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The Utopian surf dream. It’s the Search. It’s the spirit of adventure so evocatively pioneered by our surfing forefathers in the late 1970s.

Finnegan, with men like Mike Boyum, and Martin Daly, snubbed the Vietnam War-era expectations of society to explore the wild blue yonder. Through rough-hewn travels based on gut-feel and mouldy marine charts, these grizzled surf hippies happened deliriously upon breaks like Tavarua (Fiji) and G-Land (Indo) and a host of others in remote island chains such as the Maldives, Andamans and Mentawais.

They were men who lived the dream viscerally. By that I mean usually hungry, often sick, sometimes immersed in the embrace of a far-off culture (literally and figuratively), sitting bleach-haired on grass mats, getting drunk on Kava or stoned on plants, or parking off in giant turquoise barrels that reeled down razor reef passes at recklessly thrilling speeds.

What our collective memory doesn’t always remember, because of that human tendency to truncate history into a highlights reel of the good times, is the lame, in-between lulls they endured to capture that sumptious snapshot. We know that too well, too. We feasted upon it when it came out in surf mags: liquid nirvana living like a trapped wraith in a photo of a bronzed surfer tucked in casual repose, deeply ensconced in a fairy castle. If we lanced the page with a knife, perhaps we would be engulfed with a torrent of rapturous stoke as it drained from its two-dimensional confines.

As surf rats and groms straining to snap life from its deep-rooted tree, we gaped in spiritual delight, paying homage at the altar of a cascading crystalline cathedral, trying to imagine the before and the after of this blimp on a sensory sliding scale of enlightenment.

But what the image fails to appreciate are the many hours of labour and emotional and often physical anguish it took to reach that point. Malaria, disease, foot rot, the runs, drug-induced terrors, loneliness, and even madness, were just a few of the building blocks of the platform they laid for us, the modern surfer. The worst we can expect on our pre-booked, packaged, aircon island surf tours in season to Indo and the central atolls of the Maldives are having to jostle for waves with frothing clumps of surfers who look like para-troopers dropping from planes in a water-borne invasion to swarm “our” breaks. Skirmishes ensue as different cultural mores are let loose in an anarchaic clump of misery for your average above average surfer trying to get a feasible return on his investment.

Fortunately, there are other ways to capture a piece, and sometimes a chunk, of that elusive surf dream. We hope to find some on a South African-run charter boat, a 50 foot catamaran, that is plying the southern atolls of the Maldives in the area around a surf spot called Blue Bowls.

Any packaged trip to a foreign land comes with an inherent risk. You’re trying to get nature in sync to her best rhythm, but sometimes your time with her straddles the trough and the peak. That’s okay. The “half and half” surf trip means it’s fun to snorkel, and chill, and then surf some cooking waves. At worst, you’ll fall exactly in the trough – between the “You should have been here yesterday” and the “It’s going to be firing tomorrow” rhythm of nature. That can mean you’re skunked, for want of a euphemism for “fucked”.

Of course, the best alternative happens often enough. That’s when you time it perfectly. Your trip fits into nature’s undulating peak. The surf fires 4-6ft every day. Your arms are like spaghetti. You live on anti-inflammatories and Rehydrate and you spend a lot of time fast asleep, or rolling around on the deck with tennis balls under your back. This is the pack of black current fruit pastilles. Too much of a good thing can almost be bad. But not quite.

During the 22 hours of flying from Cape Town via Dubai and Male, and then a one hour local flight to the south, we have confirmed and clarified a troubling forecast of onshore southerly breezes for much of our trip followed by a wind switch to offshore west and the arrival of a cooking groundswell. Seems like we’re in for the half and half, the middle ground.

As we come in low over the green-balled islands nestling in their glistening turquoise cocoons, the wrinkled ocean confirms the wind direction as it rapidly transitions to grass then tar and palm trees as our Maldivian Aero de Havilland judders on touch-down at Kanedhoo airport.

We have landed in the town of Thinidhoo on the southwestern side of Huvadhu Atoll in the southern Maldives. We are 320 kilometres south of Male atoll, where the capital lies. With gear and boards on airport trolleys we walk to the jetty down a tarred avenue. Lined with palm trees, a bright shimmering strip of blue ocean lies 200 metres away at the end of the road. It’s like an oasis – or some sort of grail – that lies alluringly at the end of a tunnel.

