Solomon: Cape Town, South Africa is really one of the most amazing big wave spots. There are three big wave spots right there. There’s Crayfish Reef, Factory and Sunset. It’s all within a ten minute drive from my house, so you know as a big wave surfer, it’s pretty much heaven.
Cyrus: What was the first big wave you surfed outside of South Africa?
Solomon: Maverick’s. Three years ago, the first time I came over. It was one of the worst seasons ever.
Cyrus: Yes it was. They didn’t have a contest that year.
Solomon: And I don’t know if people know it, but South Africa’s currency is real bad, so it’s quite expensive for us to come here. Krugerrands (S.A. currency) are seven to the dollar, so everything is seven times more expensive. And that year, coming for three months, just sitting and waiting and no waves was tough, to say the least. It was tough, but I love coming out here.
Solomon's route
Cyrus: One of the things I’ve been following about you recently was this crazy three-month sailing adventure you went on. It was just you and one other person on a boat, is that right?
Solomon: Yeah. Well, it was me, my friend James Taylor, the big wave surfer, and his girlfriend. He phoned me up two weeks before the trip and was said, ‘Frank, you want to come sail across the Indian Ocean?’ And I was like, ‘Well, why not?’ I had never sailed before and never spent time really on a boat. And it seemed really cool. It was incredible. We left Durban on the first of September, a spring day. Sailed across the Mozambique Channel to a little island that nobody knows about.
Cyrus: Any story where you’re on a sailboat in the middle of any ocean just is crazy. Did you guys have a radio just in case anything went wrong?
Solomon: We had a satellite phone that didn’t really work properly. You would think in this day and age it would be like having cell phone reception, internet or something. If our boat sunk we would be done.
Cyrus: Is it true that during your three-month adventure sailing through the Indian Ocean, pirates tried to attack you?
Solomon: Yeah.
Cyrus: You mean like Somali pirates?
Solomon: Yeah, off of Somalia. We were leaving the Maldives sailing towards Thailand. Obviously in a sailboat, you can only go so fast because of the wind. And this tiny little boat in the middle of the ocean totally changed his direction and started coming full speed at us and my captain James was like, ‘Frank, grab a spear gun, grab a flare gun. Let’s hide Kristy somewhere safe.’ It was so scary. They came really close. We had to kind of stand there with our spear gun. I had two flare guns and looked buff and we hoped they wouldn’t come and attack us, because they would have sank our boat and killed us.
Cyrus: And these are the same pirates that you hear about taking oil tankers and hostages, right?
Solomon: Pretty much one of the scariest things I’ve ever been through.
Cyrus: So what happened? How did you eventually get them to go away?
Solomon: Me and James were standing there with all the stuff. He had a big spear gun and I had the flare guns and maybe they thought that we weren’t going to run away and would fight and they didn’t want to fight. I don’t know. One of them was going to get shot with a spear gun either way.
Cyrus: So they turned around.
Solomon: They came really close and kind of looked at us and then turned around and went away.
Cyrus: That’s heavy. One of the bright sides of your adventure is that you were able to discover and explore islands, which people don’t really hear about. Like those atolls you came across.
Solomon: We came across this wave in the Maldives. There were perfect six to eight foot waves as we arrived there. It was a perfect riding point. And we were just there, parked in a lot. I didn’t even know places like that existed. You’d think everywhere is crowded.
Cyrus: What’s crazy is that there are still places like that in California.
Solomon: I know! It was just awesome being out there. We’d come so far not being able to surf, and then here’s this perfect world-class break.
Cyrus: What was the longest stretch you went on your sailing trip where you didn’t see land?
Solomon: About twenty days.
Cyrus: Does that get to you mentally?
Solomon: I guess yes. It’s really tough. Especially, I don’t know, you’re always on your own. We do watches 24 hours a day so you don’t really see the other guys too much. You just sleep when you’re not on watch. You have a lot of time to think about life, what you’re doing. There’s no internet, there’s no facebook.
Cyrus: What were you keeping watch for?
