ONE of Australian surfing's underground legends, Peter McCabe, has come clean about his early years on "the dark side", which culminated in an 18-month stretch in a New Caledonian jail for drug smuggling.
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McCabe's story is hardly a secret in the surfing world but the tales have grown so much over the decades that fact and fiction have become hard to separate.
Although the 60-year-old Novocastrian had hoped this 30-year-old episode was behind him, what was once ancient history has been given new life through the release of a surf movie called Sea of Darkness.
This extraordinary film centres traces the rise of surfing in Indonesia and spends a lot of time on McCabe and two of his fellow travellers, New Zealand salvage diver Jeff Chitty and a shadowy American, Mike Boyum.
It was Boyum and friends who first surfed the now famous Javanese breaks at Grajagan or G-Land, which is still McCabe's favourite wave to this day.
While McCabe concedes the film is fairly accurate, he is upset with some of the surf industry reporting that has accompanied it and believes an interview with the Newcastle Herald will help set the record straight.
"I did it, I got caught, and I did my time," McCabe said this week from his surfboard shaping bay at Wickham.
"That first eight months in jail was hard, but then they let me out during the day to work.
"I was cleaning the court room, driving errands for the police chief. He just said, 'Hey, Petey, don't you escape, OK?' It was all right in the end and I did 18 months of an original three-year sentence."
Short and nuggety and still wearing the aviator sunglasses, goatee and moustache that were his trademark as a younger man, McCabe remains in demand as a board shaper, turning out "between one and 10 boards a week", many for repeat customers who have loved his boards over the years.
In a move that harks back to the days when McCabe and Surfest founder Warren Smith ran the Trade Winds surfboard shop together in Newcastle's East End, McCabe's boards will soon be available in the Sanbah Surf Shop at The Junction operated by Smith's son Rhys.
McCabe was a surfing god in the late 1970s and early 1980s, featuring in countless magazines and at least a dozen movies, often in the company of Hawaiian legend Gerry Lopez and surfing the impossibly perfect left-hand breaks that were then newly discovered along the southern coasts of Bali, Java and beyond.
His tube riding featured prominently in two big movies by Hawaiian filmmaker Jack McCoy: Tubular Swells in 1975 and Storm Riders in 1982.
And then, suddenly, McCabe was gone.
As he recounts in Sea of Darkness, and again to the Herald, he was busted in Noumea in 1984 with Boyum and Chitty in the midst of smuggling half a kilogram of Bolivian cocaine to Australia in hollowed out surfboard fins that he had made for the purpose.
Chitty and Boyum had smuggled the original stash, of two kilograms, on a suitcase by aeroplane from Brazil to Jakarta.
Chitty then swallowed about half a kilogram of it in condoms and flew to Noumea, where he met McCabe and Boyum with the hollowed-out surf fins, which someone else had agreed to take to Australia.
In Sea of Darkness, Chitty recounts how he was interrogated after disembarking at Noumea by customs agents who said they knew he was carrying drugs internally.
He kept up his denials but when the customs agents told him they were taking him to hospital to be X-rayed, he said he "died on the inside" but "kept my cool".
But instead of taking him to the hospital, they let him go, telling him to "get your English arse out of here".
Barely believing he'd been let go, he told Boyum and McCabe they were under surveillance. But lulled by Boyum's eternal optimism, the three of them went out for a night on the town and were sitting in a motel room at 3am, having just sampled the product, when the police knocked down the door.
Boyum escaped out a toilet window and used his jungle survival skills to evade capture for a fortnight, before police dropped a net on him from a helicopter at the other end of New Caledonia.
McCabe and Chitty were sentenced to three years each and Boyum four.
McCabe says that 18-month stretch in jail was the end of his involvement in "something so stupid".
Sea of Darkness shows him catching his first wave at G-Land after being let out of prison in 1986, and then he disappears from the film.
Chitty and Boyum, however, continued on their criminal scamming ways.
Chitty did time in Brisbane's Boggo Road jail after another big drug bust and eventually moved back to New Zealand.
McCabe says he last saw Chitty in 1999 and was saddened to receive an email telling him his friend had died at the end of May, aged 58.
"He was a pretty heavy drinker, and he'd been in and out of detox but basically he was just angry and upset that his life had not turned out the way he hoped it would," McCabe says.
As the movie says, Boyum's last stand was in the Philippines, where he found another perfect and empty wave - a right-hander on Siargao Island that he called Cloud Nine - where he opened the final Boyum Surf Camp.
It was there, hiding after allegedly ripping off the Hawaiian mob for $US1 million, that he died on June 14, 1989, aged just 43.
Despite his drug use, Boyum was a fitness fanatic who kept a macrobiotic diet and practised long periods of fasting to retain what looked on film to be a healthy, lean physique.
Rumours had Boyum shot by the mob, but the general account is that he was more than 40 days into one of his regular fasts when he simply pushed his body too far, one too many times.
Sea of Darkness was made by a South African filmmaker, Mike Oblowitz, whose CV ranges through film noir, music videos, sci-fi and two Steven Seagal films.
Oblowitz told Surfing World magazine recently that he grew up as a surfer in the cold waters of South Africa, a young goofy-footer infatuated with an Indonesia he could not visit because South Africans were not allowed into the archipelago during apartheid.
As a filmmaker, he saw a lot of potential in the Mike Boyum story, and began tracking down the surviving participants.
As he says in the movie, the 1970s were an era of immense turbulence in south-east Asia, with the Vietnam war and its aftermath contributing heavily to the western world's problems with drugs, as huge amounts of narcotics and marijuana began to funnel their way out of the Golden Triangle.
