plenty of times before, but those injuries came out of nowhere and by the time I could realize what hit me, the danger had passed. This was different. This time I knew what was coming, and every wave was worse than the one before.

Old-timers say there are three stages to being a Pipe surfer: 1) I’ll never get hurt; 2) there is a chance I could get hurt; 3) it’s just a matter of time. Well, my time had come.

I finally drifted into the channel, snuck over the sandbar, and beached myself. Some friends who had seen what happened carried me to Jack Johnson’s family lanai and put me in a chair under the big kamani tree. Jack’s father walked over to hand me a towel and a cold beer. He had seen a hundred guys make or break their dreams at the Pipeline. He looked out to where Ka’ena Point meets the horizon, then asked, “So, what are you going to do now?”

For close to 15 years I had lived my dream. I left California for Hawai‘i after high school to surf, freedive, and go to school. Through a combination of good luck and good timing, I had landed a modest sponsorship gig chasing storms and searching the globe for unridden spots. During my early twenties my friends and I were like migratory seabirds; we spent midwinter on the North Shore of Oahu, spring in Western Australia or South America, early summer in Tahiti, late summer in the Indonesian archipelago, then went back to Oahu. I also snuck in exploration trips to off-line spots in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Samoa, Ireland, and even Antarctica.

On some of the islands I saw villages where no one but the elders had seen a white man, where people lived in ways I had been taught to call hand-to-mouth.

Each year I would return to the same villages and over a 12-year period witnessed great changes. It was like seeing a cultural time-lapse. On my first trip to Sumatra I remember a mother, her infant strapped to her back with palm fronds, going out every morning to the reef to throw her net. Each day the father took their older son out in a single-log canoe to fish the outer reef. In the evening this family would walk to a nearby village to trade some of their fish for rice and vegetables. I knew this life wasn’t easy for them. It was hard work. But I could also see they looked healthy, and their kids looked happy.

Over the years I watched the family unravel. The father took a job on a tanker in Java and would be gone for months. The mother took a job cleaning bathrooms at a new hotel. Meanwhile a sales rep from a cigarette and soft drink company came through the village and like Johnny Appleseed, handed out free samples. The family still lived in the same thatched hut, but the woman, cigarette hanging from her lips, now sat in a dark corner breastfeeding a new baby while the older kids swilled Coke. None of the family bothered any more to go fishing. A hundred generations of independence gone forever.

This image, and others like it, stuck with me. I got my hands on an old Canon and some black-and-white 35mm Ilford film and started to record the changes I saw. A few years later surf photographer Ted Grambeau, who had looked at some of my work, suggested we check out a photography exhibit in Aberdeen, Scotland, where we were traveling, to see the work of Sebastião Salgado and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was amazed by their masterful composition and use of light, but moved by a deeper aspect of their work: Their images had captured the destruction of traditional life in the wake of the storm of modernity.

This was the theme I was after in my images, in part because of what I had seen in the villages, but also because of my background. I’d grown up in California, where my dad instilled a deep respect for farming and ranching in my brothers and me. I knew the condescension that the sophisticated assumed toward agrarian communities and people, and I also knew how vulnerable those people were in a consumer society based on corporate growth. I was also aware that I was becoming part of this corporate world, part of an exploding surf industry.

The morning after my accident at Pipeline, I peeled the bloody sheets from my knees and rolled on my side to get out of bed. My left leg, from the knee down, stayed exactly where it was, and my feet more or less faced opposite directions. At the hospital, the doctor pointed to the MRI and explained the damage: a badly torn meniscus, medial collateral, lateral collateral, and anterior cruciate ligaments all pretty much destroyed. He told me I needed reconstructive surgery, six months of rehab, and then I could walk again. I asked about surfing at the same level. “Not probable,” he replied. As I crutched out of his office I recalled Jack’s father the night before. “So what are you going to do now?”

