Legendary surf explorer Martin Daly has ridden out the pandemic aboard his luxury surf charter, Indies Trader 3, adrift in the South Pacific

By Tim Baker

How have you spent COVID lockdown? Baking sourdough? Bingeing Netflix? Home schooling? Zoom conferencing?

For legendary surf explorer Martin Daly, the global pandemic has meant a different kind of lockdown, floating through Melanesia aboard his luxurious surf charter boat, the Indies Trader 3, with only his crew and the occasional local character for company.

For the past nine months Martin’s been discovering new waves, fighting off pirates, catching fish, surviving cyclones, diving pristine reefs, all while trying to keep his surf travel empire …  well … afloat. He hasn’t been off the boat in 12 months, hasn’t seen his family in nearly that long, his last paying surf charter was in March and his exclusive holiday resort in the Marshall Islands, Beran Island, has been without guests for just as long.

I was fortunate enough to spend a month aboard the Trader 3 with Martin on two separate trips as he traversed the South Pacific in early 2020, before the world changed. Back then, he was searching for new and greener pastures to escape the crowds of his first great surf discovery, the Mentawai Islands, off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. 

Things looked promising as we discovered one friendly right hand point after another, as well as ledgey slabs, peaky beachbreaks, and a couple of serious big wave reefs, all in the most sublime setting. Bookings were pouring in and Martin’s pivot to the Pacific looked like another outstanding success in a career full of remarkable surf discoveries. But 2020 had other ideas.

When did he realise everything was about to change? “It was pretty much in March, when we had a bunch of people from Huntington Beach on board and they decided to go home early,” says Martin, floating off an unnamed island chain as we chat over WhatsApp and he dazzles me with a view of another psychedelic, tropical sunset. 

“We cut that trip in half and took them back. I thought they were over-reacting, but they weren’t. They were lucky to get home. Flights were being cancelled,” he says. “I had a bunch of people flying to Beran and they got turned around at the airport.  I was in PNG and cleared out to go to the Solomon Islands and while at sea both countries closed their borders, and I became unemployed and stateless on the same day.”

“I was in PNG and cleared out to go to the Solomon Islands and while at sea both countries closed their borders, and I became unemployed and stateless on the same day.”

He was left stranded at sea for 10 days before finally negotiating entry to the Solomon Islands, but was still unable to have guests fly in. With the running costs of his business mounting, and only his long-time Indonesian crew aboard, it has been a long and anxious wait for normality to resume. “It’s like when you see a close-out coming and you get caught inside and it never stops closing out and you never get back out again,” he says.

But there have been silver linings in floating around a largely unexplored island chain with no guests, almost no other boats or surfers in the region, and little to do but search for surf. 

“I’ve managed to do a couple of thousand miles of coast in the tin boat. I’ve found more waves in the last year than in the rest of my life,” he says. “It’s been nice really having lots of time on your hands to just reflect about things, think about your relationships with people. People talk to each other for longer, where we always had to rush off and do something. I don’t need to rush off and do something. I have to kill time and relax and chat to this person and have a cold beer. There’s time for engagement.”

He’s also been heartened by the state of the reefs he’s seen recover from recent coral bleaching events. “I’ve been encouraged to see massive coral re-growth. Where I am the reefs have almost completely recovered, just spectacular.”

While he’s run into the occasional traveller, befriended locals, and even invited a few characters aboard for short stints, it has just been Martin and his crew for most of that time. “I’ve spent a lot of time by myself and my crew, lot of time in one room. You can kind of imagine what it’s like to be in prison,” he says. “But I wake up every day and I go, I’m on a boat off a tropical island, don’t feel sorry for yourself, but it’s just going on and on. But it’s a beautiful evening, with nice people on board, I’ve just been for a nice dive.”

Martin’s Instagram feed reflects the yin and yang of surf travel in the time of COVID, capturing the extreme isolation and uncertainty alongside the idyllic sunsets, surf discoveries and chance encounters. He’s been hammered by storms, attacked by pirates, gorged on fresh crayfish and perfect empty waves.

“I think the hardest thing is to rationalise that there’s no one to blame. You can’t do anything about it except make the best of it and try to keep in touch with what the news is and to try and make contingency plans to make sure you and your family will survive and there will be some sort of outcome,” Martin says. “And the responsibility of all the people who work for you, they want to get angry with you and they can’t because it’s not your fault. It’s really a character-building exercise for everybody.”

Fittingly, it was his original old workhorse, the Indies Trader 1, which paid the bills for the first few months of the pandemic, rented out to marine researchers in the Marshall Islands. But when that contract came to an end and the pandemic and travel restrictions dragged on, things started getting critical, even for the famously unflappable skipper.  

“I’ve only really started to get anxious in the last three or four weeks as I watched my bank balance get into the red. It’s more urgent now that we get over this because it’s getting to the point where we’ve hung in there so long. I can’t imagine how bad it is for some people, losing businesses, losing members of their family.”

He’s recently received his first guests since the pandemic, somehow organising their safe travel from the US to a remote island air strip to board the Trader 3, where they scored heavily, but the future remains uncertain. “I can’t go back to Australia. I’m hanging in there by a thread with my business, I can’t justify going into quarantine for two weeks.”

But as anyone who knows Martin can attest, he’s not one to wallow in self-pity. “At the end of the day, I’ve had a pretty soft experience. I’ve been in my little bubble, any gripes I have got are pretty soft.”

What’s sustained Martin through this challenging time is that timeless quest for the next great surf discovery. “I think of the times when the swell’s arrived and we’re at a place, we don’t know if it’s any good and it turns out to be better than we expected,” he says. “When you’re coming around the headland, the possibility in 2020 that you’re going to find the next G-land or Macaronis, I’ve come pretty close in the last year.”

MARTIN DALY

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INDIES TRADER