Who Owns This Wave?

Try to imagine what Tavarua was like more than two decades ago. To reach the tiny, deserted island, you would make a five-mile trip by boat from Viti Levu, the main island of Fiji, with local fishermen or one of the villagers who went to Tavarua to collect coconuts. You would have a late-'70s single-fin surfboard that the Fijians would joke about and touch. For sure they would think you were crazy when you asked about the waves that broke a mile to the south of Tavarua on what they called Naikurukurumailagi or Thundercloud Reef. The waves were so huge and broke over such a distance that they frightened the villagers and made fishing in the area treacherous. Back then Fiji didn't have a picture of a surfer on the cover of its phone book, as it does now. In fact, in the villages closest to Tavarua there were no telephones, or running water or electricity.

Dave Clark doesn't have to imagine. He was there, in 1982, among the first surfers to ride the now legendary waves at Tavarua. Surf travel in the 1970s and '80s was anything but glamorous. It involved long flights to undeveloped countries followed by longer bus rides to boats that more often than not were barely seaworthy. Camping on beaches or staying with locals, drinking coconut milk and fishing for meals, was the norm. When the surf was good, the hardships became part of the adventure. But when the sea went flat, the romance waned. Thoughts drifted to toilet paper, never mind a toilet. Living in feral conditions on the beach of Tavarua, Clark couldn't have known that within 20 years he would forever change surfers' relationship with the ocean and become one of the most admired--and reviled--figures in his sport's history.

Even before he heard of Tavarua, Clark had it in his mind to build a resort around a world-class wave. As he grew frustrated with the crowds at Doheny, his local break in Orange County, Calif., Clark dreamed of an ideal wave, far from the masses. At UC Santa Barbara in 1979, he wrote his senior thesis on artificial reefs and included a chapter on modifying a coral atoll to create a perfect, private surf resort. "Back then it was a pretty unique thought," says the 51-year-old Clark from his home north of Santa Barbara. "It was either stupid or crazy." Turns out Clark wouldn't have to shave a reef to realize his dream.

After Clark graduated, his search for empty waves led him to the South Pacific, where he took a job teaching in American Samoa. There, a yachtie told him about a surf break near an island called Tavarua off the southwest coast of Viti Levu. On his first trip Clark camped on Tavarua for two months. He went out beyond the lagoon and surfed the shallow reef break. When it was on, this spot produced fast, hollow waves. But the surf was fickle; it needed just the right swell to break. When it wasn't working, Clark explored the 20-acre, sea snake-- infested island. On these forays he noticed a wave breaking a mile offshore, forming a white, frothy horizon line--what surfers call a cloud break. "Near shore the waves would be only one foot," says Clark, "but this cloud break would be like 20 feet and just catching all the swell."

The next year Clark returned with his wife, Jean, and friend Scott Funk and a Zodiac boat. They motored out to the offshore wave, which they named Cloudbreak. "Jumping off on a coral edge like that was really scary. You're on your own; if you get hurt, you have a major problem," says Clark. The setup scared the hell out of them, but the wave was the best they had ever ridden. It was Clark's eureka moment.

during his first visits to Tavarua, Clark befriended a village chief named Druku. Clark learned that Druku's family on Viti Levu owned Tavarua. He went to Druku--whom he'd been teaching to surf--and explained his plan to build a resort for surfers. Druku knew that besides the coconuts, the island was of little use to his family. He agreed to arrange a sevusevu, a formal sit-down, with his aunt, the paramount chief of the area. Clark arrived at the sevusevu with some kava (a mildly narcotic root that is pounded, mixed with water and drunk out of coconut shells) and a tabua (whale tooth). In Fijian culture, acceptance of the tabua grants the giver certain privileges and favors. With Druku translating, Clark made his pitch. Several bowls of kava later, Druku's aunt accepted the tabua and agreed to lease Clark the island for a share of future revenues. "We hated the wave because we couldn't fish there," says Druku. "But Dave said, 'Watch, people are going to be crazy about this place.'"

Clark had one other hurdle to clear. In Fiji native landowners hold fishing rights, or qoliqoli (pronounced ng-O-lee-ng-O-lee), which give them control of the surrounding ocean. Again with the help of Druku, Clark sat down to kava sessions with the villages that held the rights to Thundercloud Reef. In the end he secured a deal only with Druku's village of Nabila. Clark hoped that Momi, the other key village, would come around in time.

Clark had seen the negative cultural impact surfers had on developing areas in such surf meccas as South Africa's Jeffreys Bay and Bali's Uluwatu, and he was determined to keep this from happening to Tavarua. He knew that for his project to succeed he had to control the number of surfers on Cloudbreak. This policy of exclusive access to a surf break was unheard of at the time and unleashed a debate in the surf world that continues today.

Together with his wife and Funk, Clark designed the resort as a bare-bones surf camp. "The early days were pretty raunchy," says Bob McKnight, one of Tavarua's earliest guests and the head of a then fledgling surfwear brand called Quiksilver. "There were no candles, no fans, no electricity. The food was eggplant a thousand different ways with maybe a bit of fish. But because it was new and exotic and the surf was good, nobody gave a s---." It was a simple operation, but one that Clark knew surfers would crave. They just needed to know about it.

armed with a slide carousel, Clark proselytized in surf towns from San Diego to Santa Cruz but to no avail. Eventually he contacted Kevin Naughton, a well-known surf nomad who together with photographer Craig Peterson had produced an influential series of articles in the 1970s on such far-flung surf destinations as Ghana and Liberia. In '84 Naughton and Peterson agreed to check out Clark's island. The resulting cover story in Surfer magazine gave Tavarua Island Resort the launch it needed.