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Image credit: Victor Fraile/Corbis

Hajak, my “captain,” was a Sasak. He was stoic, serious, and maybe 11 years old. Dressed like a California surf kid in baggy Quiksilver shorts, he sat in front of his Evinrude, navigating an outrigger canoe through the water, between weathered wooden frames floating on the surface and marked with ragged flags.

“What are those?” I asked, in a mix of poor Indonesian and sign language.

“Rumput laut,” he answered.

Seaweed. Deep columns of it were cultivated under the frames. These were the industries in Grupuk, on the Indonesian island of Lombok: fishing, farming seaweed, and ferrying Westerners to a distant surf spot.

Grupuk Bay is one of those tropical inlets that look like paradise from a distance, with palm-carpeted hills rising from an expanse of blue water. Hajak let us glide to a halt near a clean blue break just off a sandy beach, then dropped anchor next to another pair of canoes. A group of us travelers spent the lazy, sweltering morning paddling around the bay.

It wasn’t the surf of a lifetime; it wasn’t the reason I’d disappeared (from my family’s and friends’ perspective) to a remote Indonesian island. But then surfing can be like fishing. For the big stuff you just have to wait.

Lombok is a poor Muslim island next to Bali, and the village of Kuta, on the southern shore, is a weird assemblage of thatched huts, surf bungalows, and luxury hotels. It’s a slumbering cousin to Bali’s electric-lit surf metropolis, also called Kuta, dozens of ocean miles to the west. Lombok’s Kuta has no sports bars or flagship stores for surf brands, but it faces south, and its beaches receive the same Indian Ocean swells.

In Kuta village I had found a $4-a-day surf bungalow near the beach, an orange-painted rattan hut with a stinking pit toilet and a jaundiced lightbulb so weak it had trouble penetrating my mosquito net, so I spent the evening on the breakfast terrace, where Indonesians served beer and surfers played cards under the fluorescent light.

The next morning, breakfast was sullen and tense. “Mawi Bay should be workin’ now,” said an Australian named Dave.

“Grupuk might be okay,” ventured his friend, “with that swell comin’ up.”

“I think I’ll give Air Goleng a look,” said a Canadian.

The Swiss girl, Inga, was picking up surf lingo. She sat chirpily over breakfast and said, in English, “I shall surf today at Grupuk,” in a crisp, fastidious accent. “If it’s working.”

Maxim and the other Frenchman were on their way to Ekas. I said I’d look at another fishing village, Selong Blanak, but Dave thought the angle of that bay might not catch a south swell.