Kandui / Mentawai islands, April up date.

April 16th surf report

Today was opening day for Rifles!  It was unexpected.  We had been looking at the forecasts and most of our focus was on the big storms coming off of South Africa. We were anticipating some sizeable swell, but with a lot of west in it which doesn’t get into Rifles, so our group had little hope of surfing “The Jewel”.  We did see a little storm off of Western Australia as well and we thought perhaps we could get lucky and get a few rideable waves at Rifles, but that small storm must have been the little engine that could because it produced much more than we could have imagined.  At dawn, we could see that 4 Bobs was bigger and we could see a little something going on at Rifles, but expectations were still low.
I jumped on the jet ski to give it a closer look.  Conditions were perfect with  just a breath of offshore wind.  I sat and waited for 10 minutes or so and saw what I expected to see.  Shoulder high waves managing to peel for a
while then spin to fast….no barrel.  I was just about to leave when I saw a lump on the horizon.  I took my finger off the start button of the ski.  The sun has just come up over Sumatra and I got a beautiful view of  a sizeable wave that would have been about 3 or 4 feet overhead stand up and begin to pitch and run down the reef. I followed it with the ski as it hit the second section and got even more hollow. It was a stand up barrel for sure, if anyone had been lucky enough to have been there at that moment.  But instead it was just a page for the memory book seeing such an unbelievable wave break unmolested with no one in sight to even share the moment.  It was full throttle back to restaurant.
All I had to say was, “Rifles, let’s go!”  It was a fire drill after that.  People were leaving their fresh cup of coffee and hot plates of breakfast and ambling for their boards!  The waves were a little slow in coming once we got
out there and the boys were probably wondering if their surf guide had been seeing things, but it wasn’t too long before the sets began to come.  And it got bigger and bigger throughout the morning until we were getting some double over plus Rifles!  Only a few other people showed up and the crowd factor was next to non existent.  We surfed it with pretty much just our group until midday when the tide got  hazardously low and the wind got on it a bit and we dragged our tired bodies back for a late lunch.
There were a lot of happy people at the bar that night as we went through the pictures!  Lots of barrel shots.  It was nice to see Rifles wake up from its long, off season sleep.  Could be more on tap next week.