Before setting off, the sponsors encourage you to "travel light". Rest assured, you will want for nothing on the Indies Trader, the Quiksilver Crossing's mobile headquarters that is to be your new aquatic home. You pack your bags uncertainly, the way some people riddle a heavy envelop with stamps, hoping blindly that the postage will be enough to carry it through to its destination. At JFK, you buy a phone card only to curse your luck in thinner air because the access number has a 212 area code, which renders the rented minutes useless in the Caribbean.

On the map, you pinpoint a dusty speck of land well south of Miami. Rumor has it that Keith Richards just bought a house on one of its more secluded outposts. The country may have the most unfortunately named capital in the entire region. You are happy it's not Port-au-Prince, although Haitians on this island have started to outnumber the indigenous population. The residents here are holding a referendum on how to identify themselves. In the interim, they call themselves "Belongers."

This, regrettably, is as specific as you can get with regard to your location. Confidentiality agreements have been signed. Assurances of silence uttered. What you do is secret. This clandestine approach allows the Crossing to slip into any harbor, befriend the locals, and learn the coordinates of undisclosed breaks without twisting arms. Surfers tend to be less proprietary when you promise to keep their beloved take-offs safe from swarms of swell-hungry tourists. Broadcasting the whereabouts of every head-high bowling reef from Trinidad to Rincon wouldn't make for a hearty welcome the next time you dropped in looking for hospitality.

The captain, Martin Daly, sends a deck hand to fetch you at the airport. It's a bumpy 15-minute taxi ride to the Indies Trader, a repurposed 72-foot ship once employed as a salvage vessel in Indonesia. The air is damp with sea spray and diesel fumes.

Martin checks for new arrivals.

And that's what it feels like here at first. Like you're being sucked into some X Box alternate universe. Fantasy camp with Sex Wax and long lefts. The Calypso, but with camouflage swim trunks hanging from the rigging and Biggie blaring from the upper deck.

You are shown to your quarters and assigned the top bunk. Twenty-three inches separate your thin mattress from the ceiling. The first mate tells the story of how one morning he awoke to find his nose bloodied from having been violently thrown against the ceiling when the ship pitched him skyward in heavy seas. He suggests you sleep on your side unless you want a broken-nose alarm clock.

Randy Noborikawa sits on an empty boat trailer with his sketchpad open across his board shorts. He wishes he had a paper clip to keep the pages from flapping in the wind and is rewarded with a wooden cloths pin. The edges of his book drip in a wash of fading colors. He outlines the wheelhouse with a ballpoint pen as jet black as his hair. The last trip Randy made outside the States was to Barcelona, by way of London, where he found himself drawing and painting incessantly. Many of those sketches were transposed directly onto a line of limited edition Quiksilver T-shirts at Fred Segal: phone booths, cityscapes, decorative flowers inspired by Gaudi's architecture.

The swell has picked up overnight. You are in the lagoon making a break for some cut in the barrier reef, which will lead you to open seas. The wind is gusting at 30knots and coming out of the northeast. A dolphin darts across the bow. The captain's chair spins like a merry-go-round as you dip and crest through a succession of troughs. Most days, the impossibly clear water is like a magnifying glass 50 feet to the bottom, but under present weather conditions you can't see the reef through the white water. Martin dispatches his first mate and Danny Fuller on this aluminum skiff to sit out back and call sets so you won't get caught in big waves midway through the channel. They say the Indies Trader is like a brick in the ocean-solid and stable-but you still wouldn't want to get turned sideways on it. The waves continue to close out down the line. The captain decides to look for safer passage elsewhere

Down near Club Med, you find a suitable opening and begin the two-hour trek to a choice surf break four miles off the coast. "Troll while you travel" is one of the Crossing's many underplayed mottos, so you throw a fishing line over the top rail on the journey out. Maybe you catch a blue marlin, a Spanish mackerel, or some mahi-mahi.

You reach your destination before lunch, and everyone emerges from their cabins to take stock of the surrounding. You come to rest on the leeward side of the reef's southwestern edge. About 200 feet off the starboard bow, the ocean darkens several shades, where the depths quickly drop down 3,000 or 4,000 feet. They call the front edge of this shelf "the wall: Along the port deck is a sandbar buttressed by a reef thick with fire coral, named such because its hair burns your skin when touched. They say to be stung is like having syphilis on your foot. Straight off the bow, eight-foot faces peel to the tight every few minutes or so. The rusted ribs of an anonymous shipwreck jut out from the sea at low tide. No one cares to speculate the age or provenance of the wreck. Perhaps they were sailors or pirates. You wonder if the captain keeps a shotgun in the wheelhouse to protect against modern-day marauders.

Nathan Fletcher finds some powder.

