Session of the Season // Southern Hemisphere Autumn 2023 // Logan's Last Day In The Mentawais

C-Skins team rider Logan Nicol had quite the spring, scoring good waves in both hemispheres and surfing seemingly non-stop. This session from a boat trip through Indonesia’s fabled Mentawai Islands is a stand out, and secures our Southern Hemisphere Session of the Season accolade for the perennially stoked Welshman. We checked in with Logan whilst he was off on yet another overseas trip, to get him to cast his mind back to this special day in the Indian Ocean.

Date: 20/04/2023, the last day of our boat trip
Location: Southern Mentawais, Sumatra, Indonesia
Board: 6’1” Fourth Surfboards step-up
C-Skins Kit: UV Skins short-sleeve t-shirt, basic men's long sleeve vest, and Legend 2:2 undershorts

Tell us about this run of swell…
I was in Indo on a boat trip through the Mentawai Islands with friends for Joe Lewis’ [fellow Llantwit surfer] stag do that I was lucky enough to be invited on. The boat was amazing, and we were on it for twelve days. This session was the last day. We’d had a good few warm-up surf on some pretty solid waves, and some fun lefts with some good tubes, but nothing of this magnitude with proper tubes over really shallow reef.

And this particular session?
When we pulled up to this spot in the south of the Mentawais that we’d only heard stories about and seen photos and footage of before, it looked incredible. We’d been building up to this swell for a while. Our guide Luke had been telling us it was going to be insane and we were going to get a solid swell, and it didn’t disappoint.
When we arrived it was like something out of a movie. We motored in on the boat and the waves were as perfect as if you could paint a wave, it was that good, We got there before the other boys with the skipper of the boat on the little tender, and he was like “it’s ON, boys!”. He said it was as good as you could it.
There were two other guys already in and we saw one of them go over the reef as we pulled up, so that was a bit of a wake up call and made it feel pretty serious. We’d had some good waves but nothing like this. It was proper heart-in-the-mouth kind of feeling.

Can you talk us through this wave…
I chose to ride my step-up, which was one of the bigger boards I took on the trip. It’s only a 6’1” round tail - out there you don’t really need a bigger board but I thought it would be good to have a bit more foam to help me paddle into them.
This wave was about halfway through the session. Eli, the grom on our trip, had gone on the wave before. This wave throws out quite a lot but I could see that this one was a bit more almond shaped, so I pulled up a bit higher on the face and stayed as high as I could to run through it.

All images by Luke Cromwell @photobossbali