Tavarua Will Changer Your Life

By Ken Lewis

This was a memory I jotted down a few years ago when I was working in Irvine at a job I hated with people who weren’t surfers. I would find myself in my office, in a business park, day-dreaming about what my life had once been and thinking of how far away I had moved from what truly made me happy. For me, happiness isn’t the money I made, It wasn’t the job title, it wasn’t the lame industry bro’s or it’s cool-guy events. It was beach days with real friends. It was riding waves by myself and immersing myself in the ocean that makes me feel like I’m a part of something special. That feeling was missing when I recounted this part of my life in that white-walled office. Since then I have quit that career and am living paycheck to paycheck but have rediscovered what is truly important to me and that is a priceless feeling. I hope you enjoy the story.

Tavarua will Change Your Life – 1995

In the fall of 1994 I had quite a proposal on my hands. Jon Roseman, the co-owner of Tavarua Island Resort, asked me to come down to Fiji to be a boatman. This was the kind of offer didn’t come along very often, if ever, so what was I to do? It was a dream I had ever since I started surfing and who gets to work on an island in the South Pacific with two of the world’s best waves, free room and board and three amazing meals a day? I could. All I had to do was get there.

Jon had been coming into the surf shop I worked at for many years, as he and the owner were good friends. To this day I am not sure why Jon asked me to make the trip down but it was an honor to be asked, to say the least. Over the next few months, I kicked around the idea but the reality was I didn’t think I could make it. I had a job, a car payment, a girlfriend…I needed to be here because all that is was important wasn’t it?

Lucky for me, Steve Baker, a veteran boatman and local surfer from La Jolla, came into the shop one day and explained how special this opportunity was and how I needed to drop whatever I was doing to take Roseman up on the offer. His words to me were, “Tavarua will change your life.” Little did I know how real those words would eventually ring true.

I called Jon up and asked if the offer was still on the table. He said it was and I let him know I was ready to commit. I’m glad I accepted, because in the years that followed I had quit that job, sold that car and that girlfriend? Well she became an ex-wife. Time reveals many things to a person, but one thing I always was aware of is that we only have one go-around so you better live life while you have the chance.

The planning was on and towards the end of the year I quit my job at the surf shop and began working at Rusty Surfboards. The trip was still scheduled for January 95′ and the GM at Rusty’s was cool with me taking a few months off to go on my dream trip. Rusty was stoked I was going as well and when I asked for him to make me a few boards, his eyes lit up. Rusty has spent more time on that little island than most and If there’s a guy you want to make boards for Tavy, it’s R-dot. As the date of my trip got closer I had a beautiful quiver of brand new boards in my living room. The boards were a 6’7″ diamond tail, 6’8″ Rounded Pin, twin 6’10” step ups and mini guns of 7’0″, 7’2″ and 7’6″.

On a sad note, one morning while having coffee before my departure a woman saw my Tavarua hat and asked if I had been there. I replied no, but that I was leaving very soon to go to the island and couldn’t wait. She then asked If I knew her brother, David Anderson. I said yes, DA was a super cool guy from Windansea and one of the local surfers that I always looked up too and enjoyed surfing with. I would talk with him at the surf shop often and was always left with a feeling that he was a damn good human, one of the few you met in life that you hope to always know. I was really excited because he was a boatman as well and I was hoping that I could learn the ropes from him and Baker. She then had a very serious look in her face and quietly told me that David didn’t come home from spearfishing the day before. This caught me off-guard and had me stunned as she explained that he went free-diving and that was the last time anyone had seen him. I left the coffee shop after hugs and voicing that he must be ok. But in the days that followed we all received the horrible news that he had experienced “shallow water blackout” and drowned. They found his body on the ocean floor, spear gun still in hand and a 45 lb white sea bass at the end of his spear. At his wake, after they paddled his ashes out into the line-up at Windansea, they cooked and served the fish to Davids friends. Weeks later when I got to the Island, everyone was still crushed by the loss of DA and in the boatman bure, his boards were in the corner still waiting for his return. He is very much missed to this day.

