Yet in recent times Eden was hardly hospitable, more of a site for sea wars and infamous corsairs than surf-trekking. Unsmiling men sought these shores not for paradise but for tangible loot. Misery was common in Edenic culture, a displaced colony of lepers, slaves, and exiles governed by harassed tyrants of European regimes.

Today the islanders exist undiluted, relaxed, unambitious, soft-spoken, with skin black as licorice—so black it looks purple. They are affable and polite and lazy, dragging their feet as they walk. They have wide, flat noses and full lips covering horrible black teeth. Smiles come easily.
The men are well-fleshed and unshaven, the women curvy, with enormous breasts. They wear sarongs, sandals, shorts, T-shirts, hats, flowers behind their ears, and their faces carry a smugness intrinsic of islanders worldwide, knowing they live an ocean away from the world’s dysfunction, knowing that their world is truly sublime. What they don’t know, however, is the story of great surf potential in their backyard.

On the arrival wharf was a rickety wooden cart bridled to a battered ox. Flies buzzed around its head, snot oozed from its nose. Its fur was ruffled and dirty, its left horn was broken in half, the rope through its nostrils looked painful.

This cart was our transport to the island’s swell-exposed side, as the island was carless and its roads unpaved. Our Rastafarian driver Pierre—tall, gaunt, somewhat pedantic—steered us through a coconut plantation and onto a rubbly coral road paralleling the lagoon and an unbroken line of whitewater out along the barrier reef. We passed a copra mill with an ox walking in circles, yoked to a wheel powering the mill, smashing coconut husks for valuable export oil.

The road weaved through dense palm and pandanus trees bordered by steep and lush mountains of green. It skirted waterfalls and the shores of three wide beaches; the tide was out, so pirogues sat dry-docked on the flat white sand of each.

Further, we came upon a series of pretty coves flanked by coconut palms and granite boulders. Then a clearing—a corridor of green grass fronting an algae-mottled lagoon—occupied by a trio of grazing white horses, which we petted. Their fur was lustrous and groomed, though Guillaume said there were no people on this side of the island who could care for the animals.

Eventually we stopped to survey a white arc of beach, hot and serene, its only sound was that of waves peeling into a reef pass a half-mile offshore. Nearby was a derelict red pickup truck sagging on frayed suspension, its tires bald and deflated, its windshield cracked, both doors missing.
Behind the surf were two dark men hunkered in a pirogue, low in the water, apparently sinking. In slow-motion they paddled it through the pass and crept across the lagoon to shore; packed to its gunwales, the vessel was loaded with tuna.

One man hopped out of the pirogue as the other tossed a small stone anchor into the knee-deep water near shore. Then both men grabbed a fish by its tail in each hand and trudged up the sloped beach toward us and the truck. Shirtless and shaggy in wet sarongs, the men looked middle-aged, with dreadlocked hair and gray beards. I said “bonzour”—Creole for hello—as they staggered by, arms and faces shimmering with sweat.

“Comman sava?”—How are you? the fatter man asked, grinning at me, revealing his black teeth-stumps. His eyes were blazingly bloodshot.

“Mon byen, mersi,” I said—Fine, thanks.

One-by-one, the men lunged the heavy fish into the bed of the pickup, which appeared to be incapable of supporting the weight of the great catch.

“What kind of fish are those?” David asked.

“Deese good feesh,” the fat man said. His voice was hoarse—talking seemed painful. “Deese good fo’ eat.”

“Where are you taking them?”

“Le marché”—the market.

An hour passed before the boat was emptied and the truck was loaded with a slimy, shiny heap of dead fish. They were big and plump and all looked alike. The men got into the cab of the truck. Remarkably, its motor started with the key’s first turn.

“Orevwar,” croaked the fat man—Creole for goodbye.

We waved back, and then they were gone. David wondered if there was a town nearby, but it was of no real concern: this beach was heavenly. Its lagoon was clear and warm, lapping up onto soft, powdery white sand between granite boulders. Palms and takamaka trees bordered the beach, offering shade from the fierce afternoon heat. And out there along the north side of the pass was a perfect, unsurfed right peeling into the clear, blue channel.

