Quest for Fire (Part 2)
Surfer Magazine  (USA November 1998)

Text by: Sam George
Photos by: Darrell Jones and John Callahan

Port Blair: April 28th 1998:

Still no sign of the boys in their yacht from Burma. I hire a driver and in a battered taxi rattle through town, winding around a snug back bay called the Hornbill’s Nest. Top-heavy inter-island ferries with blood-rust-streaked hulls and straked fishing boats lie over on their gunwales, propped up for repairs in the low-tide muck. Across the Chatham Jetty to the islet of Chatham, its tall signal tower rising up through tangled trees, standing out against the hazy blue sky at the summit of a steep hill. A sleepy customs officer had told me that any boat arriving in the Andamans must register with Port Control, housed here in the lonely tower. The taxi wheezes up a vertical driveway, I climb sweating up narrow stairs, and in a shadowy, dusty office, sitting in front of a round, electric fan, a very solemn Mr. Kumar looks across a huge desk and informs me no shipload of American surfers has checked in with his office.

I ask Mr. Kumar if they get many private yachts here in Port Blair. "Three or four a year", he says. "Not enough to lose one in the crowd." "Have you ever heard of any surfers traveling through here, Mr. Kumar?" I ask. "In the years past, I mean." "Surfers?" he asks. Mr. Kumar has a huge fleshy cyst protruding from the side of his nose, and I try not to stare. "You know, surfers, here to ride the waves that break on the coral reef." "No, I have never heard of such a thing here", he says. "Never?" "Never."

"Is there any way somebody could get to any of the outer islands without you knowing it?" "This is not possible. You must first register with us and then clear immigration and customs. The government is very serious about protecting the original native cultures on these islands. Some of these tribes still live in the Stone Age, you know. The Jarawa tribe in the south have not yet discovered fire. They must wait for lightning to strike a tree, and then they protect the flame throughout the year. And their dress is nudity. Most of Middle Andaman, North Sentinel Island and Little Andaman are off-limits for foreigners. To visit, many of the islands require a special permit. The Crescent’s master has these permits?" "I sure hope so", I say.

Later I walk through the bazaar to the Aberdeen Jetty and swim with half a dozen Indian boys: glistening brown frogs, leaping and then kicking across the placid surface of the bay.. To be honest, I don’t think that there’s any surf here. Flying in from the Indian continent the sea was lake a pane of green glass – not moving at all. And that was on the Bay of Bengal side, exposed. Here in Port Blair, on the Andaman Sea, facing Thailand and the Isthmus of Kra, I get nothing from the water. No message, no hints, no siren’s song. I feel no energy, put my foot in the sea: no pulse.

I hope that I’m wrong. But it doesn’t really matter. I’m here, my boards are with me, and with or without the Crescent I’ll look around a bit. There is a man, Mr. Magavarnan, who is said to know these waters, and who tomorrow might charter me his fishing boat from Wandoor Bay on the west side of the island.

To pass this day I put on goggles and swim across the channel to tiny Ross Island, a quarter mile off Aberdeen Jetty. This densely forested lump was once the home of the British Chief Commissioner. Port Blair was settled by England and established as an offshore penal colony during India’s Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, though the Royal Navy had first surveyed the chain of 321 emerald islands as far back as 1788. The infamous Cellular Jail crushed the life but not the spirit out of generations of Indian freedom fighters.; it’s now a national monument and one of Port Blair’s prime attractions. Ross Island, on the other hand, has been left to rot. The consular mansions are now crumbled ruins wrapped in goat’s foot creepers, the mortar cracked and blasted by the prying roots of 100-foot-tall padouk hardwoods. Ghosts haunt the footpaths in the dappled light under the canopy: the sound of a waltz being played in the doomed ballroom, the clink of cur crystal – gay, righteous laughter.

Later that afternoon, dozing in my room in the Hotel Dhanalaksmi, dreaming of morning offshores whipping out of Salinas Valley, a small white telephone I didn’t know existed trills like a dove. Startled, I pick up the receiver. "Yes?" "This is Mr. Kumar at Port Authority. Your yacht is here, Mr. George."

I jump on a motorcycle and blaze out around the point to the southeastern tip of Port Blair’s wide, natural harbor. The sea is bottle-glass green, rippled with a light, south-westerly, the horizon indistinct in the refracted sunlight. I park in the shade next to a small Hindu shrine and look out past Ross Island, not focusing but just letting my eyes take in the sight. There is something so wonderful, so filled with promise, about sitting on a promontory on a faraway shore and scanning the horizon for a sail. Friends are out there, somewhere. Laughter and shared perspectives.

I love being alone on a trip like this; I can’t wait for the Crescent to get here.