FINDING TELESCOPES

Indies Trader:  So tell us about finding Telescopes …

MD: Ahhh well, yeah Telescopes … one of the best waves I have ever seen I guess. So I was … ah … I have a friend Called Danny Madre (Happy Birthday if you are reading this Danny!) and around about 1990 I had to go to the Philippines and Danny and I had been talking about going to the Mentawais … frothing over charts and stuff and we had already done the coast of Sumatra and the bottom end of the chain but not the other part, so Danny and I were gonna join forces and go do it but I had to go on this salvage mission to the Philippines so the bastard went out there without me.

So he went out with his brother Martin Madre and a friend of mine called Dave Schiller (Who’s passed away) so they got a zodiac and got dumped off the ferry and were going around camping on the beach out of the Zodiac. I dunno how long they were out there probably about two or three weeks in the Mentawais. This is one of the very first expeditions …

So I have come back from the Philippines and Danny had had one of those Betamax video cameras, you know the ones you put the big cassettes in the side of and he was just torturing me with videos of these waves he had found in the Mentawais. So he had video of a place he called Telescopes and some video of a place he called Macaroni’s and a place he called Kandui (Which was re-named Rifles) and the bastard had beaten me to it … I was gutted.

Anyway I was still pretty keen to get up there, so later on that year I went up there to do a salvage job and found a few waves and then the year after that I ended up taking Stuart Cadden, Ross Clarke Jones, Tom Carroll, Martin Potter, Bodge and his mates from Newport a guy called Paul Graham on a new boat I had built called Volcanic up to the Mentawais.

So Danny and I had a deal where I would not tell him where I found waves and he would not tell me. The deal was that if he could prove that he had surfed it we would stick to the code name he had given it and if I had surfed it first we would stick to the code name I had given it. That’s all that surf spot names are, just so you don’t give away the geographical location. So that was our deal.

So I am on the trip I mentioned and we arrived at Tuapajet which was the second biggest town in the Mentawais. I had lost a generator and was trying to see if it was possible to buy one in the islands, and we arrived at Telescopes at daylight, well just as the first rays of sun were coming up, I had been past before when it was crappy but this day was … pretty well the day of days.

Anyway I am circling around watching the sun come up next to the break and it’s 8 feet, anybodies 8 feet and the sets are lasting 20 minutes. An absolute apparition, you know I’d already surfed some amazing waves with these guys on this trip but I didn’t know much about, you know I’d never been to Hawaii and I didn’t really know what they thought good surf was. I kinda assumed that there was amazing surf all over the world that these guys had been surfing. I kinda thought what we had found in the Mentawais and what we had found up there was not really that special compared to what they had been surfing.

So anyway finally I started making some noise to get these guys up and I remember the look on their faces as they came up from the bunks, Ross Clarke Jones had bumped his head on the way up and was sort of complaining and then their jaws just dropped and they we’re just going “Holy shit what is that”. So next thing you know we are anchored up and there was a scramble and we had an amazing session, I thought it was possibly Macaronis cause I didn’t really know how Danny had named them and which of the two lefts it was and then we went to Macaronis later and thought that was Telescopes.

So I saw Pottz out there and he had been World Champ recently and Tom Carroll had been world champ recently so there is two of the best surfers on the planet at the time. Out the back of Telescopes this session there was another peak WAY up the reef that we have never surfed since and the two goofy footers Stuart Cadden and Tom were getting barrelled all the way through from that section to the normal deepest take off there is now and going all the way through to the end. I think I watched Pottz do 17 snaps on one wave … something like that. I got a few waves myself and was pretty stoked and that session has been embedded in my brain my whole life. To this day I think it may be some of the best… actually is the best surf I have ever seen and certainly it was fresh and it was new … and the rest, as they say is history.