Return To Volcano Is. The best Bodyboarding wave in the world!

Author: Ian Thurtell

25th February 2007

After a 6 hour wait in Johannesburg, we flew 10.5 hours to Madrid airport, where we had 1 hour to get from one terminal to another…byron and I entered the building to find the longest passage in history!! As far as the eye could see the passage existed…. we ran like 2 mad guys with everyone looking at us like we were freaks!!! We got to customs where a lady spoke to us in Spanish but we didn’t understand so we started stripping down everything metal…there was something in our bag the customs personal didn’t like..It was cans of cooldrink! They confiscated it immediately and let us go. We made our flight with 5min left before they closed the doors!

We arrived on the island and struggled to find a taxi. We eventually found one and paid the crazy 30 euro fee to our hotel…
20min later we were stroking into a super perfect reef pass near our hotel, small, around 2-3ft but perfect and no one out. The next day we went to the Northwestern side of the island were 3 of the most serious waves are..these 3 waves have one thing all in common..they are made to break you in half!! It’s a very deep drop into deep ocean of that section of the island so the waves have nothing in their way to slow them down…the day we surfed there the swell was a solid 6ft and thick. We decided to surf a left that broke towards a cliff..some of the biggest ramp sections..infact all the waves on the island have intense shallow bowls sections to boost the hell out of!! If you enjoy your left breaks this place is your heaven..there are some crazy good rights though. The right hand spots usually work at the same time as all the lefts, so its your choice…

One day Byron and myself had seen a good right/left combo wave that breaks off a headland, we packed our stuff and walked the 3km to see what it was all about.we found a perfect reef setup. A powerful shallow lefthander with warping bowl! Again nobody out.we surfed this wave 4 days in a row, each day bigger than the day before. We named it El Cha Cha.We met 2 other travelling bodyboarders, Jeff Winter from New York and Joel from Gold Coast, Australia. We were super lucky because they often took photos and got some real jems! Some of which I cant post right now….anyway these guys were the best..we cruized around with them, went drifting down some pshyco mountain roads in the rent-a-car and had some real good times…

In the second week of our 5 week stay ,we finally got to surf the wave we came to surf..its one of the 3 waves that say “im going to break you in half”!
The wave that was made ONLY for bodyboarding, no surfers even bother to surf it, its to heavy and shallow! It’s a crazy slab of lava that extends off a headland.Its basically a reef A-frame peak. The left is short but super intense that sometimes ends in a pshyco surge onto dry rocks, no pull-outs here! The righthander is longer and locks you into a deathpit with a extra hollow bowl barrel you don’t see coming…The wave is popular among the local bodyboarders so you have to try get it pretty early. We hit it every day the winds looked good and scored every time..often with hardly anyone out.

We hooked up some good accomadation over there. We got an apartment that is on the beach, pretty cheap but nothing is cheap when converting from Euros into Rands! Our place was perfect except for our shower that had no shower curtain, so eveytime we showered the whole bathroom would be underwater!

We got some good video footage, but peters camera he lent me had a screwed up zoom issues, I think it was missing its owner…but still we got some…thanks again peter..

All in the entire trip again was perfect. I think we got one day below 3ft, the rest of the time was solid…infact, when checking the forecast on windfinder or windguru we learnt that a 0.9m swell translated into a 4-5ft surf..Pretty crazy. So when a 2m swell hit, it was 10-12ft! We lucky a 5m swell didn’t hit! Thanks to Byron for a sick time. Also a massive thanks to Jeff and Joel who helped us so much! You guys are legends..

Well, thats it...

Ian Thurtell

Thanks to my sponsors: Sport Unlimited, Science bodyboards, Reef Wetsuits..




ps.thanks to Mark whitelaw for getting the grabs done for me...

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