BY ALEXANDER HARO
This review first appeared on The Inertia.
Torren Martyn should be considered one of the greatest surf adventurers of our time. There are plenty of surfers who travel a lot these days, but Torren takes truly epic trips. If his adventures came in written form, they would be sweeping sagas, thousands of pages long. And in early 2022, Martyn and his partner Aiyana Powell embarked on a voyage for the ages.
Martyn is a man who loves the search. Sure, he loves the waves at the end of the rainbow, but the act of looking is just as good. He and Ishka Folkwell, a filmmaker with some serious chops, have created some beautiful surf films. Thank You, Mother, for example, and more recently Distant Shore. They were also responsible for Lost Track Atlantic, a four-part series that saw them fly from Australia to England and buy a busted old 2008 Ford Transit van for peanuts, then attempt to go from northern Scotland all the way down to the equatorial coast of West Africa.
Novice sailors, epic voyage
Martyn’s latest film, Calypte, is one of his best yet. Torren and Aiyana, with just a few combined days sailing experience under their belts, had an opportunity to take a sailboat from the east coast of Thailand to Eastern Indonesia.
“They could learn as they went, get a few friends with sailing experience to help through the tricky bits and pick up as much as possible from them along the way,” the the filmmakers wrote. “With this plan, the pair embarked onto the South China Sea, headed up through the Strait of Malacca and around the tip of Sumatra; out into the Indian Ocean on a year-long expedition in search of waves.”
Of course, sailing is never without its problems, especially for a couple with almost no sailing experience.
“What seemed like an idyllic journey didn’t come easy,” the team continued. “It was difficult to anticipate the challenges of the sleepless nights, the endless rolling and tossing of the boat, the breakdowns, the relentless maintenance and confined space. But adventures always seem sweeter if it really feels like you had to work to get there.”
And the adventure documented in Calypte is certainly a sweet one.
