Nic von Rupp really likes Desert Point. Most people do, but only a handful can surf it as well as he can. He recently made the jaunt to Indonesia (the rigamarole was covered here), and he had an inkling that it was going to be good. Like, really good. But getting there wasn’t easy.
“Traveling to Indonesia used to be as easy as booking a flight the night before,” he said. “Now with the COVID crises and numbers spiking, Indonesia went into full lockdown with crazy restrictions to enter and travel through the country. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we booked Indo as our travel destination.”
After he had done the mandatory quarantine, he pointed himself towards Desert Point. He timed it just about perfectly, too — for two straight days, the famous wave reeled down the line just about as perfectly as it ever could. But, as is often the case while in Indonesia, a wrench fell into the cogs. That wrench came in the form of an insect called a tomcat, sometimes known as a rove beetle.
“I was worried I was going to spend the swell in a hospital since I got attacked by a rare insect that got me really bad,” Nic wrote. “My eye started swelling like crazy, my face was covered in a weird rash. I honestly thought I couldn’t make the swell.”
Tomcats ain’t no joke. It’s said that their venom is as powerful as a cobra’s. It looks a bit like a long ant with a black and reddish-brown body. Found across Java and, in isolated cases, in Bali and Lombok, tomcats show up in the dry season. If you somehow manage to get the venom in your bloodstream, you’re in for a bad ride, but luckily, the tomcat’s venom didn’t enter Nic’s veins. Still, though, the results are pretty horrible.
“Look out for those guys,” Nic continued. “They can get you bad. But honestly as bad as it was, nothing was going to stop me from scoring that swell.”
And from the footage, it’s clear he meant that, because he scored. Hard.
