Lakey Peak Is For Lovers… Of Surf

We spent a little over three weeks at Lakey Peak, on the southeast shore of Sumbawa in Indonesia. It’s a beachfront area with nine or ten guesthouses. There are a bunch of surf breaks of different difficulties scattered within a 4 km stretch of the beach, with two excellent waves right out front of the main guesthouse strip.

There’s not much to do here for non-surfers. Lakey is not a village (the closest village is Hu’u, a few kilometers away). If you don’t surf, there is a bit of decent snorkelling right out front of the guesthouses, or you could pay a local to take you out fishing. Most of the time, we surfed twice during the day and spent the time in between lying in our hammocks and reading. It was perfect for us.

The main break, Lakey Peak, is a beautiful, machine-like A-frame that I’m going to dream about for the rest of my life. It was one of our favorite waves so far.

A few of the other breaks around are Lakey Pipe:

Nanga’s:

and Maci Point (a 45-minute boat ride away):

The closest ATM is in a town a 45-minute drive away, called Dompu. We went to the market to stock up on fruit at the same time as an ATM run.

We passed by some picturesque rice fields on the way to and from Dompu.

There are many stray cats and dogs on the beach at Lakey. All the cats have strange, stubby tails. They’re born like that; it’s not from having the tails bitten off.

We went snorkelling twice and saw really cool creatures just a few meters off the beach: puffer fish, moray eels, parrot fish, lobster, a big turtle, and this beautiful lion fish:

There were fun waves the entire time we were there, and two quite large swells came in as well. Taj Burrow and Joel Parkinson flew in for the first swell, and Mick Fanning was there for the second one.

We also got to hang out and catch up with an old friend while we surfed. Our good friend Alan from New York City made the trek all the way to Bali and then Sumbawa to meet up with us for two wave-filled weeks at Lakey.

And another surfing friend, Tack, whom we’d met on a surf trip in El Salvador six years ago, happened to be coming to Lakey at the same time as us. It was lots of fun to reconnect.

A lot of people in the surf industry visit Lakey, so the local kids have an early exposure to a very high level of surfing. We saw a few of them starting out super young, surfing the shore break. Seeing their huge smiles reminded me of what it felt like when I was first learning and any wave was a good wave.

We met a guy named Carlos from Barcelona who has been living in the Lakey area for the past two years, heading an NGO called Desarollo Compatible, with a project that provides health care, educational opportunities and much more to the kids in the area. It’s called Harapan Project, and if you visit Lakey, you can ask around for Carlos to see him and his colleagues in action. They can always use donations and funding. Imagine how much it could help the community if every surfer that passed through Lakey gave $10!

Most evenings, the guys working on the Harapan Project were out on the beach playing soccer with a posse of kids.

As far as I know, there are no other humanitarian projects in the immediate area, so if you’ve been lucky enough to surf some of the nuggets that Lakey has to offer, please make an effort to contact Harapan Project and give back to the community in some way.