A local couple. Maldive Islands. Photo: Chris Malloy

Chris Malloy with no chance for retreat at the Pipeline. North Shore, Oahu. Photos: Jeff Divine

Jack Johnson and Chris Malloy sift through a box of slide film. Santa Barbara, California. Photo: Grant Ellis

Over the previous 10 years I had saved some money, and even before my wipeout had been thinking about making a surf film. I was disillusioned about how the surf industry had turned surfing into an “extreme” sport, and in turn how this influenced most surf films. Now I was looking at six long months out of the water and no security after that. It was either use the money to go back to school or dump it into a film. School didn’t appeal, but there were a few problems with the film idea: I didn’t know how to run a film camera. I didn’t know the first thing about editing or editing machines. And I didn’t know anything about the business side of filmmaking.

During a long and intense rehab program I started working to close my gaps as a filmmaker. My buddy Jack Johnson had just finished his film studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, so I tracked him down in Europe where he was living in a van with his girlfriend. “Do you want to make a surf film?” I asked. He had no plans and no job. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be home in a few weeks.” I then called my cousin Emmett Malloy, who was working as a runner at a post-production house. I asked if he knew how to work an editing machine. “I’m getting the hang of it,” he said. And if I wanted to make a film we could work at night when the editors were gone. “I also know where we could trade some telecine transfer time for a few surfboards,” he added.

I filled four sketchpads with drawings and a notebook with ideas for music. My friends and I felt that our film should be about the past as well as the current moment. Rather than use these faraway places as aquatic gymnasiums for surf stunts, we wanted to share with a film audience how the cultures in those places helped shape the way we saw the modern world. We wanted to document good surfing, but the experience of place was even more important.

By the time Jack got home, my knee was starting to mend. We bought an old 16mm Bolex. Two weeks later we were out for our first footage, crossing a river in Burma, heading toward the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Islands. Between travels I used an old typewriter to peck out letters to music labels, requesting rights to songs, while Emmett edited the film at night. We called it Thicker than Water, and its 1999 release barely earned mention in the surfing world. It didn’t matter though, we had achieved our personal goal to make a film that reflected what we loved about surfing.

Then, slowly, friends began to pass the film to other friends. The surf shops started to order it. Little by little it gained momentum, enough that it looked as though we might be able to pay off our loan. Then, a year after release, the unimaginable happened: Thicker than Water won Surfer Magazine’s “Film of the Year” award.

I found myself back on Oahu with a film in the black and interested sponsors. I could now make more films, but I wanted to keep the scale small, to put together a little collective of filmmakers and musicians who were friends and family, including my brothers. We wanted to safeguard our independence and learn the process in our own way.

On Kona wind days my brothers and I would train at Waimea Bay, swimming, running in the sand, and bouldering on the volcanic rock on the west side. One day we found North Shore lifeguard Jeff Johnson on the same program. He gave us some climbing tips and soon we were spending more time bouldering than running or swimming.

When a house on the beach became available, and we needed another roommate to make the rent, Jeff seemed like the perfect fit. Before long we were calling him “the fourth brother.” Jeff and I had a lot in common. We had both grown up in small inland towns in California – he was from Danville and I was from Ojai – and had both moved to the North Shore in our teens. We shared a deep appreciation for the history of surfing, and – new for me – a love for climbing. We both had archives of out-of-print films and books, and after a day in the water, liked nothing better than to crack a cold beer and nerd out on what it would have been like to run with Pat Curren, Buzzy Trent, Chuck Pratt, Yvon Chouinard, or Edward Abbey.

My brothers and I had lucked into the free ride of pro surfing, but Jeff had come up on his own. He left school at 16, started sneaking into abandoned houses to skateboard empty swimming pools, and worked construction to pay for his boards. On Oahu he had become a member of the highly respected crew of watermen that make up the North Shore lifeguards. He also worked as a flight attendant so he could travel the world, and for the past five years had pinballed between climbing and surfing trips almost nonstop, all on his own dime.

