PSYCHED!
Shortly afterwards, Marijke, the marketing director at Mystic, wrote to me to ask me to please book a ticket from Maui to LA so that I could join the whole team on the final flight to Tahiti. I couldn’t believe my luck! I had dreamt of going to Tahiti so many times, watched countless Teahupo’o videos and spoken to so many people about the place that I almost felt like I had been there. Now I was actually going and with a whole film crew to document the story!! Only one thing beats playing in some of the world’s best waves, and that is being filmed and photographed while you are doing it!
On the final plane down there, they had the film Encoded as one of the viewing options. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth a watch as it documents some of the biggest swells ever ridden at Teahupo’o. It was certainly enough to put the fear of God into us on the way down there and had Guilly (one of the Mystic kiters) and I quaking in our boots as we prepared to land in Tahiti. The forecast was for pumping swell right from day 1 and there were rumours that lots of pro surfers were heading down to catch the swell before their WSL event in Fiji the following week.
There were 10 of us on the trip, all staying in a basic but absolutely incredibly positioned house on the waterfront, about 15 minutes by boat from Teahupo’o itself. We arrived in the dark, picked our beds and tried to sleep, but you could hear the waves out on the reef and the mosquitoes were out in force, so it was tough to sleep with the combination of jet lag, insects buzzing and adrenaline pumping through the veins. It’s funny though how little you need to sleep when you have that much adrenaline coursing through your system as we were all right as rain in the morning and chomping at the bit to get out there!