There is this about Nicaragua: it has lakes, it has volcanoes, and it has waves. Or so I've been told. About the waves, I mean. Driving northwest through the capital of Managua on what a battered street sign tells me is the Pan American Highway, which, if I cared to, I could take all the way from this point in Central America, up through El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico at Calexico then up to Palm Springs (and on to Alaska or south to Patagonia, so they say) I can verify the lake and volcano part. Though we ran quickly out of the city, me and three young surfers in a Toyota 4-wheel drive pickup with board bags piled high in the bed, navigating the honking rush of traffic and whirling roundabouts, bargaining with dirty-nosed street vendors hawking cashews, cellophane-bagged water and cell-phone car mounts at every sernáforo, breathing in the steaming, acrid stink of what is also known as No via del Xolotolon, this scruffy city of 100,000,000 on the southern shore of Lake Managua, the country's two most renowned characteristics were soon revealed. There was the namesake lake, just a patch of muddy water compared to the vast, 8,030 square miles of Lake Nicaragua to the south, and there, on the northeastern shore, was a volcano, Mt. Momotombo, rising up out of the western green lowlands in a perfect cone, impossibly triangular against the denim blue sky, wisps of gauzy white clouds obscuring its peak. No mere ancient core, Momotombo appeared very authentic, very volcano-like, in full possession of its geological faculties. While having last erupted in 1905, scientists who monitor this sort of thing report that as of late Momotombo's gas emissions have turned black. I assume that's bad news.

The emissions problem in the cramped cab of the Toyota wasn't nearly so bad. These, after all, were New Age pros I was traveling with, all three sponsored by Quiksilver, our host on this Centroamerican surfari, all three very courteous, very focused: Josh Hoyer, 26, from Newport Beach, an aerial specialist, the word is. Evan Valiere from Kauai, 19, son of legendary '70s surf traveler Steven Valiere; goofy-foot, fearless at Pipe, cheerful as a lab puppy. And Dylan Graves, 17, from lsabela, Puerto Rico and another second-generation surf star, son of East Coast pioneer Lewis Graves. Elfin, shaggy surfer hair hanging over his ears; a preternaturally stylish regular foot. Good kids, loading up their own board bags at the airport and taking their seats in the truck, getting out their Mp3s and Gameboys, Hoyer with a copy of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. Not the kind of guys who while driving across Nicaragua with an editor from SURFER would likely lift a cheek and giggle in the crowded cab, but who don't ask a whole lot of questions either. Which was odd, considering none of them had any idea where they were going. Then again, neither did I.

Only two weeks earlier I had been sitting in the SURFER offices, braying at Martin Daly, the legendary surf explorer and skipper of the equally legendary Indies Trader, the storied mother ship of The Quiksilver Crossing. This incredibly ambitious, corporately funded expedition has spent the last four years wandering around our watery planet-to the tune of 70,000 miles and change-looking for surf.

Daly was in the SURFER office to tell me that during the Central American leg of the Indies Trader's Northern Hemisphere voyage they had come across a very promising point break and would we be interested in sending a photographer down along with a few of their team members to document it. The only hitch: no telling where.
'That sounds great," I told him. "You want us to reveal the place, promote the place, but not say where it is. I think you'd better know that my current motto here at the mag is 'Death to Secret Spots."'
'And my personal motto is 'death to anyone who would say death to secret spots."' Martin replied.

"So where does that leave us?"
"I guess I'll see you down there," Martin said. "What better place to continue this discussion than on the deck of the Indies Trader, anchored off a newly-discovered secret spot. Give you a chance to experience first-hand what the Crossing is all about, mate."
"Fine," I said. "Where will I meet you?"
Martin just smiled.
And so that's how I found myself with a carload of groms driving north-west across Nicaragua, headed toward points unknown and with plenty of time to ponder the weird ethical history of surf discovery in the magazines.
In the beginning the vibe was share and share alike.
"Think of all the perfect waves that have gone to waste," narrated Bruce Brown in 1965's The Endless Summer, intoning the sports first "get up and go" edict…and of all the perfect waves that are going to waste right now at Cape St. Francis."

