Bodyboarding can gift you many things, and not just the metaphysical; we’re talking the good shit, the tangible shit, the real shit. It might be the result of being marginalised from surfing so like any self-respecting minority group we banded together, built crude homemade weapons and made noisy intonations with the same hotheadedness as Indian student migrants (except we don’t have a country of billions standing behind us). 

So nowadays you can book a ticket to Europe and bounce between gracious hosts who are always at the ready to show you around, if not house you. The Elit’ team arrived in Morocco with nothing more than a scrap of paper and some loose assurances given by some other loose acquaintances when they left France. They exited the airport in Casablanca and the Moroccan rep is waiting by his shiny red sports car, the country’s top rider, Adnane Benslimane, is happy to squeeze all four and boards for the eight-hour drive down the coast, his sound system that fills the entire boot is loaded with enough R’n’B to do the drive four times over. It might not always be pretty but it’s always appreciated. 

What is becoming an annual feature for this magazine, the Balinese board test, should be one of the hottest tickets of the year. We won’t be surprised if pros start ditching contracts in future years just to land an invite. Seven or eight mostly unsponsored guys posted up in a luxury villa, courtesy of Dean who runs Secret Sumatra, with 28 plastic-wrapped presents and two weeks of scouring the island in search of waves, arak and Scandi babes.

It was Dean who also met Lackey, Hardy and Tom Smith at an isolated airstrip on the island of Sumatra, joining his driver on a fourteen-hour round trip so he could personally greet the guests, loading bags into the four-wheelers that could navigate the mountain towns back to the bodyboarder-owned oasis in the jungle. Perfect right out the front, Blackrock-style left a short drive and all the mod-cons for which a twittering iPhone kid could hope. This spot was little more than a jungle clearing when Hardy first visited in ‘05, discovered a couple of years prior on a surf trip Dean and fellow owner Chris took while they were teaching English in Taiwan. It’s now Hardy’s favourite Indo hang and one he’s been back to three times since.

Jono Bruce recently took a trip to South Australia with Thom Robinson as part of an overdue profile but bodyboarding never gave him much else. As talented as Rawlins in his prime, he drifted on the outskirts for reasons of his own and reasons that weren’t. He still lives on the Sunshine Coast, where we visited him, but isn’t the quiet young kid you might remember. For everything given, just as much gets taken – but remember the real shit. 

- Movement