Last week we received an email from King Island farmer and adventurer Andrew James detailing a recent trip to a quiet corner of the Indian Ocean. He and brother Richard along with good mate Ned Winn-Dix and photographers Alex Tilbury and John Olsen chartered a small boat in search of tropical perfection.

Richard James details the heavy nature of the wave and environment below.

// Surfing this wave is akin to being a crash-test dummy in those car safety experiments where they drive really fast into a brick wall and tyres screech and metal crunches and plastic arms and legs get ripped off and twisted inside out and fly out of windscreens in an explosion of jagged broken glass.

You take off, set your line, and it just keeps going faster and faster like an annoying computer game, and you’re steering around boils and coral heads and angry-looking reef-dwelling crustaceans only a couple of inches under the water.

It tempts to let you out, but it’s just constantly feathering further down the line, and you think to yourself, “well, hell, I can make one more section,” and you pull in a couple of times, and then you catch a rail or you line up too high or it just gets too damn fast, and then you’re in a top-loading washing machine of painful anticipation.

Low tide, high tide, it doesn’t really make much difference, some part of your body will be jack-hammered into a spiky fist of coral. The takeoff zone has been commandeered by what appear to be Darth Vader’s stormtroopers as a bunch of guys in white helmets and 4mm rubber suits bob about even though it’s 26 degrees in the water and you can actually feel the temperature inside your brain start to elevate as the sun beats down and the swell period is so long that waves only appear once every forty minutes.

That’s plenty of time for doubt to creep into your head and you twist around and grimace and look down the reef and wonder what kind of beating you’re in for next and whether you might not do better to just paddle back in. But the jungle is full of rabid monkeys and monitor lizards and rhinoceros and large carnivorous cats, and you’re a long way from any kind of sterile operating environment should your flesh be punctured in any fashion, and God here comes another set and I better start to paddle… //

Click through for more photos from their trip: Lonely Indian Ocean