My work these past few weeks has seen me bogged down in the studio with very few chances to chase waves or adventures. So I've been planning them instead. And to keep my sanity in check, I've been diving back into my hard drives – back in time to this year's Mentawai Islands trip.
It's always a nice trip down memory lane to revisit these images. We got completely lost out there on the Indian Ocean, just following our noses for pulses of swell, whimsies of wind and empty reef breaks. By midway through the two-week trip, life in the tropics starts to normalise. You've been through the wringer physically, but you start to rise to the challenges that present themselves each day.
There is such a variety of waves in this part of the world – you can surf completely new spots or old ones that behave quite differently due to a swell direction or bump in energy.
The images this week come from a hollow little perfect left that I never really made friends with and a lumpy right that was nowhere near as pretty but was a heap of fun to surf, with sections all the way into the coral sand in the corner ... if you made it past a knot of coral that occasionally dried up. I find myself dreaming about Indo a lot as we grind out of winter and into spring. But this El Niño should be kicking in some ground swells from here on in ... fingers crossed.
See you at the beach, Derek.
PS: Huge congrats to Raglan surfer Alani Morse, who earned a bronze medal at the 2026 ISA World Junior Surfing Championships, held in El Salvador this past week. Alani competed in the Under-16 Girls, while Dunedin's Alexis Owen finished 10th equal in the Under-18 Boys and helped the New Zealand team secure an eighth-place finish.
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