It was a classic thirty-foot-long cargo sloop, relic of outdated commerce, unsuitable for distant trips but fine for a surf-seeking island sail. Guillaume, our lively chaperon, had borrowed the sloop to access a nearby beach that was unreachable by land.

“A surf spot?” I asked.

“You wait and see,” he said.

From our boat, the beach looked charming—we expected photogenic privacy and some good snorkeling, not the solitary wonder of an empty, tropical Rincon Cove. And so it went.

Late afternoon. Mary straddled her longboard atop an incandescent mirror, her back and shoulders warmed by sun dropping into mountain silhouettes. Waiting for waves, her legs dangled in an exotic aquarium: snapper, angelfish, butterfly fish, chromis, fusiliers, wrasse, trumpetfish, pipefish, needlefish. Flying fish skipped across the surface, chased by barracuda.

My first wave: the tube’s almond eye reflected everything. Into the glare, it was a funnel of resplendence, in slow-motion—the mountains, the sinking sun, the deserted beach fronted by tranquil lagoon.
Between waves, all was Edenic. Above, fairy terns flitted; around, green turtles floated; behind, the palmy beach awaited.

Soon the natural light darkened, morphing from saturation to a wash of pastels, sea and sky glowing violet and ocher, the play of light distracting me from an approaching swell.

Like the others, this set was perfect. Purply and tapered, the first wave humped onto the reef and effortlessly let Holly in. She hopped to her feet; a predictably hermetic backside barrel followed, and the technique—perfected from cold dedicated hours at El Porto—was innate.

My last wave: another tube, this one inky and narrow, like a teardrop. Then I turned shoreward and paddled in. Large fish—perhaps the kind those fishermen had caught—blurped out of the water, snatching baitfish, my hands sinking into schools of them, the whole lagoon alive, reflecting coolly into my sunburned eyes.

Pinpoint the surf discoveries you remember best. Perhaps it was Indonesia—Uluwatu, Grajagan, Lance’s Right. Perhaps it was Tavarua, Mundaka, Cloud Nine, or Supertubes. Or maybe it’s desert sand that intrigued you: Red Bluff, Chicama, Scorpion Bay. Or hypothermia: Lofoten, Seaside, Thurso East. Or emerald Indian Ocean dreams of Pasta Point, Kumari, and…..Santosha.

The looping lefts at Mauritius’ Tamarin Bay inspired the nucleus of Larry Yates’s seminal 1974 article about the “Forgotten Island of Santosha,” which reassured each and every one of us of our own mental utopia. The concept sent urban-weary surfers into a scattered frenzy, pining abroad for this “Santosha,” knowing that it existed, but not knowing exactly how or where.

Australian Kevin Lovett found his at Lagundi Bay on the Indonesian island of Nias. After sailing along Sumatra with partner John Geisel and hard-core traveler Peter Troy, Lovett endured remarkable hardship and garnered personal growth to discover one of the world’s best waves, his reasoning published in The Surfer’s Journal:

“Recurring images of pristine tropical environments, swaying palm trees and perfect surf seemed to fill my every waking moment from the time I read (‘Santosha’). The author…drew a red herring across the trail to the site of his experience by describing ‘Santosha’ as not really a place, but a state of mind….Was the Surfer’s Dream just a state of mind? Was there no physical basis for its existence?”

Of course, Eden—our discovery—is what you make of it. It could be purely mental, or it could be an actual place. Chances are you’ve never even heard of it, anyway—an unmodern island, sunny and slow, off the radar, sunken into the periphery of an equatorial ocean theater long revered for its treasure, its piracy, its mystique. But not for its surf, which, if you adhered to common belief, remains nonexistent. Eden isn’t Mauritius, Yates’s fantasyland of yore. Eden is, however, Santosha’s conceptual twin.

“Santosha really isn’t a place,” Yates wrote. “It’s a state of mind. A forgotten state of mind.”

And, like Yates, we stumbled into a paradise through serendipity. We had reached the end of the road in terms of nirvanic wanderlust, facing us there, in Eden.

What was once abstruse became absolute. Like Lovett and Yates, we sought, so we traveled. Eden prevailed. How romantic it was, a gift to share with rest of the world, something we fled, but ultimately returned to, ultimately enlightened.