The phone wakes me up at some ungodly hour. “Do you speak English?”

“Reasonably well,” I answer. The American voice at the other end presses on. “Is this Uluwatu Surf Villas?”

“No, Bill. It’s me. Phil.”

“Aw shit, man. I’m sorry, did I wake you? Hey, you should be out here. It’s pumpin’!”

William Finnegan is busted as. The celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Barbarian Days is, like me, a guest of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, with obligations to attend events on this, the last day of the festival. But the pressure has been building. Just last night he insisted that I come and check out the rice fields view from his hotel room, but what he really wanted to do was show me the WAMS on his laptop, with a monster purple patch spreading across the Indian Ocean. Finnegan was excited. No, he was almost beside himself. This was a Bukit beauty in the making. He had no board, he barely knew where the Bukit was from here in Eat-Pray-Love-ville, not after 37 years, but he was going. I must know a guy who’d loan him a board. (I did.) He was flying the coop, bugger the consequences.

This is what I liked most about playing Bill’s games for a couple of weeks last month in Bali. His hunger for surf knows no bounds. The guy lives on Manhattan’s Upper Westside and spends most of his life in surfless trouble spots, or getting to them on dodgy flights. But at 63, and with a whole other life to lead, give him just a sniff of a swell and he’s all over it. Frothing with a Tom Carroll-esque intensity. It’s hard to take, but you’ve got to love it. It’s what has made his surf memoir reach so far beyond the genre, fascinating readers with possibly the most eloquent descriptions of waves and the riding of them ever penned.

I loved the book but would have preferred fewer waves and more Bill, but what would I know.

So the Bill and Phil show hit the road, doing “in conversation” gigs in Ubud, Sanur and Canggu, discussing books, surfing, the impact of surf exploration and other juicy subjects under the general banner of “Writing Waves”, a title I stole from the review of Bill’s book in the New York Review of Books. Although I’d appreciated his work since reading “Playing Doc’s Games” in The New Yorker more than 20 years ago (and in fact Tracks had first published his writing in the late ‘70s just a few months after I’d left the editorship), I’d never met Finnegan.

Jamie Brisick, who’d just done a couple of gigs with him in New York, emailed me: “You and Bill will be best mates. He loves a drink!” Brisso’s good like that. He doesn’t hold back. He didn’t mention that Finnegan looks uncomfortable outside of a business suit. In fact, Bill actually asked me beforehand if he should bring one. A suit, that is. I advised by return email a sky blue safari number, and heard nothing further on the matter. But he’s one of those guys – Freddie Hemmings is another - who is just not cut out for the surfer uniform.

You could say the same about his broad intellectual rejection of just about everything we have come to regard as modern surf culture. The man’s interests and knowledge are as wide and as deep as the Pacific, but when it comes to surfing, if it’s not a wave or a board, he’s not interested. I found that refreshing too. Since his first waves in California, teen years in Hawaii and early years of surf exploration in the South Pacific and Indonesia, Finnegan has been unimpressed with style without substance. He has never sought the company of star surfers, nor tried to stand out from the pack, except by not being in the same place as the pack.

Although his standing as a foreign correspondent has long placed him in the limelight of serious journalism, few people in surfing knew the man, even if they knew his scant body of work related to surfing. But the success of Barbarian Days has made him the du jour go-to surf guy. While we were working together, he had to miss a couple of cocktail hours to finish an urgent op-ed piece for the New York Times on surfing and the Olympics. It came as no great surprise to me that he was appalled by the idea, just as he is bored shitless by the surfwear industry and everything it stands for.

Finnegan owes no allegiance to anyone in our small world. No one flows him a board. Ain’t no care pack coming from Quiksilver or Billabong any time soon. He’s a man apart, yet he’s totally immersed in surfing’s pure heart. He seemed happiest when surrounded by serious surfers of like mind, just like his New York surf buddies. In Bali it was with people like human rights lawyer Patrick Burgess, who charges on the Bukit but is just as happy fooling around on a longboard at Old Man’s, or Bukit pioneer Tim Watts, whose illustrious career has embraced innovation in fabrics, vanilla farming and sculpture, and whatever else he could fit in between swells.

Forty years ago when I started stirring the pot at Tracks, readers would ask: but does Phil surf? Readers of Barbarian Days know not only that William Finnegan surfs, but that he has a keener understanding of bathymetrics than most. But still I was asked, is he as good as his descriptions?

Not that it matters a damn, but I think the accompanying photo from Padang Padang tells the story. He reads the wave well, gets the job done. He told me later he was pissed off with his performance that day, mistimed a turn, dug a rail, wore a couple on the head. He’s a perfectionist, but if you’ve read the book you already know that. //PHIL JARRATT