"That's what freedom tastes like."

The three-time champion surfer of the world John John Florence, the famous tour refusenik, has spent the last year, and then some, sailing the oceans and seas in search of waves and adventure.

A series of regular videos posted on YouTube have become an extended mediation on what it means to be truly free, although freedom does come at a cost: a million dollar cat plus daily expenses and so on.

Still, Florence and his wife Lauryn, along with baby Dez, displays an admirable belief in Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy that human beings are naturally good, peaceful, and solitary in the “state of nature,” and that it is civilisation and society that corrupts them.

Florence writes,

“It’s interesting how much time it takes to settle in and figure out where we are when we sail into new places. It always takes a while whether that’s anchoring, or how to time our trips to land, or figuring out where to surf, or the types of food that are available.

“We arrived in the Marquesas in the dark which added to the feeling of not knowing. We had an idea that it would be similar to parts of Hawaii with big mountains and deep valleys. But when we woke up the next day, we were all kind of just blown away by the landscape. It really felt like nowhere else we had ever been. Everythign was raw and alive. There were giant waterfalls falling out of the sky, the land was this deep lush green, and there were vertical cliffs that fell straight into the ocean and continued down underwater. The water was deep and dark pretty much everywhere we went with a lot of movement to it. You could sense right away that there were probably a lot of big animals around.

“Once we started sailing between the islands there was tons of wildlife from sharks to manta rays to large fish all around the boat. Most of the different bays where we anchored were very similar, cut really deep into the valleys, with steep cliffs on the side, and a river mouth at the base that would add some murkiness to the water. Everything about the landscape had a dramatic feel to it. Once we would go into land it was probably the most productive and alive place we had ever been. We have never been offered so much fruit. Everyone was so welcoming and sharing with everything they were growing. I could eat pamplemousse for days.”

Inspirational and, yes, essential.

Captain Florence has long been hailed as the modern incarnation of Jacques Cousteau, flippers he fills easily.

People who dote on real adventure in the ever-wondrous area of the sea are in for ten minutes and twenty-six seconds of pictorial marvels and thrills when they see the new short from Captain John John Florence.

For this account of oceanographic exploration is surely the most fascinating documentary of its sort ever filmed. With a sense of the awesome and the dramatic as well as with technical skill in photography, Captain Florence and his team, which includes baby Dez and wife Lauryn, as well as the unseen filmer Erik Knutson, have produced a marine adventure film that combines the experience of sailing through the Panama Canal with a wonderful intimacy.

The engineering scale still astonishes. Locks lift ships 26 metres over the continental divide, using nothing but gravity-fed water, no pumps. The Culebra Cut sliced through solid rock and constant landslides. It slashed the New York to San Francisco sea route by roughly 12,900 kilometres, and it still handles vessels the size of small cities today. Crazy, yes?

A few deaths in the build, but omelettes aren’t made without belting hell out of eggs, as they say.

Captain Florence, three time champ and Olympian, has long been hailed as the modern incarnation of Jacques Cousteau, flippers he fills easily.

The shaggy haired boy who enchanted the world in Vogue fashion spreads and as the first tweenie to ride Pipeline, is at his big-assed best, as master of vessel, commander of his surfboard and peerless daddy and husband.

Captain Florence and Erik Knustson have filmed with an integrity of events and in colors that are irreproachable.

Like true scientists, they’ve eschewed trickery. 

Next stop: the Galapagos Islands!