When Bruce Raymond, the Managing Director of Quiksilver International, conceived the idea of the Crossing, his concept was more than simply discovering new surf sites throughout the ocean tropical world. Bruce imagined an expedition on which surfers would become total ocean persons skilled in their sport but also more completely knowledgeable about the sea. Bruce's idea was to put an oceanographer on board the Indies Trader, a naturalist to school the team riders of Quiksilver into becoming more complete ocean people. My job has been to fill this role, or at least to invite equivalently qualified ocean surfer-scientists to be on board for each leg of the Crossing. So far, the concept has worked brilliantly.

It was in August 1999 on Leg 10 of the Crossing and we were in French Polynesia. The surf had been pretty small for several days and we had conducted a Reef Check on two islands. Kelly Slater, Peter Mel and I got to talking about the origin of these islands. I explained they all originated about 20 million years ago from a common source, a hotspot in the earth's crust, where dozens of volcanoes had burst forth, all rising up to the surface to become islands in the sea. Movement of the earth's crust over the stationary hotspot during the last 20 million years had been responsible for the islands forming a linear chain, all of this millions of years before human beings inhabited the earth. Our species has only been around for about 100,000 years, or at most 200,000 years, a mere one per cent of the age of these islands.

Kelly and Peter wanted to know more. Pretty soon we were talking about the origin of the universe - Big Bang, the Red Shift, the Doppler Effect, Hawking's Radiation, the speed of light and the edge of the universe. I explained that the edge of the universe was not really an end point; that it only appeared to humans as an edge because matter there was traveling away (expanding) from the earth at the speed of light, meaning that we could no longer see it. Light travelling away from an observer at the speed of light becomes invisible. This discussion led on to the question of reality. I talked about Albert Einstein's famous quote "there are only atoms and opinions". What Einstein meant is that there are really only two realities, first, atoms which represent matter and energy, and second, opinions, which represent ideas made up in the mind of human beings. Kelly imagined the second reality, consisting only of ideas, to be what God is all about. Kelly intuitively understood in an instant what philosophers had been struggling with for thousands of years.

Heavy talk for an idle afternoon on the Indies Trader somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Kelly Slater and Peter Mel smiled, looked up at the sky and stretched; returning to the world around us. No surf, but with the thought of tomorrow, of discovering a new island break, of welcoming a new swell and thinking about leaping off the boat to charge insane barrels, screaming at each other, now with a more complete understanding of who they are and knowing that we are all ocean brothers. Just one more day in paradise on the Quiksilver Crossing.