The most famous left in the Mentawais, a machine-like wall widely called the best fun wave on earth.
Also known as Macas.
Macaronis is the wave that made the southern Mentawais famous. It is a long, running left that peels down a reef pass off North Pagai with a consistency that borders on the absurd, and it has spent two decades near the top of every list of the best waves on the planet.
Its reputation is built on repetition. Where most world-class waves demand a very specific swell and a very specific tide, Macas turns on across a wide range of conditions and holds its shape all the way through. That is why surfers talk about it in terms of "turns per wave" rather than barrels alone.
The wave
The take-off zone sits at the top of the reef and the wave immediately forms a steep, clean wall that runs away from you. From there it is a series of open-face sections that link, letting a good surfer put four or five real turns on a single ride before the inside bowl.
On smaller days it is playful and forgiving, a rippable wall with a friendly shoulder. As the swell builds it gets faster, hollower and more serious, with a proper barrel section on the inside where the reef comes up sharply. At size, it stops being a fun wave and starts being a heavy one.
The channel alongside the reef is deep and well defined, so the paddle out is straightforward and you can sit and watch sets march in without getting caught inside.
Conditions at a glance
- Wave type: Left-hand reef break
- Best swell: S to SW groundswell
- Best wind: E to NE offshore
- Best tide: Mid to high
- Best size: 3ft to 8ft
- Season: April to October
- Crowd: Busy. A resort sits on the wave, so charters time their visit around the swell and the tide.
- Where: Pasongan, North Pagai, South Mentawai
History and reputation
Three Sydney surfers reached Pasongan in May 1980: cousins Chris Goodnow and Tony Fitzpatrick, and their friend Scott Wakefield. They are generally reckoned the first surfers to set foot in the Mentawais. Goodnow's diary shows they nearly rode straight past it. They looked at the left on 1 May, decided the reef looked too shallow to be worth it, and only moved into the bay a few days later once they had watched it properly. They used the local name, Pasongan, and camped near the point. Before they flew home they agreed to say nothing, having seen what sudden attention had already done to Nias. The secret held for more than ten years.
What finally let it out was a boat. Martin Daly was working the islands in a converted salvage vessel, and in March 1991 he came across Lance Knight surfing at Katiet, which is how Lance's Right got its name. The following year a Rip Curl film crew went through the chain on Daly's boat, and the footage did the rest. Goodnow tells of standing in a Sydney surf shop watching Tom Carroll ride a perfect left on the screen and recognising it instantly. Nobody wrote down who renamed Pasongan. The version Goodnow passes on, as hearsay rather than fact, is that a surfer camped in the bay was eating a bowl of macaroni when Daly asked what the place was called. The wave has been filmed and photographed almost constantly since. The line most often repeated about it comes from a Waves magazine survey said to have run in December 2003, in which Macaronis was voted the most fun wave in the world. That claim now circulates mainly on the websites of people selling trips there, so it is worth treating as reputation rather than record.
On 25 October 2010 a magnitude 7.8 earthquake sent a tsunami through the Pagai islands. At least 408 people died and around 300 more were never found, almost all of them in villages with no connection to surfing. In Pasongan Bay two charter boats at anchor were thrown together and one of them caught fire, and everyone aboard got across to the other boat. The resort on the bay was badly damaged. Access works differently now. Silabu village put mooring buoys in the bay, and boats book them ahead and pay a mooring fee plus a per-head charge that goes back into the community. That does put a ceiling on how many surfers are in the water at once. The ceiling is not a low one, though, and the takeoff is small, so plan for company.
Who it suits
Confident intermediates and up. If you can carry speed along an open face and make a steep drop, Macaronis will give you the best waves of your life. It is not a beginner wave, but it is far more forgiving than the heavy right-handers further north.
It is also the wave most likely to convert a good surfer into a repeat Mentawai traveller, because it rewards clean surfing rather than raw courage.
Surfing Macaronis well
Boards that actually work here
Macaronis rewards a board you can turn rather than one you just hang on to. Your normal performance shortboard is the workhorse, and a bit of curve through the back half helps, because the wave keeps asking you to redirect rather than run straight. Bring a wider hybrid or a fish as well. The small days here are genuinely worth surfing and a stiff little shortboard feels dead on them. Only pack a step-up if the forecast has real size behind it. Bring spare fins, fin keys and a repair kit too, because there is no surf shop in the southern Pagais and a cracked board on day two of a ten day trip is a long wait.
The takeoff is smaller than the crowd
The ride is long but the spot where it first stands up is not, so everyone stacks onto one small patch of reef. The mooring system caps numbers in the bay, but the cap still allows a few dozen surfers split between the resort and whatever boats are in, and people have described the peak as being as dense as the Superbank on a good day. Expect a queue, and expect an international one rather than a local one. Nobody owns the place, which also means nobody is keeping order. What works is choosing a position and staying with it. Either sit deep and take the sets, or sit wider and take the ones that swing through. Trying to have both from the same spot is what starts the arguments.
Wind matters less here than tide does
Plenty of trips get wasted sitting on the boat waiting for glass. Macaronis is tucked into a bay and holds its shape in wind that would pull most reef passes apart, so a bumpy afternoon is often still a good surf. Tide is the thing to actually watch. The wave works across a lot of the tide range, but as the water drops off the reef the inside section stops being playful and turns into a hazard. Look at what that last part of the wave is doing before you paddle out, not once you are already sitting on it, and take the tide window your guide points you at.
Where people get hurt
Macaronis feels so easy that people surf six hours a day and keep pushing the inside on a dropping tide. That is where most of the injuries come from, and it is usually not the wipeout that does it. It is the extra turn attempted on a section that was already closing out. If a wave is going to shut down on the shallow part, kick out over the back or angle towards the deeper water rather than straightening off and riding it in prone. You are a long way from a hospital here. Coral cuts go bad quickly in the tropics, so scrub them out properly the same day rather than the next morning, and pack booties for the low end of the tide.
How to surf Macaronis with WaveBorn
Macaronis sits in the southern end of the archipelago, well away from the central and northern clusters. A live-aboard charter is the natural way to surf it, because the boat can position overnight and have you in the line-up at first light rather than burning half the morning in transit.
Both of our charters roam the full Mentawai chain and run south when the forecast points that way. Because we follow the swell rather than a fixed itinerary, we head for Macas when the charts say it will be on, not because it is a box to tick.
Trips that reach it: Ombak Kabau and Odyssey Mentawai .
Nearby breaks
Macaronis sits within easy reach of Thunders, Greenbush and Roxies , which is what makes this part of the archipelago so productive: if the wind or swell does not suit one reef, another is usually working a short ride away.
Conditions here are a guide, not a guarantee. Our crew reads the swell, wind and tide each morning and puts you on the break that matches your surfing that day. See the full Mentawai surf spots guide or browse every break we surf.