With New Year’s firmly in the past and hangovers a vague mental aberration away, our crew assembled at six early at the Deus Temple to load up the vans and head to the sands.
Sunday, the second of January, was when we’d scheduled the first Deus Board Meeting, where the only suits appropriate were of the amphibious kind.
The event was held in conjunction with the Times Beach Warung on Batu Bolong Beach, this was to be most people’s first opportunity to test drive one of Jared Mell’s ‘Surf-A-Billy’ boards.
With anything where there are multiple moving parts and planned well in advance there will always be components out of our control. Seems the sea got the memo but decided to let it all slide. The tide was in high and the waves were definitely on the small side but fun trumped the day and there was smiles for miles especially in the water.
First up though was an organised beach clean-up by the Pangea Movement. Wet season brings currents that continually line the beaches of Bali with society’s single use plastics. People, quickly swooped onto the bag fillers; you know the big pieces, shoes, nappies, lightbulbs, flip flops and other non-biodegradable flotsam and jetsam. But some focused on collecting the small pieces of Styrofoam and other plastics that quickly become micro and slip into the fish and soon after, our food chain.
Just in this one stretch of sand, we collected up just shy of one hundred and seventy kilos of trash which we thought ain’t bad for an hours work on the first Sunday of the year.
The Times Beach Warung had already fired up their BBQ and coffee machine, aromas like the kid you get from grandma’s kitchen mixed with the salt spray making our collective mouths drool. The menagerie was sprinkled with cool tunes that drifted across the soon to be foot scorching hot black sand as things got really underway.
While we had fifteen boards to choose from it was the logs that were on high rotation. The waves might have been a little on the light side but that didn’t dampen people’s curiosity to grab something from this Jared shaped quiver, whether it be a log or a single, a bonzer or twinnie and get amongst it and make the most of a perfect day at the beach.
When the Deus Board Meeting happens again we’ll hope for better waves but what we’ll want more of is those same great vibes we experienced all day.
Big shout out to everyone who came down and shared a smile and a slide; The inimitable Mr. Jared Mell for the long hours in the shaping bay, Tai Buddha for the idea in the first place, Times Beach Warung for great food and drink and the hard working team from the Pangea Movement who organized the beach cleanup.
Shooter: Didit Prasetyo Adiwibowo