One evening Jeff and I, poring over an old climbing book, came across an account of the first ascent of Yosemite’s Half Dome. When we saw the date – 1957 – we looked at each other in disbelief. The first big wall to be climbed and the first big wave to be ridden were both in the same year. A small team of ragtag climbers, led by Royal Robbins, in June made the first ascent of Half Dome’s vertical northwest face, a feat then thought impossible. In November, a crew of surfers led by Greg Noll and Pat Curren paddled into Waimea Bay. We had been nurturing this idea that climbing and surfing had a lot in common, and here it was right in front of us: surfing and climbing, twins separated at birth.

I began to read more about the history of both sports and also about the context in which they evolved. By the late ’50s America had gone from the “land of the free” to the land of the “nine-to-five” – with nothing seen as worthwhile unless it turned a profit or provided security. Unaware of each other, two different groups split off from the mass culture to travel parallel paths. They traded middle-class prosperity and security for adventure, self-reliance, and a connection to the natural world. The two tribes, largely unknown to each other, lived similar lives. They were all dead broke, building and inventing their own gear as they went along.

Ten years later, in Ventura, California, two epic dirtbags crossed paths. Yvon Chouinard, one of America’s best climbers, and Bob McTavish, one of Australia’s best surfers, ended up working a few yards away from each other. They lived hand-to-mouth on the same beach, building equipment that would change forever their respective disciplines. Yvon in his tin shed forged the first hard-steel pitons suitable for multiple placements on big granite walls. McTavish in his Quonset hut was chopping feet off old-style longboards to help usher in the shortboard revolution.

An appreciation for history led Chris Malloy on trips to seek out people like Miki Dora, Bob McTavish, John Kelly, and Pat Curren. Here, Chris has a chance encounter with North Shore pioneer Pat Curren. Baja, Mexico. Photo: Tom Servais

Late 1950s big-wave pioneers at Waimea Bay. O’ahu, Hawai’i. Photo: Don James

Early big-wall pioneers Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Yvon Chouinard on the first ascent of the North America Wall, El Capitan. Yosemite, California. Photo: Chuck Pratt

Inspired by the film Mountain of Storms, Chris Malloy and Jeff Johnson set out for Australia to film a climbing and surfing road trip of their own. While their filming effort dwindled, the trip would prove to be a precursor to Chris’s film 180° South nearly a decade later. The Watchtower Crack, Mount Arapiles, Australia. Photo: Scott Soens

Years later when I asked each of them what his prime motivation was during that time, they gave precisely the same answer: “I was after the cleanest line on the steepest part of the face.”

For Jeff and me, the kindred spirit of being in the ocean and being in the mountains played out in long surf sessions in the morning at places like Sunset and Phantoms, followed by even longer climbing sessions in the afternoons at newly discovered crags near Ka’ena Point. The wheels began to turn in my head. A film with climbing and surfing might be possible, one whose images and music inspired people with a sense of place.

One evening, after returning from a trip to Joshua Tree and Yosemite, Jeff cracked open a couple of beers and handed me a beat-up VHS tape with “FITZ ROY” scribbled on the spine. “You gotta’ check this out,” he said. “It’s gonna blow your mind.”

The story that unfolded in Mountain of Storms did blow my mind. The year was 1968, and Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins, with their friends Lito Tejada-Flores and Dick Dorworth, loaded climbing gear and surfboards into an old Ford Econoline van for a six-month journey to Patagonia, surfing and climbing along the way. And at the end they put up a new route on Fitz Roy, the iconic peak of the region. Lito’s wind-up 16mm Bolex captured the essence of what I felt to be the common spirit between climbing and surfing – the spirit of these pioneers finding their own way in an increasingly complicated world.

I had read about Conservación Patagónica, Doug and Kristine Tompkins’ effort to save and restore millions of acres of wilderness in southern Argentina and Chile, and I knew that Yvon Chouinard was involved as well. I also knew that Yvon donated 1 percent of Patagonia’s sales to wildlands conservation. Something started to click for me: that Mountain of Storms had documented something larger than an adventure; the experience may have played a big role in setting these two guys on their paths as environmental philanthropists.

