The Forgotten Islands
Australia's Surfing Life (August 1999)
Photos by: Andrew Shield
The world’s last un-crowded
surf spots lie lonely and empty thanks to different forces. For some, mystery is a shroud
of protection, these breaks may secretly lie only a few hours drive from the frothing city
masses… but only the lucky few know their location. Others are in zones so harsh
they’re impossible to surf, places where you’d freeze, starve, or be hit by a
stray bullet.
Some places have simply been forgotten. Maybe they’ve
been idly dreamt of by surfers staring at the world map, stumbled into by sailors far from
home or whispered about in Third World bars.  But they’ve remained too far
away and too expensive to get to. Protected by strange laws and latent with the fear of
incurable tropic disease. Seen only by cashed-up crazies or drifters who’d forgotten
what year it was. But slowly, as surfers probe deeper and deeper into the world’s
lonely places, strange new doors swing open.
The Forgotten Islands still are a hell-mission to get to,
they still have some weird cannibalistic corners and they make your average Indo village
look like a suburban shopping mall. But they hold one important jewel – waves.
Margo, Shannon Pollard, Luke Munro and James Catto trekked
there recently with Hawaiian hell-groom Mark Healy and ASL senior photographer Andrew
Shield.  It was a
grueling trip that began with waves before slowly descending into a horrible delirium of
sacrifice, monsoon storms and, as they silently crept into a bored insanity, some
terrible, terrible home-hairdressing experiences.
Most locals here welcome funny looking white boys and are
happy to let ‘em bat at number three and even open the bowling. But on the more
isolated islands they see strange visitors in a different way, actually they see them as
food. The surfers are told not to set foot on land and if they saw a bunch of dudes
paddling madly towards them in canoes to get the fuck out of there. Word is, an
inter-island freighter was wrecked on the island and all the survivors were eaten. Are
these the world’s heaviest locals?
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