“When we finally got there, it was high tide and barely a wave breaking. By late afternoon it was pumping!” Surfing Life’s filmer had been waiting patiently for Padang to fire up for the Rip Curl Cup when Ozzie Wright (who’s in Bali with his family and is a reserve for the contest) told him Desert Point would be good for the next two days. Naturally, Sam jumped at the chance to go on a mission with Oz … but getting there is easier said than done.

“You’ve got to drive for about two hours to the ferry, but if it’s busy and the next boat’s full you can be left waiting for a couple of hours. Once you’re on the boat, if you’re lucky you can get a cabin on the ferry. We managed to grab a cabin and had about five hours of interrupted sleep before we arrived at Lombok. And then once you’re off the ferry it’s another hour to get to Desert Point.  We stayed just one night in a little hut on the beach and surfed till lunch time the next day, and then made the trip back to Bali.”

“Funnily enough, two parts from the opening clip have a weird story. That big cow you see is actually what the Indonesians get put in when they die and it gets burnt – we only found that out after we’d filmed it. The boat that you see Ozzie in is actually the newest of the fleet. And by newest, I mean it was made in 1979! There are 29 boats that go between Padang and Lombok and every couple of years one of them will sink.”

“And the song? Ozzie told me a mate had given him a CD with that Iggy Pop song on it, and he wanted to use it on a clip with that board he was surfing because it was super fast. Oz told me that he had seen Iggy Pop on a plane after a show a few years ago and he’d gone up to him and said “Hey Iggy, thanks for playing an awesome show last night!”. Iggy thanked him and was stoked that he had been there.”

“That sort of sums up how Oz is in person. He’s not caught up in any hype in the slightest. On the first day he took the time and went around and said “Hi” to all the local guys that lived there,  and when we left he went and said his thanks and good-byes to everyone too. Legend.”

Video: Sam Norwood

Story from - surfinglife.com.au