Shortly after Jeff showed me the film, he and I crammed as much climbing gear as possible into our board bags and took off for Melbourne. Scott Soens, director of photography for my film Shelter, came along to shoot. Jeff had made a few calls to score gear and lucked into Patagonia’s testing program, which got us free clothes in exchange for feedback on the product. We were operating on a smaller budget than usual and the first priority of the trip was to have as much fun as possible. We surfed the reefs of Victoria and climbed the crags of Mount Arapiles, and each night I crawled into my sleeping bag totally exhausted. One of Jeff’s journal entries tells it best:

My hands have woken me up. They feel as if they’ve been slammed in a car door. They’re swollen, riddled with scabs, and my fingertips are raw. I shake them out above my head and lie there in my sleeping bag. I can hear Scott and Chris sleeping. “Okay,” I say to myself. “I’m in a room, but what room? Where?”

The sky begins to glow behind ratty old curtains. I get out of bed and walk to the kitchen of the 150-year-old farmhouse to boil water for coffee. Standing on the back porch watching the stars go dim, I expect my well-trained ears to hear the ocean, my sensitive nose to smell salt. But there is nothing, only silence and dust. A few minutes later, Scott and Chris stammer in dragging duffel bags and backpacks. I slide a cup to Chris and offer one to Scott. Scott smiles, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and asks our daily question: “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” says Chris as he inspects the scabs on his hands from yesterday’s climb. “But I’d love to get these things into some salt water.”

It seems like we’re in the middle of nowhere, landlocked in Natimuk, a small, dusty town straight out of a spaghetti western: one road, one bar, one general store. After 20-some-odd days of being on the road, the three of us have grown accustomed to perpetual movement. Last night we received a report from the coast saying a swell is on the way and the winds are good. Our car is now stuffed to the ceiling, our board bags strapped to the roof, and the stereo is loud. Mount Arapiles fades on the horizon, Scott is at the wheel, and Chris and I sip our coffee watching the countryside streak by. We have only two days left and we need waves.

Thirty days later we returned home with scabbed hands, sunburned faces, and a new understanding of what Patagonia’s “Ironclad Guarantee” was all about. I was increasingly curious about Yvon Chouinard, how he had started as a penniless climber, surfer, and craftsman, and ended with a multimillion-dollar corporation. I had read of his animosity toward big business, yet here he was running one, albeit one that sounded a little quirky. I’d be coming through California in late summer, and I planned to spend a few days tracking him down.

I finally met Yvon in the water. He sat out the back at a small point break, quietly waiting for sets. For an hour I just watched him surf, and there was something about him that reminded me less of a businessman, or even an environmentalist, and more of my dad and uncles, who were pipeliners and cowboys. Finally, I worked up the gumption to introduce myself. He was surprised that I’d gotten my hands on the obscure Mountain of Storms. He told me about some of his favorite flyfishing spots and turned me on to a recipe for buffalo meat. When a set swung his way, however, he didn’t hesitate to break off. When he paddled back out I told him that Jeff Johnson and I wanted to someday follow a route like his to Patagonia. He sat up on his board, looked out to sea and said, “Well, you’d better go now. The bastards are damming the place to hell and poisoning all the river mouths with pulp mills.”

In the coming months my brothers and I started surfing and climbing with Yvon. One morning he took us into the Sespe, a climbing wall he had pioneered in the 1960s. We couldn’t help but notice his climbing gear was archaic. He handed us an old swami belt, and then started up the rock while we had to figure out on our own out how to belay him. Later we had dinner at his house and I started browsing his bookshelf. He showed me passages from Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, and we talked late into the evening about how they and others had influenced his philosophy as well as his approach to business. Still, I was skeptical. I just assumed, a little cynically, that the more I got to know Yvon, and especially the more I learned about his company, the more I’d see they were like all the rest.

