You and fifteen pals. All booze included.

Got a spare bitcoin gettin’ all het-up in that virtual wallet? Want to throw a crypto-shekel at Martin Daly, the great surf explorer who set up his alt-universe on Beren Island in the Marshalls there, and get a piece, maybe the last piece of empty surf heaven, for you and fifteen pals?

All booze included?

To celebrate the wild ride of cryptocurrency, and to attract a hipper, more tech-savvy crowd instead of the usual dinos wiring cash via Western Union, Marty’s offering a deal which means, given bitcoin’s volatility, either you win, ie the currency crashes, or he wins, it soars.

If you want in, want to examine the parameters of the deal, dates, what you get and so on, click here.

Marty, who is now sixty four, tells me what brought him to the Marshalls, specifically Beran Island, a twenty-hour sail from Majuro, the republic’s capital city, in the first place.

“I know what the ocean and the reefs are supposed to look like. I grew up diving pristine reefs, reefs without names when I was a kid in Townsville in Queensland. When I was on The Crossing I went everywhere, dove everywhere and I saw that ninety-five percent of the world’s reefs were impacted. Two thirds were actually gone or dead. Put your head underwater here and you see what’s supposed to be here.”

Near Beran island he found a righthander, which Marty called Nirvana (“The best thing I’ve ever seen”) and “like a typical human being when I first came here I sat on the beach and thought, I’ll put a treehouse here, a wharf here, I could build bungalows here. And I said to myself, ‘What sort of fuckwit are you? You spend your whole life looking for Nirvana, you find it, and the first thing you want to do is destroy it… You never get sick of it. If you were standing here you’d go, ‘Oh my god, mate.’ It’s everything a bloke could want: great surf, great diving, the reefs are alive, it’s not fishing it’s catching, so we never run out of fresh fish. It’s stupid.”

Eventually, he decided, yeah, he’ll do something but he’d learn from lessons past and make something he calls “a shining light of responsible development.”

So he built an off-the-grid lodge for sixteen people, powered by wind turbines and solar panels. All of the rubbish the lodge creates is processed and all non-biodegradable refuse is taken back to Majuro’s dump furnaces and its recycling centre. He grows watermelons, papaya, tomatoes, kale, catches a ton of fish and even keeps a few hogs.

“Fuck,” says Marty, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Interestingly, the Marshall Islands is going to be the first country in the world to swing over to a cryptocurrency, shucking the US dollar.

“This is the way of the future,” the country’s minister-in-assistance to the president of the Marshall Islands, David Paul, told Reuters. “As a country, we reserve the right to issue a currency in whatever form it is, whether in digital or fiat form.”

Called the SOV, supply is capped at twenty-four million in order to prevent inflation.

The 24 mill tokens represents the country’s 24 municipalities and some very clever Israelis are going to issue the SOV.

Bigger than Melbourne's Urbnsurf, less crowds etc.

Switzerland came twenty-third out of fifty-four teams in the ISA World Games in 2019. Great Britain was 20th, Philippines 21st, the Netherlands were 22nd.

Just below Switzerland were Ecuador, Barbados, Ireland, Fiji and Morocco.

Not a bad result then, for a nation without a coastline.

However, in the time of wave tanks, they have decided to build their own piece of coast.

Sion, in Valais, is a sunny little town nestled in the foot of the Alps. It is well-known as the area in Switzerland that receives the most sunlight annually. It is at the foot of famous ski resorts like Zermatt and Chamonix and does have quite wonderful views.

In Sion, Alaïa Bay is soon to turn on engines and make some waves for visitors and locals.  

Alaïa Bay founder, Adam Bonvin, is a twenty-five-year-old surfer, who had the idea of building a wave pool in Switzerland when he was 18-years-old and traveling.

“I have always loved snowboarding, but when I discovered surfing I was hooked,” said Bonvin on his motivation behind building the Alaïa Bay facility. “The idea for the Alaïa Bay pool actually came to me after a surf trip to Hossegor in France.”

There has been much planning, as well as dealing with all the COVID details and protocols, but all is set for the grand opening in April.

The Alaïa Bay management opened up tickets for pre-0pening sessions, and they were offered in various packages and at different prices. Those pre-op tickets valid for the pre-opening period were immediately sold out.

There are two main payment structures: pay per session or join the Alpine Surf Club, pay a premium, and receive extra sessions and reduced rates. The Alpine Surf Club offers several membership options, much like the Gold memberships at Melbourne.

A big diff with Melbourne’s UrbnSurf is the number of surfers in the water. An expert session in Switzerland will consist of eight surfers on the left and right on the right, with a wave count of about twelve waves in the session.

The advanced sessions will consist of eleven surfers per side, and about thirteen waves per session.

In Melbourne, the numbers are eighteen and twelve.

Your wave count will be above ten rides for a fifty-five-minute session. That’s a wave every five minutes.

In today’s crowds, some people would be ecstatic with that wave count.

The Wavegarden Cove set up is modular, and the number of modules, which is the number of motors, effects the length and quality of ride.

The waves at Alaïa Bay, set up with forty-six motors, are going to be that much better than the Melbourne Urbnsurf facility, with a slightly smaller pool size translating into slightly bigger, and more powerful waves.

How cold is the joint going to get?  Everyone asks about the water temperatures.

For a location like Sion to have good snowboarding and ski locations twenty minutes away, the temperatures will drop through the middle of winter.

Still, good rubber and warm facilities will see any stoked surfer through the coldest patch. We all know that wetsuit quality and tech are excellent. Surfers are getting barrelled in Iceland, Norway, Kamchatka and Scotland.

In the height of summer, there are about sixteen hours of sunlight in Sion, the air temps get into the high thirties (nineties Fahrenheit)  with all sorts of heat-wave warnings and advice, like ‘stay indoors’ and ‘stay hydrated’ etc.

Surfers however, will use any sort of heatwave excuse to disrobe and surf in boardshorts and bikinis.

So there is that.