January finally arrived, and I said goodbye to my friends as I loaded up my huge board bags stuffed to the gills. In them were my boards, pillows for the resort and porn mags for the boatmen.  I was in LAX on New Year’s Eve getting ready to jump on an Air Pacific flight that would take me to a place I had dreamed of for years. I was pretty fucking giddy to say the least. The flight was a 12 hours and half empty since it was New Years eve. Happiness is a whole row to yourself on a long flight. Eventually I landed in Nadi and was taken aback by the tropical heat as it hit me upon exiting the plane. It was January in the tropics, the middle of their summer; it was hotter than satan’s balls. I soon found some large gentlemen with a sign that said my name and they loaded me up and took me a local hotel to stay the day until our island transfer. Soon a small van would leave to take me and others to the launch, just a few miles away. The long bumpy drive was under way and the slow progress only makes the heart grow more impatient.

Soon the rocky, muddy beach comes into view and I saw two Pangas waiting a few dozen meters off the shore. We loaded the gear and a small group of guests, and we were on our way out to the island. As we were pulling up, Roseman was on the beach loading up a panga in a hurry. I yelled to him and he asked If I wanted to jump in and go for a surf. I hadn’t even touched the sand yet. In a few minutes my stuff was in a head by the board bure, I asked Jon what I should bring? Roseman said the 6’10” would be good. 6’10″? How big was it out there? I had been riding a 6’4″ and that handled some decent waves back home. I grabbed the 6’10” and a 7’0″ just in case because I had no idea what I was going to be seeing out at Cloudbreak.

As we got into the deep channel between Cloudbreak and Tavarua we pull up  to a boat full of guests who were heading back to the island after the morning session. Baker was the boatman on that one and he gave me a huge smile, stoked that I made it. Only one guest made the transfer to our boat and that was one of La Jolla’s favorite sons, Henry Hunte. Henry is the ultimate surf rat and is one of those guys that was always down to surf more. With Henry on board, we made our way out towards Cloudbreak, just the three of us. As we motored up we watched a solid 4′-6′ set march down the reef as the wind started to switch (Morning winds in Fiji can be funky sometimes and the mid morning boat was always my favorite). The rashguard went on, leash secured and board waxed. Once I was in the channel, my jaw dropped as the first set pour down the reef. It was bigger than I thought. The wave at Cloudbreak  starts way up the point, a lot of times looking like a very long closeout until it gets to “the ledge,” where it slows down just a bit, and lets you in. I was sitting where I thought the corner was, but Jon and Henry paddled way deeper. Shit. I was being a pussy. I followed them from a safe distance trying to make sense of the line-up Roseman showed me from the boat. Paddling behind them, my heart beat through my chest and I was beyond stoked as I watched Roseman drag both arms and side-slip into a double overhead barrel. 

Shit just got real.

I’ll never forget my first wave at Cloudbreak. I dropped in and arched into an overhead barrel and came flying out, my legs shaking from adrenaline. I was from P.B. and that wasn’t an everyday experience for me, hell it wasn’t an every year experience. I kicked out just in time to see Jon in a huge barrel out and to the right of me. I was caught inside at shish-kabobs.  For my ignorance, I tried to push under a six-foot ball of foam but instead my board hit the reef with my head still above water. Uh-oh. Actually,I think it was more of an “ohshitithinkimgonnadie.”

I took a great beating and got washed further in on the reef. Later, I found out this is what they call “Taking the tour.” One thing I didn’t expect was the intense power the wave had behind it. Somehow in my mind I thought it was going to be a “softer” wave, how wrong I was. I got some fun waves that session and went back to the island a happy man. I was thinking about how my buddies were scrapping it out at three-foot Crystal Pier with a pack of long boarders and I had just surfed a wave with only two friends. People shouldn’t get so lucky, but goddammit, I’ll take it.

Over the course of the next two months I got so see some amazing things and I will tell those stories later. Also, during those two months, I got the flu three times from visiting guests and was got very sick. During those times, the guys would take the boats out and I would have to stay in bed.  The old boatman bure was by the board graveyard and was a pretty big shithole compared to what the island is now.  It was dirty and there was mouse infestation that left the floors covered in mouse crap. I would sweep up their poop all the time and watched as the island cats Bob and Ginger chased them down and gobbled them whole. After an all-time afternoon surfing Cloudbreak with just a couple guests, I returned and was backing in the Panga when my head started hurting pretty bad. I moored the boat in the channel and as I got back to the beach, the pain grew and grew until I was dizzy and threw up.