Nathan Fletcher scratches the tattoo of American Indian chief oh his right calf. Above the headdress are the words "kill me". Nathan slumps into a waterproof pelican case and eats a cheeseburger while Danny Fully readies his six-foot-two-inch swallowtail. The airline misplaced Nathan's surfboards somewhere en route from California and, despite repeated offers to lend one; he's not ready to concede the loss just yet. The two guys have been friends since Danny was still a teenager living in Hawaii. There's an unguarded flow of banter that runs deep between them, whether its talk of zoom lenses, Indies boat trips, beach brawls, or lost love. Nathan, along with his brother, Christian, are the surfers credited for inventing "big air," pushing the boundaries of what's possible on a wave by co-opting maneuvers already popularized in skate and snowboarding. Their father, Herbie Fletcher, is the legend who perfected slip-free traction padding for board decks and the filmmaker who shot all the surf footage feature in Julian Schnabels Basquiat. Nathan is a third generation pro and has become, over the years, an unofficial mentor to Danny Fuller, teaching him how to tame lips for maximum lift (always make sure your body is higher than the board mid-flight) and encouraging Danny to explore creative ventures during his downtime. Both men are now avid photographers, but today they work the other side of the camera, ripping sliders, cutbacks, and the occasional three-sixty. Watching them makes you feel like money inside. They remount their fiberglass charges again and again against an infinite swimming pool blue horizon. Land is nowhere in sight.

Danny Fuller shows what three generations of proffessional surfing does to your genes.

Somewhere between the era Dogtown's Z Boys and the rise of the X Games, Natas Kaupas was a professional skateboarder. Growing up in Santa Monica, he surfed alongside the likes of Strider Wasilewski but lacked the drive to master tricks required to make it on the world tour. Instead, Natas took to handrails, curbs, concrete steps, and with his loose improvisations, eventually did for street skating what Tony Hawk would later do for vertical. Today, Natas is the creative director of Quiksilver, working from the company's home office in Huntington Beach, California. Wetsuits hang from employees' cars in the parking lot, and when there's swell coming, don't be surprised if your appointment is temporarily postponed.

In 2001, Natas introduced a handwritten script - the impaired logo - that soon became the company's signature, in both senses of the world. Natas says his design was inspired by the old-sign painting techniques found on vintage storefronts and racecars, the artwork of Rick Griffin from the late 1960's, and paintbrush lettering that springs from the same influences that inspire contemporary street artists. Some legibility is sacrificed, but it is generously made-up for by the flourishes of a human hand. The drop shadows, the colors, the fades - they're all similar to the throw-ups you find in graffiti.

The current Reef Check marine biologist onboard dons his scuba equipment and makes a giant-stride entry into the ocean. Over the course of the next hour he carefully lays his 100-meter measuring tape through a tangle of sea fans and vase sponges. He counts the number of fish and invertebrates on a white slate to his inflatable vest. The highlight of this dive is a pair of peacock flounders he finds half-hidden in the white sands.

Anytime a surfer wipes out and winds up face down in the drink, someone from the Crossing invariably shouts, "Reef check!"

The joke never gets old.

After disembarking the Indies Trader on Monday, Danny Fuller makes his way west to Fiji and then on to Tahiti for the WCT trials at Teahupoo. If he qualifies, Danny will compete against the top 44 surfers in the world, including reigning champion Andy Irons. The tour stop isn't his usual business. Danny Fuller is what's known in the industry as a "big-wave specialist," a surfer who traffics in treacherous barrels at places like pipeline and G Land. All the same, he savors the opportunity to go head-to-head with the sports' anointed, its riding giants.

In 1999, Danny learns this lesson the hard way when he bites it at Teahupoo and cheese grates his back on the coral. While tending his wounds - a torturous affair which involves rubbing limejuice into the bloody cuts - this bomb set rolls in from nowhere and a local guy gets caught inside. Danny sees his surfboard starting to tombstone, wobbling on the surface straight up and down like a grave marker, and does a double take, for it suggests that there's an anchor tugging on the board from below. Danny jumps back on his gun and fearlessly paddles out as fast as he possibly can to help. Reaching the unnerving buoy, he grabs at the taut leash and immediately feels the pull of limp body weight from the other end. He reels up the unconscious surfer completely unprepared for what he's about to witness. Danny equates the vision to that part in the movie, The Mummy, where the villains face is reanimating. That's what it looks like, because when his head finally breaches the surface, half the surfers jaw is missing. The injured athlete is a chill Tahitian skinhead named Brice, really calm and cool, lots of tats. Danny and the guy's cousin get him onto a nearby boat where he is temporarily resuscitated. Shortly after, Brice falls into a come.

Flyingfish # 025.

At night, you drop anchor and eat dinner under the blue canvas canopy on the rear deck. The cook passes plates of grilled Wahoo up through an open skylight in the galley's ceiling. Danny's hyped about his new house in Venice. "Five blocks from the boardwalk, five blocks from the ghetto," he announces. Natas estimates, " More like two blocks from the ghetto," Fuller doesn't debate the proximity.

The boat has more passengers than bunks tonight, so Skippy is forced to get creative with his bedding. The hammock looks promising, but it bottoms out on the surfboards stacked beneath netting on the cover of the cargo hold.