The Story of Lance’s Right (Hollow Trees), Mentawai Islands
Lance’s Right — known to the surfing world as Hollow Trees, or simply HTs — is widely rated among the most perfect barreling right-handers on Earth: a fast, sculpted tube peeling down a shallow coral reef off the village of Katiet, on the southern tip of Sipora in Indonesia’s remote Mentawai Islands. There are no roads to this wave. It is reached only by boat, across open ocean from Padang in West Sumatra, through a jungle-island archipelago that holds the densest concentration of world-class surf anywhere on the planet — the wave the whole Indo boat-trip dream was built around.
The Boat Trip to Katiet
Getting to Hollow Trees is a voyage in itself. Nearly every trip begins in Padang, the humid port city on the west coast of Sumatra, where charter boats load boards, ice and fuel for the crossing to the Mentawais — a chain of jungle islands lying roughly a hundred kilometres out in the Indian Ocean. The classic way to surf here is the liveaboard charter, typically around eleven nights aboard a boat that starts and ends in Padang and roams between the island groups, chasing the best reef for each day’s swell and wind. It was this boat-charter culture, pioneered by exploratory skippers in the early 1990s, that first opened the Mentawais to the world.
You can also go land-based. The Mentawai Fast Ferry runs from Padang to Tua Pejat, Sipora’s small island capital, in around three to four hours, and from there a further boat or road transfer carries you down to Katiet at the island’s southern end. Katiet is a modest village of stilt houses, fishing boats and coconut palms, and a cluster of surf losmen and resorts sits right on the reef’s edge — several with verandahs that look straight out over the lineup. Whichever way you come, this is a remote place, where supplies, comforts and medical care are all a long way off.
The Reef at the End of the Island
The wave breaks off the very southern tip of Sipora, where the jungle-clad island tapers to a point and a shelf of live coral reaches out into deep, warm water. Sipora is one of four main islands in the Mentawai chain — alongside Siberut and the two Pagais — a low, forested archipelago fringed with reef and home to the Indigenous Mentawai people, whose culture on the larger islands long predates the surfers. The water stays bath-warm all year, and the reef that makes the wave so flawless is also what makes it so unforgiving.
What arrives at that reef has travelled an extraordinary distance. Powerful south and southwest groundswells, generated by storms deep in the Southern Ocean, march thousands of kilometres up the Indian Ocean and wrap around the bottom of Sipora, standing up as they hit the shallow coral so that the wave breaks almost due south. The season runs roughly April to October, the dry months, with the biggest and most consistent surf usually stacking up from June to September. Light offshore winds groom it clean, and because the reef is shallowest and least forgiving at low tide, a rising mid-to-high tide is generally the safest and the best.
Hollow Trees and the Surgeon’s Table
The wave itself unfolds in distinct sections. It starts up the point at the takeoff, where sets jack up and throw almost immediately into a deep, top-to-bottom barrel, runs on through an open, sculpted wall — the stretch long known as The Office — and finally reaches the Surgeon’s Table, a length of very shallow, flat reef on the inside, named with grim humour for the cuts and coral rash it hands anyone who falls there. At its best, from about head-high and up, the sections link into one long, spinning tube, and it is unmistakably a wave for confident, experienced surfers. Reef booties, a step-up board and a healthy respect for the coral are all standard kit here.
As surf lore has it, the wave takes its name from Lance Knight, a travelling surfer who rode it in the early 1990s during the pioneering boat expeditions that first charted these islands; the name Hollow Trees is attributed to a hollowed-out tree that once lodged on the reef and long ago washed away. Images of the Mentawais’ flawless barrels filled the surf magazines and films of the 1990s and helped ignite the modern Indo boat-trip boom. Today, when a good swell lines up in peak season, the lineup and the ring of anchored charter boats can get crowded and competitive — a high-stakes scene over one of the shallowest, most perfect reefs in surfing.