G-Land is a mythical place. When it was on tour, it was one of the best stops there ever was. “No other event has changed the vision of the tour so much,” Kelly Slater told me a few years ago. “G-Land made the world tour an adventure and started the ‘Dream Tour’ as it were. The excitement of going there for the first time for an event in the middle of nowhere with all that history of surfers past like Gerry and crew made it that much more exciting… None of us knew what we were getting into and figuring the wave out as we went was an amazing part of the process. Someone found a floating skull on the shoreline, Kalani Robb got malaria, I touched a green mamba in a tree, rats were stealing all of our snacks and dragging them to the sides of our huts. It was adventure and competition all wrapped up into one.”
The inaugural Quiksilver Grajagan Pro sounded the horn in 1995, and my God, the waves were absolutely perfect. For an entire week, four- to eight-foot surf pounded the reef. Kelly Slater won. It ran for two more years, then was slashed from the schedule due to a host of social and political issues that are far too complicated to get into here. But that event, as short as its run was, changed competitive surfing forever, much like G-Land’s discovery changed surfing forever.
Of course, surfing isn’t just pro surfing. And G-Land didn’t just change the tour — it mapped a route to surfing’s present-day destination. As the story goes, Grajagan was first surfed in 1972. It was nearing the end of the Vietnam War, just two years before those NVA tanks rolled through the gate of Saigon’s Presidential Palace. Indonesia looked almost nothing like it does today — untouched by the grasping fingers of the insatiable tourism industry and shorelines not yet lined in plastics — and for a handful of surfers, it was Shangri-La.
Twenty-three years prior to Kelly Slater’s win, Bob Laverty and Bill Boyum, two American surfers, caught G-Land’s now-famous waves. We wrote about it a while back, when the WSL first announced the place was re-taking its spot on tour.
“Boyum, born in 1951 in Philadelphia, was the son of a Navy pilot from Maui,” we wrote. “In 1969, not yet 20 years old, Boyum flew to Bali to meet his brother, Mike. There, Bill and Mike met Bob Laverty, a surfer from California. They surfed Uluwatu in its glory days, well before the crowds and plastic infiltrated the lineup. A few years later, on a flight from Jakarta to Bali, Laverty looked out the window and saw his paradise. A perfect, empty left peeled its way across the reef, feathering gently in a slight offshore breeze far below. It was somewhere on the edge of the Plengkung National Forest, near the tiny fishing village of Grajagan, and Laverty burned the area into his memory. A few months later, that aerial view still scorched into his brain, they took a ferry across the bay from Grajagan, then set up a camp on the beach that was shaded by the vast jungle behind them. In front of them, the yet-to-be-named G-Land pumped out waves of nearly un-rivaled perfection. For three straight days, the luckiest pair on Earth surfed with only each other for company.”
The Blambangan Surfing Club was, in 1983, at least, a “feral paradise.” The camp there was frequented by Gerry Lopez and Peter McCabe, and for a while it was what surfers these days dream about: perfect waves, empty lineups, and just a few good friends. Since the G-Land event is right around the corner, Quiksilver posted the short video you see above, and it’s a brief glimpse into a moment in surfing history that, sadly, won’t likely be repeated.
