What's Underneath The World's Most Perfect Wave?

The film recently debuted at the Ocean House Beach Club in Nice, France, as part of the UN Ocean Conference where SURFER had an exclusive look at what is a first-of-its-kind documentary of a collaboration between the four partners. 

Although coral reefs only cover 1% of the ocean floor they sustain a quarter of marine life and support over 1 billion people. While people often talk about the importance of  trees and forests for oxygen and wildlife habitat, marine ecosystems like kelp and coral reefs are actually even more instrumental to the creation of oxygen and regulation of carbon dioxide. Despite the importance of coral reefs, they’re under immense strain from climate change.

The film travels to Fiji, home to Cloudbreak, widely considered the most perfect wave on Earth (thanks to, guess what, a coral reef) and meets locals like Hannah Bennett, President of the Fiji Surfing Association, Apakuki Tasere and Victor Bonito, of Reef Explorer Fiji. 

From the outside, Fiji is synonymous with paradise, the type we see in marketing campaigns for luxury hotels or bottled water–a picture perfect pristine ecosystem. In real life, it is certainly a paradise albeit one with its own needs to preserve local ways of life–rooted in shared resource management– and to create opportunity through education. 

“Eleven years ago, there were plenty of fish. It changed a lot from that time and now we are trying to maintain and sustain our reef. I even teach my son how to do it, how to preserve our reef–and so I give my heart to it.”

Apukuki Tasere

SeaTrees, known for its global partnerships with local environmental groups, lets locals lead the way and supports them in taking ownership of conservation and regeneration efforts–yielding results that often elude foreign organizations. They represent a unique approach serving as a bridge to help boost groups like Reef Explorer by bringing science-based backing from institutes like Scripps and technology from Samsung.

As one of the pioneers for women’s surfing in Fiji, Hannah shares, “Nine years ago I started a Fiji girls surfing clinic to mentor and create space for young girls so that they look at the ocean as a place they want to preserve and protect. We receive a lot of messages from organizations who want to ‘help’ Fiji but you can’t always be sure that they’re serious and will respect our needs and our vision. With SeaTrees, I felt like we could trust them to truly work with us.”

Victor, President of Reef Explorer Fiji, explains that, “They were keen to support a coral reef project here in Fiji and it really complemented what I was doing already. Our work involves finding the most heat-resilient corals and help them be more reproductively successful. We’ve planted close to 100,000 corals now since we began.”

While most surfers and divers know the value of living coral reef, Victor says, “most of the population has a disconnect because it’s an ecosystem they just don’t really encounter.”

That’s where Scripps and the new Samsung Galaxy comes in thanks to the work of Sanghyup Park, a diver and Image Quality Engineer at Samsung, who set out to tackle the challenge of shooting underwater–something previously limited to big, heavy equipment–by developing Ocean Mode. This custom camera setting is designed to easily capture high-quality imagery of coral reefs by taking into account the differences in white balance, lighting, and motion that make underwater photography more challenging. 

With Ocean Mode, divers can document coral reefs and upload the photos to provide Scripps with the images it needs to apply 3D photogrammetry to track coral growth and biodiversity. All together, these efforts help bring coral reefs to life outside of the water, a crucial step to highlighting their importance. Because if you can see it, you can save it.

 As Apakuki says, “It’s a big process, we need all hands to help save the reef.”