But then I ran across one of his old catalogs with an essay he had written titled “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” The article encouraged Patagonia’s customers to not buy a new jacket until they had worn out their old one. That got the wheels turning. There was nothing in that position you could label as marketing bullshit, and I concluded that Yvon’s mantra to “use business to make change” was legit. At the end of summer I hit the road with a backpack full of books from his shelf. I wouldn’t see him for another year, but my brothers and I used his clothes on some cold-weather travel to the Orkney Islands and Canada in search of unridden surf. Our respect for him grew.

Chris Malloy with gaucho Erasmo Betancore during the filming of 180° South. Valle Chacabuco, Chile. Photo: Scott Soens

Director Chris Malloy on location. Patagonia, Chile. Photo: Scott Soens

The following summer, my brothers and I returned home to find out that our sponsor of close to 15 years had gone public and was on the verge of a big expansion into the fashion market. They had treated us like family, supporting our surfing and filmmaking through thick and thin, but I didn’t want to go where they wanted to go. I told Jeff in confidence that my brothers and I were seriously considering walking away from the surf industry.

We started surfing and hanging with Yvon again. He was guarded now and so were we, but eventually we began to circle around the “what if” of us working with him to bring his methods of business to a whole new world: the surf industry. There were already some pieces to work with. Yvon’s son Fletcher was a good shaper, and he had been working on a new and smarter way of building longer-lasting boards. Yvon had been building good board shorts for over a decade, but they both had gone largely unnoticed because they weren’t part of the “scene.”

Jeff could see the writing on the wall and, unbeknownst to my brothers and me, had talked with Yvon about the possibility of a partnership. Yvon saw the value in working with us, but there were gaps to close. He didn’t want to pay us just to ride and get cover shots. The few athletes he paid were expected to really work for the company. On our end, we knew we would make far less than we had been making.

Finally my brothers and I reached the point where we had to follow the gut more than the head. We called our sponsor and asked to be let out of our four-year contract. They graciously let us go, and a week later we shook hands with Yvon and Fletcher, and together we became partners in a new mission: bring Patagonia’s revolutionary business ideas to the surfing community.

That first year we spent every day we were in town in the office, working on clothing designs and catalogs. If Patagonia was going to build a new surf line, we were going to be involved in it, beginning to end. But we were also expected to continue to live the kinds of lives that had made us a good fit in the first place. And for me, that meant continuing to look for surf, and to think about making another film.

Rick Ridgeway and I talked over what that next film might be. Rick, one of Yvon’s best friends, headed up Patagonia’s marketing department and its environmental initiatives program. He was a surfer and climber – and a writer and filmmaker – who was also deeply involved with Doug and Kris Tompkins and Yvon in Conservación Patagónica.

Rick listened as I told him how inspired I’d been by Mountain of Storms, that I wanted to film a road trip that combined climbing and surfing – and before long we brainstormed an idea that excited us both. Why not a modern-day remake of the 1968 trip? Exactly 40 years later, we could get a team together to leave from Ventura on a surfing and climbing trip all the way to Patagonia.

Rick then pulled out a map and showed me a section of the Patagonian coastline where Conservación Patagónica had recently created a new national park. Here was a mountain he and Yvon had talked about climbing. It looked like the Matterhorn only it rose right above the beach, on one of the most amazing coastlines he’d ever seen.

I thought about it. The mountain sounded good, but what about the surf? I knew that once you got far enough south on the Chilean coastline, there was an unbroken chain of islands offshore that blocked any waves from hitting the mainland. “Yes,” Rick said, pointing to the map, “except maybe right here, where the mountain is. See this breach in the offshore islands? If a swell hit from just the right angle, it would also hit the coast.”

A month later Rick and I were in a small plane crossing a fjord on our way to visit Parque Pumalín, one of the projects created by Conservación Patagónica. For a decade I’d dreamt of seeing this place. The fact that Yvon was there too, working with Doug and Kris, made it that much more special. My first view of the Reñihué fjord, where Doug and Kris had their home, and where the park had its administrative center, was staggering: a deep fjord framed by steep walls covered with beech forests, and in the back a huge glacier-covered volcano.