We anchored just outside the port last night so we had a couple of hours motoring this morning to get back to the break. It was smaller than yesterday but still super hollow. All the boys hit it but I decided to have a go at shooting some water footage. Pav set up his 16mm film camera for me and off I swam. I got a couple of good shots including a really sick shot of my brother. I hope it turns out. It has rained all day, not one ray of sunlight has been seen. I surfed after lunch and it was low tide and inconsistent. I think one wait was for about an hour, but I finished off the session with a handful of pretty nice tubes. I'm not quite sure what our plan is from here. The wind is pretty strong and the captain said this is the only offshore place around with this wind. I hope the wind will pick up the swell and we surf here again tomorrow.
Intrepid surfers did go, and as late as the early-1970s the thrill of global surf exploration was still innocent enough to share openly. SURFER's 1970 travel feature "Perils Of The Tropic" by a 19 year-old Bernie Baker, openly chronicled his back-pack and board voyage down through Central America and the Caribbean, naming many breaks that later went onto earn protective pseudonyms, including La Libertad in El Salvador. Printing misleading names of California breaks had already begun, the most famous case being San Diego's Big Rock, which was known by a number of goofy monikers like Lobster Lounge and Moidsland; the beachbreaks of Imperial Beach known as "Emerald City." But so far as the rest of the globe was concerned, the world was still big enough for show and tell. 

Then in June of 1972 SURFER ran a feature called "El Dorado: A True Life Adventure" by John Amsterdam. On a yacht voyage across the Atlantic, after touching in at the Cape Verde Islands Amsterdam and his buddies made their way to what is only described as "our island destination." The waves were depicted as perfect, the people friendly, the livin' easy. Despite several photos of what indeed looked like a perfect point, for the first time the destination wasn't named.
"I could go on about the place, but there's really no point wrote Amsterdam. "Besides, I've told you too much already. Just figure that whatever you desire is out there, at the end of some rainbow. All you have to do is find it."
And they were just passengers on a yacht. They didn't own a yacht, especially not a 75-foot, former dive salvage trawler refitted specifically for surf exploration. Amsterdam and crew would've fit right in on the The Crossing, however, where the ethic they first introduced to the surf media three decades ago has become an essential element of this most modern surfari, the first of its kind and certainly the most elaborate, comprehensive surf trip in the history.

"This is a very important aspect of The Crossing," reads a paragraph on the project's Quiksilver.com website. "While the basic route is outlined, no specific references are given in regards to surf spots. Everyone connected with the project respects keeping known and unknown surf spots a mystery. In fact, everyone who is invited on board The Crossing must sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose locations."

Once free of the city zone, the two-lane road bent away from Lake Managua and toward the coast like an asphalt river. And like a river it seemed to pull civilization along with it through the jungle, small towns and villages bordered right up to its banks, all modes of transportation sweeping purposely either upstream or down: pedestrians, couples sharing rickety bicycles, two-wheeled carts drawn by tired ponies, big- rig tractor trailers roaring by like steamships.
We were following a Land Cruiser carrying photographer Tom Servais and Britney Huntington, a marine biologist on hand to participate in The Crossing's work with The Reef Check Foundation, monitoring the worlds coral reefs. It was a decidedly odd experience to be driving through this exotic landscape with absolutely no idea as to our final destination, although not an entirely unpleasant one. I knew we were headed for a port in the north, from which we were to be ferried either up or down the coast to the waiting Indies Trader, which was anchored at this reported point break. I had my own ideas about where. Unlike the pros, who'd probably signed their non-disclosure agreements in advance. I'd purchased a detailed map of Nicaragua and was already using it for reference. A certain amount of whimsy is fine on a surf trip but ultimately it's nice to know where you're headed.