I went to the restaurant and chugged water and immediately vomited again. I found Jon in his office and told him how I was feeling. He said that it might be heat stroke and that I should rest in the office as it was the only AC available on the island back then. As I layed down, the pain persisted. Jon arranged for a boat to take me to the mainland, so I could rest at the Dominion hotel and hopefully I would be feeling better soon. As I was driven across the channel I was already feeling like I was seeing things and losing consciousness. As I was dropped off at the nambila boat launch, I remember seeing heat trails and was starting to hallucinate and eventually blacked out. Later I was told that the Fijians thought I was drunk because I was making no sense and was throwing up. I was put in a room by the driver when we got to the hotel but what nobody knew, me included, was that I was in the middle of a 105-degree unchecked fever. Luckily Jon called to check on me a little bit later that evening, and when he got no answer from my room, he sent someone to check on me. I would have died that night if not for Roseman.

In later conversations after this experience, Jon told me that he called the room and was not getting an answer, so he called the islands driver, Sayid, and asked him to check on me. After he knocked and received no answer the staff opened the door. Sayid called Jon, woke me up and gave me the phone. Roseman said that I didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about and hung up on him. Jon knew I wasn’t right and called a doctor and sent his fiancee’ Cynthia to come check on me. The Dr. gave me a shot in my ass and Cynthia placed cool towels on me and iced me down all night and in hindsight, I really feel that is what saved my life that night. Roseman called his father who is a doctor at Scripps in San Diego and told him what the symptoms were, and his father thought that I had possibly caught dengue fever. That night the headache returned, and Jon made arrangements to send me home the next day as a Fijian hospital was not where he wanted me to be.

The next morning, I was on a Quantas flight to LAX with specific directions to not let anyone know I was ill or they may not let me fly. It was the longest, shittiest 13 hours of my life. No number of painkillers would relieve the pain and my brain felt like it was exploding. My mother met me at the airport and drove me straight to the hospital in La Jolla. After a spinal tap and a CAT scan I was placed on morphine and was posted up in bed where I remained for the next week. I was light sensitive, so it had to be completely dark in my room and during those days there were periods I would hallucinate and have conversations with my visons. I can vividly remember these events. It was so real and so awful.

The Morphine and Demerol helped ease the pain but left me unconscious, only emerging when the pain returned. It was a hard thing to deal with, one minute I was surfing as good as I ever have, to being bedridden and in a drugged-out haze. The Doctors explained that what I caught was called parasitic-meningitis and wasn’t Dengue fever after all. Apparently microscopic parasites got into my system when I was sweeping the rat shit out of the bure. The parasites live in the rat-poop get airborne and find their way into a host. Since my immune system was weakened by my many bouts with the Flu, it allowed the parasite to take hold. The pain in my head was caused by my brain being pressed into the topside of my skull because the parasites were in my spinal fluid and the white blood cells were flocking in to fight the infection. There is no cure, but the parasites cannot live very long and eventually I felt better after a month or so. There was talk that I may have gotten this from eating some power bars that were gnawed on by the rats but that was false. The Dr. said there was no way to get the meningitis in that way.

The only long-term issue I have with brain is that I’m just not as quick as I once was and have had some emotional ups and downs. Maybe it’s not related at all, but I think it is. Looking back on this incident, I realized that the trip to Tavarua was indeed life changing. My world opened up and I experienced a once in a lifetime opportunity that I’ve never forgotten and still remain appreciative of, even after 20 years. Shit happens, so I place no blame on anything or anyone on Tavarua. The island is much different now compared to then and there has never been another illness like mine since.

The truth is, I would do it all again as it forever changed how I look at things and people. The Fijians are the sweetest people I have ever met and the friendships I forged with Isei, Druku, Asaki, Siti and so many others, still gives me so much happiness. Now with social media, It’s easy to keep in touch with them and to see how the small island has grown so much. I encourage anyone to go and enjoy the country and its people, the waves are the bonus. Bula Vinaka my friends.