Mick Fanning is jumping out of his skin. It’s taken four days to get here and waking to the sight of six-to-eight foot A-frames unloading right in front of the camp has got the three-time World Champ’s blood at maximum fizz. He suits up, skips down the boulders, jumps in a rip and is swept towards the impact zone just as the first true set of the morning begins stampeding over the horizon. Collision is inevitable. Line after line of unimpeded ocean power aims to unload directly onto the famous blond cranium of Kirra’s favourite son. As we watch Mick get obliterated, Mason Ho stops waxing his 6’4”, returns it to his board bag and picks up a knifey looking 6’8” pintail. “It’s a lot bigger than it looks out there, huh,” he says with a smile that’s all eyebrows. “Brah… the Search has delivered again!”

Where are we exactly? Ha! As if we’d tell. This is the Search after all. It ain’t for sharing secrets, it’s for inspiring you and your mates to get out into the wild and score your own little corner of perfection. Looking around, though, we could be in any of a million places. Giant scrubby plateaus stretch for miles softened only by the familiar pink hue of the soon-to-be-rising sun. It could be West Oz. It could be Chile. It could be the moon… (if the moon had blue sky, pumping waves and a little lizard doing push ups on a nearby rock). This is the desert and, like any desert, it doesn’t take long venturing into one to quickly discover an overwhelming sense of complete isolation – a feeling that’s becoming more and more absent as modern life invades ever deeper into our personal space… but sheez, let’s not go there just yet.

The tremendous expanse of the heavens above us and the nothingness of the surrounding landscape have nothing on today’s ocean, at least not during the daylight hours. This ragged coastline we’ll call our home for the next week is lighting up with double-overhead tube after spewing tube for as far as the eye can see. With the wind expected to be offshore for the whole week, with not another soul around for miles and with absolutely no contact to the outside world, it feels as if this might all be a giant prank of the imagination, but if something can’t exist without nothing… then right now the nothing is where it’s at.

Mick plays cat and mouse with the shifting A-frames for a good 20 minutes before he finally picks a plumb. Taking off behind the peak, he knifes hard off the bottom, rips the handbrake and casually stands bolt upright as the entire world spins around him. It’s goosebumps stuff to watch, and not just because the wind is 180 knots and cold enough to freeze the nipples off a penguin. This is all Mick, the kind of line and surfing we’ve clearly missed since he hung up the comp rashie back at Bells, and as he exits the tube and flies into a deep and flawless down carve you remember that the style, precision and power of a true surfing master are marvellous things to witness in the flesh.

Mase reaches the line-up and Mick has to be happy for the company. There are seals jumping around all over the place and while there are no polar bears or killer whales in these parts, there is another apex predator with a fondness for seal meat and world champs born in Penrith. After trading a few clean ones with Mick and feeling out the extra length in his board, Mase snags an absolute bomb. Freefalling down the face he finds rail off the bottom and drives up into the maw before being spat into the channel like a sour villager from the mouth of a fire breathing dragon – a creature Mase says he would like to be one day, so he can fly to the top of mountains and check the surf before torching villages on the way back home. It’s just one of the many things we’ll learn about Mason over the coming week, he’s a man who approaches every conversation like he does his surfing – an opportunity to fire up the imagination and create something magical – and he knows how to get in the hole.