"We were really sensitive about not naming spots," he said "We'd talk about the general areas freely enough, but when it came down to actually naming the spots, we wanted to share the stoke without running the sense of adventure for the guys coming behind us. Surfing a new spot, even when it's just new to you, is always a big thrill."
Very altruistic, but not taking into account a component almost as powerful as those colored dots on a page: surfing word of mouth. Perfect example? Look at Punta Pequena, in Bala California. Although this dreamy desert point had already been surfed by a handful of surfers - (Sufline's Sean Collins reportedly rode here as early as 1969, having sailed by with his father during the annual Newport-to-Ensenada race) when Scott Dittrich's surf movie Fluid Drive came out in 1974, featuring J. Riddle and George Trafton racing the impossibly lined-up, sand-bottomed barrels, the Great Bala Land Rush was on-despite the fact that the break was never identified. Nor was it in the summer of 1975 when the first-and only-major magazine feature on what was now being called "Scorpion Bay" appeared in SURFING magazine. And yet by 1979 this remote fishing village in the Mexican desert was a veritable R.V. park of Econoline and V.W. vans, with as many as 50 like-minded surf campers on hand for every decent south swell. Today "Scorpion Bay actually does have a campground-as well as restaurants, beach rentals and public toilets. All the result of simple word-of-mouth.
"Oh, yeah, the surf grapevine is a major factor," says Naughton. "But the magazine article factor pumps things up, whether you name the break or not."
In regards to the Nicaraguan trip I had written to Quiksilver's Mark
Warren in an attempt to explain SURFER's current policy on the naming of newly discovered breaks, a letter that, in retrospect, may have tried a little too hard to make its point.
So far as identifying surf spots are concerned," I e-mailed. "our policy here at SURFER is simple; place it on a map, but don't necessarily draw a map. This is absolutely necessary to provide some sort of editorial interest and point of reference to travel stories. Another boat trip to Macaronis doesn't have quite the cache as, say, a first-surf trip to the Nicobar Islands. Nor would a feature on Lagundri Bay be as compelling these days as a newly discovered right tube in the Tubuai's. To label this recent trip simply as "Centroamerica" again would rob the story of any real significance. By not saying where it is you cannot write about the country or its people, the culture, the weather, the history, the food, the music, the flora or fauna. By lumping this trip under the single banner "Centroamerica" you also run the risk of fostering an insular, neocolonial attitude that disregards the rich cultural differences that distinguish all the countries that make up the region. The fact that they all speak Spanish does not mean "it's all Mexico south of the border..."
After almost six hours of driving we arrived in the crossroads town of Chinandega, where at a tiny, brightly lit import-export office we picked up an inscrutable guide who had been retained to take us to the Indies Trader. By now it was twilight; people were everywhere, emerging in the evening's cool, drifting in and out of the darkness bordering the highway like shadowy spirits. Eventually we swerved off the paved road and down a rambling, rutted dirt track that snaked it's way through what by the bouncing headlights looked like a deep forest; broad topped mahogany trees draping themselves over the path, blocking out the inky sky and stars above. Martin Daly was waiting at the end of this road. Surf was waiting. The naming or not naming of which seemed totally irrelevant at this juncture, considering I had absolutely no idea where here was.
Rattling along in the ebon tropical dark of the Nicaraguan forest, scattering charcoal-dusty pigs and aerobic chickens, bound for our secret rendezvous with Captain Daly and the Trader, I thought back on the pattern of exposure/colonization that established itself in the decades following Naughton/Peterson's journeys. And there has been a pattern: Intrepid surfer (or in many cases surf photographer) discovers exotic new break. Tells friends. Friends tell friends. Generally, two seasons pass. Word of mouth builds, eventually reaching Dana Point. Mag team is dispatched, consisting most often of a tuned-in surf photographer who'd been told of the spot and several pro surfer/models. They return with story, magazine feature appears full of titillating photos but no specific locations. Another season passes. Second season following release of magazine article sees the arrival of the suitably inspired, their presence resented, naturally, by those surfers who'd come due to word-of-mouth. Third season, more surfers, maybe a second magazine feature. Fourth season, Balinese/Sumtaran/Latin American/European/Polynesian locals start renting out hammock space at the break, which is now considered crowded, and subsequently ruined.
But just who, exactly, are the destroyers? The surfers who find the break, the magazines who run the photos, or the surfers who come after? The answer is usually revealed in degrees of privilege. A few privileged surfers get to experience the thrill of discovering a brand-new spot. Even fewer surfers attain the level of privilege-and the wherewithal-to keep looking, one step ahead of the ravening hordes that are sure to come swarming behind.
The ultimate privilege lay waiting for me at the end of this jungle track. Our arrival could not have come as more of a surprise. After what seemed like hours in the bush Dylan Graves spoke up for the very first time.
"I can smell the ocean,' he declared.
We rolled down the Toyota's windows, the damp heat pouring into the cab. And something else: the smell of saltwater and muddy, bare mangrove roots. Rounding a corner the trees ahead were suffused in a halogen halo -bright lights illuminating a black iron gate that stood out in sharp contrast from the thatched-roof palapas that lined the trail. Through the gate, across a cobblestone-paved driveway and suddenly there was our destination, as if it had been plopped down in its entirety on this forgotten Coast by some alien hand, completely formed: an exclusive yacht basin, complete with yacht club and restaurant. And there at the dock, moored next to several well-appointed ocean-going sloops and what looked like some millionaires' motor yacht (a millionaire developer who, in fact, had carved out this little slice of Miami Beach in the middle of nowhere), floated the Indies Trader, resplendent in her red-and-black Polynesian print, wheel-house and deck lights blazing, the smiling Indonesian deck hands standing ready to load and store board bags
And here was Martin Daly, sweating in trunks and a t-shirt, looking a thousand times more comfortable than he did back in the SURFER office, smiling broadly at our incredulity.
"Welcome to The Crossing." he said.