Today, surfers wanting Indonesian perfection can book a spot on any of the literally dozens of charter vessels working a 3500-kilometre long stretch of equatorial Indian Ocean from Banda Aceh to Timor Leste.
Back then, it was a much less certain adventure.
Boyum and his brother Bill were the sons of a US naval pilot. They got to Bali in the late 1960s, after a spell on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
Kuta was still a village in those days, and Uluwatu, on the Bukit peninsula, would not be "discovered" until 1971 by Australian filmmakers Alby Falzon and David Elfick, who were in Bali to shoot scenes for their soon-to-be-classic, Morning of the Earth.
Australian surfer Stephen Cooney, then just 15, is credited as the first person to catch a wave at Uluwatu, after he and expatriate American Rusty Miller paddled out through the now-famous cave for the first time.
G-Land was discovered the following year when a friend of the Boyums, Bob Laverty, saw it out of the windscreen of the plane he was flying to Jakarta. Soon after their first surf at G-Land, Laverty drowned in the surf back at Uluwatu.
Although Mike Boyum had only average skills as a surfer, he was a charismatic and driven individual who had decided, like lots of his generation, that anything was better than a nine-to-five job.
He was such a wheeler and dealer that he wrangled a private concession on G-Land from the Indonesian authorities, giving him the sole right, for almost a decade, to say who surfed there and who didn't.
For the first few years, it was just him and his mates, including McCabe - who was spending every May to October in Bali in those days - and a handful of other early Indonesian hands including Lopez and 1974 US champ Rick Rasmussen.
Boyum then turned G-Land into a commercial venture, earning up to $250,000 a year charging up to $1000 a week to surfers willing to put up with primitive camp conditions to surf perfect uncrowded waves in warm water.
Boyum eventually lost control of G-Land to the Indonesians, and it was during this period, in the mid-1980s, when the Noumea disaster unfolded.
The links between drugs and surfing have been well documented, but Sea of Darkness joins the dots in ways that apparently alarmed some of the participants and led, as Oblowitz told Surfing World, to "a lot of attempts to shut the movie down and make it disappear".
However, the record speaks for itself.
Rasmussen, shown surfing G-Land in the film, eventually succumbed to heroin addiction and was shot dead in a New York drug deal gone wrong in 1982.
Quiksilver US co-founder and legendary big-wave rider Jeff Hakman outlined his battles with heroin in Mr Sunset: The Jeff Hackman Story by former Newcastle journalist Phil Jarratt.
Away from the characters in the film, Tom Carroll and Mark Occhilupo both survived their well-documented drug problems but another former world champ, Andy Irons, did not.
THE drugs might have been plentiful in Indonesia but to McCabe, the main attraction was always the waves.
Born at Narooma on the NSW south coast in 1955, McCabe moved to Newcastle with his parents at the age of eight, living in one of the "Boatmen's Row" of terraces on Nobbys Road in the East End.
For a while, his mother, Joan, ran a takeaway shop on the same street, a block closer to Newcastle beach. The shop disappeared years ago.
Surfing in competitions from an early age, McCabe honed his skills in the various rock-bottom breaks from Nobbys through to the Cowrie Hole and Newcastle Point.
He went to school at Marist Brothers, Hamilton, where he was two years ahead of another rising surf star, a young Mark Richards. McCabe remembers Mark's father, Ray Richards, picking him up to go surfing before school.
He finished second to Richards in the junior division of the Australian titles in 1974, and placed fifth in the men's division the following year - a competition he says spurred him on to his first trip to Bali.
"I'd been at the Australian championships in South Australia at Middleton Point - everyone called it Dribbleton - in 1975," McCabe recalls.
"It was freezing cold, the waves were rubbish and I was sitting in the water with 'Doris' [Queensland goofy-footer Tony Elthrington] and I had just had enough, I said, 'That's it, I'm out of here', and I drove home to Newy and got a ticket to Bali."
It was the thing to do at the time. Elthrington, a year younger than McCabe, also made his first trip to Bali in 1975, and is still in Indonesia 40 years later, running a surf charter business from his own 65-foot boat, the Raja Elang.
Taught to shape by Sam Egan, the king of the Newcastle shapers, McCabe opened Trade Winds in 1976, with Warren Smith joining him about five years later.
McCabe's boards were always popular, and the Trade Winds name, and the first logo - a black and white ink sketch of a palm tree beside a left-breaking wave - summed the vision perfectly. Later versions followed until McCabe eventually settled on the symbol he still uses today: the footprint of a Sumatran tiger, animals that were still roaming the jungle behind G-Land when the first surfers arrived.
After returning from Noumea, McCabe split with Smith, a decision he now looks back on as "my fault entirely". "I had a bit of attitude about me then," he says.
Smith had organised the first Surfest contest in McCabe's absence, and McCabe struck out on his own, shaping boards under his name and for other people and brands across the world.
McCabe said he relied on shaping to repay the people who lent him "a lot of money" for legal bills and other costs associated with the Noumea bust.
He sold a lot of boards in Japan but when his Japanese business partner took his own life in a fit of depression in 2004, it hit him financially as well as personally. "I lost about $80,000 on that," McCabe says.
To celebrate his 60th birthday, McCabe and "about 40" of his friends converged on G-Land in June for a month-long surfari and party this year that will be featured in a forthcoming issue of "the surfer's bible", Tracks magazine.
Although Indonesia is steadily succumbing to development, G-Land is still effectively untouched, thanks to its location within the Alas Purwo National Park.
McCabe said the birthday party took its toll - but from eating and drinking, not drugs - and he came back six kilograms heavier.
Even so, as he shows a photo of himself on his phone, leaning in a low, timeless bottom turn to set up another perfect G-Land wave, it's clear that the soon-to-be-grandfather has still got it, in spades.