We rendezvoused at Doug and Kris’s house, and around the dinner table I started to learn about the 15-year struggle to create Parque Pumalín in the face of Chilean suspicions of a rich American buying so much property that it literally cut the country in half. I also learned about Doug and Kris’s commitment to using sustainable farming and ranching practices. I had seen firsthand in North America the bitter struggles over land use between the “leave it alone” camp and the “manifest destiny” camp. But here was a new vision, a new idea of how to effect land conservation.

By our second day at Pumalín, we had maps spread out on the table. Rick pointed to the Corcovado peak that was the centerpiece of the new Corcovado National Park, another project created by the Tompkinses’ land trust. Rick pointed to the small breach in the otherwise continuous chain of barrier islands and repeated his idea about the possibility of a swell sneaking through and hitting the mainland. If Rick’s theory proved true, it would be a perfect setup: waves that have never been ridden directly in front of a stunning mountain that had only been climbed once, and that was by Doug. I was still skeptical.

We took off in Doug’s small Cessna and for the next hour, flew over high alpine valleys framed by feathering waterfalls, then over the volcano covered in a dozen square miles of brilliant-white glaciers. And it was all part of the largest privately owned park in the world. We crossed a bay and ahead in the distance loomed the stunning tower of Corcovado peak. As we neared the coast I looked at the shoreline and… it was flat. There was no whitewater at all.

From the backseat I heard Rick yell, “We’re not there yet.” There was a prominent point coming up and as we rounded it, I saw the slightest indication of waves. We rounded another point, and the waves increased. After another 10 miles I was looking out the window at a near-perfect right, maybe four to five feet high, crossing a bay that had never seen a surfboard. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We circled back and flew over the spot again. On land, a beautiful waterfall dropped from a short cliff onto a cobblestone beach. In the water another set arrived, and I watched it peel right cross the bay. I turned around and yelled back to Rick, “We got ourselves a movie!”

Chilean gaucho near Pichilemu, Chile. Photographed and framed by Chris Malloy for his cousin Emmett Malloy. Photo: Chris Malloy

In the months to come, Rick and I pondered the team we might put together to retrace a route inspired by the 1968 trip. We both realized that if the film was to succeed, it would need to not only capture the dynamic elements of surfing and climbing, but also explore how that original trip had been such a catalyst in setting Yvon and Doug on their paths as wildlands philanthropists and adventurers. What was it about Patagonia, the place, that had made such an impact on their lives?

To put our team together we had access to the most famous climbers and surfers in the world. But that route didn’t seem right to me. Whoever followed in Yvon and Doug’s footsteps had to be someone who, like them, had dedicated his life to experiencing the world. One evening, as Jeff and I were mulling over the list, I realized that no one was even remotely as qualified as he. He was intelligent, self-educated, and independent – and a gifted photographer and writer. Jeff was the one who’d found the old footage, and it was also his real dream to retrace their journey. I didn’t care that he wasn’t a big name, or a name at all. He was the person for this trip. I called Rick and we made our decision that night.

I asked Jeff to pick the best climber and the best surfer that he knew to go along. He chose Timmy O’Neill as the climber and my brother Keith as surfer. These guys were pros, but they were real friends of Jeff’s, and they were guys who had put in some hard miles together.

The next question was how to get there. Rick had a solid background in sailing and raised the idea of jumping on a boat and heading south. We loved the idea, but chartering a boat felt wrong for the spirit of the trip, not to mention the budget. Not giving up, Rick connected with the sailing community and put the word out. Soon he got word that a young guy was readying a boat in Seattle to head south to the Chilean coast. It was a one-in-a-million chance. We had little time to prep, and Jeff actually missed the boat when it came through Ventura. We had only one more shot: if Jeff could drive four days straight, from Ventura to Ixtapa, where the boat was stopping for re-supply, he could join in on the five-month sail, then surf the Chilean coastline and climb Corcovado with his heroes Yvon and Doug.

Jeff made the boat. The rest is his story, as seen through his camera and recorded in his notebooks. And Yvon and Doug’s story too, as told around the fire.