The Story of P-Pass, Pohnpei
P-Pass — short for Palikir Pass — is a world-class right-hand reef-pass barrel that breaks on the outer edge of the barrier reef off the north side of Pohnpei, a jungle-and-waterfall island in the Federated States of Micronesia. It is a long, fast, hollow right that wraps around the corner of a deep-water pass and peels down the reef in wide-open tube sections, and it is widely called the wave that put Pohnpei on the map. Getting there is a serious commitment — a multi-flight journey to one of the most remote surf destinations on earth — and every wave on the island is reached by boat. When a North Pacific groundswell lines up, few waves anywhere break so cleanly.
The Long Way to Pohnpei
Reaching P-Pass is half the adventure. Pohnpei sits far out in the western Pacific, and most surfers arrive on the long island-hopper route, commonly routed through Guam, before landing at the little airport beside Kolonia, the island’s main town. Pohnpei is famously one of the wettest places on earth — coastal towns record on the order of five metres of rain a year, and the mist-wrapped interior far more — so the island is a wall of dripping rainforest, threaded by rivers and more than forty waterfalls and crowned by Sokehs Rock, a sheer basalt plug that rises straight out of the jungle above the harbour.
None of Pohnpei’s surf can be reached on foot. Every break sits out on the barrier reef, so the day begins with a boat ride — roughly twenty to thirty minutes across the flat, sheltered lagoon from Kolonia out to the pass. The surf-camp model that opened the island to travelling surfers dates to 2004, when the Pohnpei Surf Club began running guided boats out to P-Pass and the other reef passes, and a small camp scene has grown up around it since. The upside of all that distance is water that is warm year-round, around twenty-eight to twenty-nine degrees Celsius, and a lineup that is empty far more often than not.
The Reef Pass on the North Corner
Pohnpei is a classic high volcanic island wrapped in a barrier reef, with a broad lagoon separating the shore from the surf. The rideable waves all break out on that outer reef, clustered around the passes — the deep-water channels where the lagoon drains to the open ocean — and P-Pass takes its name from the Palikir Passage on the island’s north side. The wave breaks on the north corner of the pass, where the reef edge meets deep water; that same channel is what the boats run in through and what surfers use to paddle back out.
The pass faces the open North Pacific, and that exposure is everything. Through the northern-hemisphere winter, long-period groundswell generated by storms thousands of miles away marches down onto the reef, joined at times by closer swell thrown off by typhoons tracking through the region. The wave wants swell with north in it — from the northwest through the northeast, with straight north the best — and the corner of the reef bends and focuses it into a peeling wall. On the far, south-eastern side of the same island lies Nan Madol, a UNESCO-listed ancient stone city of nearly a hundred artificial islets built on the reef centuries ago — a reminder that people have been reading this reef and its water for a very long time.
The Cleanest Wave in the Pacific
The wave itself is close to flawless. It starts with a predictable takeoff out on the reef, then throws into a hollow barrel and a long, wide-open wall that runs down the reef edge beside the channel — surfers describe riding it all the way in until it fades to a two-foot runner, or pulling off after the first couple of barrel sections and paddling straight back out through the deep pass. It is a small-wave gem at two to four feet and turns serious from about four to six feet, when the barrels open right up; it holds its shape all the way to a solid ten feet, where it starts to double up. The reef is comparatively forgiving and the channel is deep, but it is still shallow, sharp coral in a very remote place, so it is an advanced wave once it is overhead, best on a mid-to-high tide.
As the surf-world story goes, a travelling surfer rode P-Pass back in the early 1990s, but it stayed a rumour until the Pohnpei Surf Club opened in 2004 and photos of its clear-water barrels began turning up on magazine covers. That is the moment Pohnpei arrived on the surfing map. Because the island is so hard to reach, the lineup is usually uncrowded — but P-Pass is essentially one peak, so when a good swell lands on full camps it can get busy, and the etiquette is to share it respectfully with the small local crew. The trade-offs are the ones that come with any world-class wave at the end of the earth: a sharp reef, currents that pick up on the most extreme tides, and a long way to the nearest hospital.