Two weeks, one boat, and nobody else in the water

Xaver Walser did not drift into surfing. He picked it, on purpose, because it was harder.

"I always wanted to do something different. I'm always choosing the more complicated group in life," he told the room. Then he picked the more complicated version of that, too. His sport is waveski surfing: you sit on the board rather than stand on it, with a paddle in your hands, and you take it into the same shallow reef breaks everyone else does. Very few people do it. The running total on his body is six shoulder dislocations and eight broken ribs. He knows exactly what the consequences are. He goes anyway.

Getting to the Banyaks was a year of work in a country with no waves. For the six months before the trip he could not surf at all, so he ran trails and did strength work instead, every day, most of it at four in the morning with nobody watching and no wave at the end of it. He arrived at his peak and surfed like it.

What he brought to Schifflände 26 was two weeks of footage from the Banyak Islands, a scatter of small islands off the west coast of Sumatra, and a running commentary on what he was actually thinking in each frame.

Reading water is a skill you can watch someone use

Xaver took us into the world of surfing and gave us the eyes of a surfer for an hour. He shared three challenges.

A point break peels one way, right to left, so you ride right and nothing else is on offer. An A-frame gives you a choice: go right, go left, both work, and you can read the shape before you commit. A slab is the one that gets your attention, deep water arriving over a very shallow reef, standing up fast and heavy, with almost no margin for a wrong read.

"As you take off, you have to judge it, because it breaks on the slab," he said. "The wave is very hard to read. I'm not sure what is going to happen next." Then, mid-sentence, the decision. Bottom turn, find the line, go.

One wave he waited for the entire day. He let others go past, sat through the wrong ones, and then the right one arrived and it worked out in every possible way. Inside the barrel the light came through green, the air compressed behind him, and it spat him out. He had been chasing that specific thing for years. He got it once.

The boat mattered as much as the waves

The trip ran off a small surf charter: top deck for watching, a chill-out zone, the captain's cabin, a kitchen, bunks below. The crew who ran it turned out to be the part he talked about longest, particularly the master mechanic who also cooked, and who could fix anything on board with whatever was already on board.

The rule on board was the whole itinerary: surf, eat, and tell each other what you were building. Ten people, two weeks, one table, and the same conversations most of us have at lunch on the Limmat, held somewhere with no phone signal.

Outside the water it was 31.6 degrees. In the water it was 31.6 degrees. Day and night, the whole trip. "If you're in the water, you don't notice."

When they were not surfing, they sat and watched the waves. That was the entire programme. "We were just there."

He also spent a stretch of the talk on what that same ocean does when it stops being a playground. These islands sit on the fault that ruptured on 26 December 2004, a magnitude 9.1 to 9.3 earthquake and the third largest ever recorded. Half an hour between the seabed moving and the water arriving, with no warning ahead of it. Coral along that coast has been lifted clear of the sea and died where it stood. He was matter-of-fact about all of it. He has spent enough years in that water to hold both things at once.

The closer was his own, and it was the reason he showed us the photographs at all:

"You don't need to travel across oceans to find this feeling. Do the same thing here, and pick the right people to go with."

We have written about that idea before, in surround yourself with who you want to become, and it keeps arriving from people who found it somewhere else first. Xaver found it on a boat, with his closest friends, a long way from anywhere. The rest of the year he is at a table on the Limmat with the rest of us.

Thanks Xaver. What's on next is over on the events page.