When I first started surfing in Boston, I thought I was the only one. I mean, I didn’t REALLY think I was the only one, but I thought there were at most 50 surfers in the entire city. It was 2014 and while I don’t want to pretend to be some OG who discovered surfing, it was pretty damn uncrowded when I started. I remember surfing on a Sunday in March 2015 on a huge Nor’easter, the waves were about head high and perfectly groomed by the winds. I broke my nose on my board because I had no idea what I was doing and I remember thinking that if I’d gotten knocked out I would have been dead because there was no one else in the water. Literally zero other people. This left me with the sense that I really needed to take care of myself in the ocean. It’s rarely like that anymore, but I won’t bore you with tales of the good ‘ol days, this is a tale about friendship.

In the summer of 2018, about 2 years after I learned to surf in Boston, I spent a month in Sri Lanka hunting down remote point breaks from the quintessential surf town of Arugam Bay. Sri Lanka is one of those magical places on earth: Elephants, Jungle, Mountains, Ocean. The whole place feels like a dreamscape. 3 weeks into my trip a massive swell arrived. I paddled out at sunrise and had the session of my life….

I never wanted to become a surfer. I didn’t grow up liking the ocean, and was generally terrified of sharks. I hated swimming because the pool was always cold at summer camp and they made us swim first thing in the morning when the air was freezing cold. I was an unathletic skinny kid and I used to shiver for about 45 minutes straight when we had swimming. The fact that I learned to surf at 31 years old while living in Boston made my path into surfing highly unlikely. But here’s how it unfolded.