In the early eighties, while sailing off remote Lombok Island in Indonesia, young California surfer Bill Heick and his friends stumbled across the perfect wave…a pristine barreling left reeling endlessly and empty over a shallow, live-coral reef. As treacherous as it was beautiful, it was later dubbed “Desert Point” for its dry forbidding nature. In the years that followed, a pioneer crew of hardcore surfers set up a makeshift beach outpost and kept their treasure off the surf-media map for almost a decade.

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​Their mission: to surf uncrowded Desert Point at the highest level possible…no matter the cost. But Paradise, they quickly found, came at a price. Camping rough on the beach for months at a time was far from an idyllic vacation and came with its own set of annoyances, malaise and outright danger. Life on the remote point was a constant balancing act between the surfing dream and the very real possibility of injury, armed robbery and life-threatening disease. But the siren’s call of the Perfect Wave held strong and has kept the pioneers, and the thousands who have followed, returning to “Deserts” for decades.