Watch: Tai Buddha Takes 6 Big Horses To The Deathly Hollows

In partnership with Billabong.

There’s a fairly clean line between Tai ‘Buddha’ Graham’s two lives.

In one, he runs a Bali hospitality empire that includes Single Fin, The Lawn and roughly a dozen venues under Project Black. In the other, he gets on creaky stink boats with 6 identical surfboards built for going straight and looks for waves that can turn a human being into a meat crayon.

The latter version just produced a new clip — returning to the iconic, heavy Indonesian right he used to surf with the late Mikala Jones, armed with six Big Horses, his signature tube model with JS, and accommodation apparently selected on the basis that running water would constitute needless luxury.

Which is fairly on-brand.

Long before the restaurants and Sunday sessions, Tai was doing Indo strike missions “on an oily rag,” catching barely seaworthy vessels, sleeping on floors and surviving on pancakes. At one point he was living on roughly $200 a month, selling surfboards to stay afloat and getting around Bali on a pushbike because he couldn’t afford to rent a motorbike.

He’d moved there with $3,000 after growing up between the Gold Coast and Bali, learning to surf around Legian and Padma during school holidays. Before business boomed, he chased junior contests alongside the likes of Bede Durbidge, Luke Munro, Dingo Morrison and Joel Parkinson, and had a crack at the QS.

Later, Mikala became his great co-conspirator.

The pair shared a particular appetite for complicated missions with no guarantee of reward. Multiple flights, six-hour drives, four-hour boat legs, then potentially nothing. Tai reckoned Mikala’s forecasting helped them score around 80% of the time, but said the important part was that neither cared much about the other 20.

The spirit lives on.