Let’s Meet A Man Who Spent Years Living Out Of A Cave So That He Could Get Very Barreled

Surfing is full of cliches, and the idea of escaping society to surf is amongst the greatest of them. 

Imagine sacrificing a steady income, private land, material possessions, stable relationships, and most certainly Instagram for uninterrupted access to the water. Existing to ride waves day after day, year after year, enjoying nothing more than the rudimentary pleasures that come with that.

Maybe it’s hedonistic, or maybe it’s ascetic, but it’s something that has been part of surf culture for decades. Is it even possible to live such an existence in 2021? 

In the age of the internet, anybody can find any wave anywhere in the world and it’s harder than ever to disappear. There’s even a new twist to the cliché. You can sacrifice everything, only to find that the wave you’ve given it up for is crowded beyond belief. You find yourself sandwiched between a kid making Tik-Toks and a kook that’s ‘just travelling through for the day’, on a single fin painted like a rainbow. An eco-lodge/surf camp has sprung up on the paradise you’ve been calling home.

Could it be that the dream is just that? A concept, an idea, not a pursuable option? 

I was skeptical. Until, one day, I met another skeptic. And suddenly I wasn’t so skeptical.

I first came across Bentley gnawing away at the discarded remains of fish frames at the caravan park I was working at. A fisherman had caught these fish and filleted them and, at that point, a magnifying glass would have been necessary to see any meat that remained on the bone.

“What a waste aye?” he drawled.

There’s no shortage of unusual types hiding out at caravan parks but something about this wiry man’s demeanour separated him from the rest. Bentley is just over six-feet tall, broad shouldered, without an inch of fat, and has sandy hair often obscured by a truly ancient visor. He was living in an orange and white mini-bus, one that had originally been a school bus. I knew this because the ‘s’ and ‘h’ had been removed on the front so that it simply read ‘c ool bus’. Several boards and a single camp chair are strewn absentmindedly out the front. He speaks with an air of antiquity, an Australian larrikin brogue that sounds like you’re watching an episode of Neighbours from the 1980s. He is eccentric, which you’d expect. 

Bentley spent 20 years living at Red Bluff in Western Australia — first out of a cave, and later moving between several primitive shacks made out of grass. It was here he reigned supreme at one of the most unforgiving waves in the world throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, even featuring in the Capricorn Drifters film. And it is here he hasn’t returned since he left in 2005. 

“This bloody internet thing came into practice,” laments the 58-year-old, whose ubiquitous presence down the west coast sees him identified by his last name, rather than his Christian name (Gary).

“We’d be sitting there waiting for months. The swell would turn up, and there’d be 50 people out before we were.

“The other thing they did was to start charging to stay. It started at 50 cents a night, they built proper drop toilets, and turned it into a community. Before that it was freedom, and then you had to abide by the laws again.

“You were no better off than in town. We’d lost that freedom.”

Bentley used to work on boats, vineyards, and construction sites, saving money before hitting the Bluff for an extended stay. Sometimes it would be for a few months. One year, though, he made enough to last him five years off the grid. 

Collecting water in a tarp, using candles for light, catching dinner and using a fire to cook it — that’s how Bentley got by, which is exactly the type of Gilligan’s Island shit I was looking for.

There are tales of the ocean coming into his cave and washing everything away, of awry fins to the eye and the ensuing chaos, of police raids. He estimates 60 broken boards over the two decades he spent at the Bluff, which led to a preference for the bulk of a windsurf board. He was on one of these when Joel Parkinson was in the lineup, and was heard to comment after seeing Bentley emerge implausibly out the other end of a tube: “That is the best barrel on the worst board I have ever seen”.

He said he’d chosen that lifestyle in order to ‘escape’, and he said it in a way that I knew digging deeper was not an option. Nevertheless, it’s a good point. Regardless of personal circumstance, there are plenty of reasons why getting away has a lot of appeal in the days of COVID, social media-induced anxiety, and climate concern.

“I went to the Bluff to escape from society, and some bullshit,” he warns.

“And I did for a while. But in the end, society and the bullshit caught up with me out there.”

Bentley’s story is not unique for his era. He acknowledges there were plenty that came before him at the Bluff, and plenty elsewhere who have relinquished a material life in favour of one of simplicity. It’s how it became a cliché in the first place.

I asked him if he thinks it’s still possible to go that route today. 

“Getting away from society and just surfing now?” he ponders over an Emu Export I’d given him. “I believe you can do it, but not the way I did,” he tells me.

“I had nothing. I caught snapper or squid every night and that was it.”

“I’d go into town once every few months. I used to shit on the beach before they got drop toilets. Would people do that now?”

Despite this foreboding, and despite the fact you won’t find many good lineups to yourself these days, there is no reason why any individual couldn’t save a decent amount of money and bail on everything to live a simple, surf-centric life. 

However, the requirements to live an isolated existence have changed dramatically. There is a practical blueprint for pure survival, but no such thing exists for giving up the various forms of validation that today’s world offers. On top of that, the temptation to half-ass it has never been stronger: Why remove yourself from the system entirely when you could instead work a freelance gig for a few hours a day while spending months inhabiting an air conditioned room on some foreign, wave-rich coastline? 

Hell, there are even websites that enable you to organize work-trade agreements with surf camps around the world. 

Today, escaping is not as simple as getting in a car and driving away. Society follows you now; it lives in your pocket. On a certain level, following the path of Bentley and others like him has less to do with sacrificing creature comforts and more to do with fully eliminating your connection to the outside world. 

And, in that light, perhaps the dream has never been more appealing.