Who Was the First Person to Surf Padang Padang and Bali?

The first surfer in Bali was the handsome photographer, tennis coach, CIA agent, and natural-footer Bob Koke. Koke had learned to surf in Waikiki when he had been an assistant to the film director shooting the 1932 film, Bird of Paradise. In 1936, Koke and his girlfriend Louise travelled from Singapore to Bali by steamship, fell in love with the island, and opened the Kuta Beach Hotel on the site of the current Hard Rock Hotel. He arranged his redwood plank to be shipped from Hawaii to Indonesia, and whilst waiting, had some locals carve out a couple of shorter wooden boards to use to teach the hotel guests. The pair left before the Japanese invasion of Bali during World War 2, came back in the early 1950s, and discovered the hotel had been burned down. The boards, however, escaped the blaze and are still in Bali today.

The first reef to be surfed in Bali would have been the offshore Kuta Reef, though the exact first surfer is a mystery. “A white guy was out in the surf. He was standing on a red thing and shooting across the face of a breaking wave,” wrote the anonymous author of Bali and Indo Surf Stories, retelling an experience in early 1971. That could have been Cottesloe surfer Barry Middleton, who was one of the first to explore Bali’s waves that year. Matt Warshaw says that by the late 1960s, American and Australian flight attendants had also begun to surf Kuta. Nat Young is also recorded as surfing the beachies in 1971.

What isn’t in dispute is the first wave ridden at Uluwatu. That was surfed by 15-year-old Steve Cooney in August of the same year, during the filming of the Morning of the Earth. Director Alby Falzon filmed Cooney and Rusty Miller surfing pumping The Peak and Racetracks, without leashes. The movie was released early the next year and immediately brought global attention to Uluwatu. It’s never gone away.

However even despite the new crowds coming to the Bukit, nearby Padang Padang wasn’t surfed until 1975. That origin story traces back to Peter McCabe and Tony “Doris” Eltherington. The pair had been competing in the Australian Titles at Middleton, better known as Dribbleton, in South Australia. “I was mates with Steve Cooney, and the surf was miserable. I said to Doris, ‘Let's get out of here and go to Bali.’ There was no more thought to it than that,” McCabe told SURFER.

That first season on a huge swell, McCabe, along with Steve Hamilton and Steve Agnew, surfed giant Outside Corner. Footage of Rabbit Bartholomew on that day would later appear in the iconic film Tubular Swells. Back on land, and with the tide filling in, the trio decided to walk down through the cave along the cliff and check the next wave along. It was solid, and though they didn’t surf that afternoon, they vowed to return the next morning.

The following day, the swell had dropped, and the trio paddled out. “It wasn't even big, maybe five foot, but we knew it was gold. I’m not sure who caught the first wave, but we had a mate who was taking photos and I got the first image, so I’ll claim it,” cackled McCabe.

It wasn't a one-off. In between pioneering G-Land with Gerry Lopez and other iconic waves like Desert Point, McCabe would spend three months for each of the next 25 years in Bali, with his prime focus on Padang.

“In the early days, everyone tended to surf Outside Corner, and we had this almost secret, perfect six-foot barrel to ourselves just down the next cove. Sometimes crew would only find us when their boards were washed down from Ulus, ” he said. “Even as the crowds increased over time, it retained its magic. That’s never gone away. That first session changed everything. It was the wave I lived my life for.”