In the Maldives, on any of the 1,200 islands fringing 20 something atolls, you are never far from water. Here, like everywhere near the equator, it is hot. It is humid. The palm fronds barely move in the breeze. We are only about 20 miles north of the equator. A sweaty walk later, and we arrive at the quayside – covered with crushed coral in bleached white stages of decay – and load up the dinghy with board bags, soft bags and hand luggage. It will require two trips out to our home for the next 10 days.

EL KAPITAN: Ballies, meet Brent, son of Dux, old ledge from South Beach.

We meet and greet Joe Streeter, 38, our spiky blond haired skipper browned like a polished groundnut. He is a civil engineer who chucked that in after 13 years to start a charter company in the Seychelles before striking out east for more adventure. We meet Brent Coetsee, 50, the affable owner; and his kind-hearted wife Sharyn, fair skinned Durbanites browned by years in the sun. This was their surf dream: a family boat cruising the world. They’ve turned it into a South African-run charter boat. Greg Bertish from True Blue Travel has managed the process, and is relieved to have partnered with a boat and crew that subscribe to the catering code of her passengers.

We are joined by Cape Town surfers Marius Smit, 42, Myles “Boris” Protheroe, 46, Carlos Nobriega, 54, Ross Frylinck, 43, the twin brothers Greg and Anton Mayne, 43, and Spike, 52. We have decided to check out surf spots near the airport. It is too late to strike out for our destination, the five star Blue Bowls, which is 25 miles from the airport and will take us four to five hours, arriving after dark. Instead, we will find a local anchorage for the night.

The southerly breeze has been blowing for two days and continues to do so. Brent says it was cooking two days ago. Of course it was. Now the winds have shifted from their seasonal westerly trade direction to a skunking south, which can happen before the season begins properly in September. Another problem becomes apparent. There is no swell along the western side of the atoll.

KING CARLOS: Carlos prepares sashimi from a batch of Rainbow Runners (bought).

We have heard there is swell in the southeast, where we’re heading, a 3-5’ SSE windswell at nine second intervals. We dive along a reef that sits adjunct a left hander – a crumbly 2’ set not stoking the fires. Drifting with a current running down and into the atoll from the small island, we are blown away by the myriad marine life humming along the blue drop-off, and in the brown, hotwater shallows of the reef. A deeper dive off the edge takes you to 10 to 15 metres into a darker, colder water zone, and a mystical sense of the deep blue.

At the base of your dive, breath holding steady, you turn, look up towards the shimmering sunlit surface that seems to be impossibly far away, and begin your ascent. Time it right and you’re cruising centimetres above a wonderland of flat-headed coral and spiny corals and tiny shiny blue fish and Emperors and a piscene plethora feeding off the food provided by the reef.

Like an aircraft studying the inhabitants of a wondrous world, you pass caves, and colours of cobalt blue-lipped oysters with one “eye”, and red dangly bits of organic ocean material, and bright yellow fish, and neon green or orange flashes of this and that as you suck the last vestiges of oxygen into your bloodstream and surface in the hot warm surface layer, a spume of heavily expelled breath followed by the first rasping injection of fresh oxygen. Relief.

Next morning, the cat cruises out into the big blue. We’re heading across the inside of the atoll: a vast crater fringed by its fragmented rim – a series of islands of different shapes and sizes. We set course 143 degrees (SSE ) for Blue Bowls. Marius, a building contracter, is a keen fisherman, and he unpacks his fishing gear, as do I.

Our skipper Brent is the son of the legendary Durban South Beach lifeguard Dux Coetsee, one of the buff beach boys that could count a host of robust blokes as part of its loose gang more than half a century ago in the 1950s – guys like Cliffy Honeysett, Leith and Derek Jardine, Jimmy Bell, Shorty Bronkhorst, Barry Edwards and Chooky Salzman.

They were joined later by junior members, such as Graham Hynes, Jimmy Whittle and Harry Bold, as well as Ray and Anthony Heard (my father in law). These were the originals of SA surfing, perhaps the first to properly begin to experiment with surfing, starting out as a way to get back to the beach during surf lifesaving drills and later – in concert and in parallel with the Australian influence – as a recreational pursuit beyond the conformity of lifesaving’s purpose.

Brent himself is no mug in the water. He is a waterman. A springbok swimmer when he was younger, he was also world surf lifesaving champion in 2006, winning the masters component of the worlds in Australia in 2006.

We cruise to Blue Bowls from early in the morning, crossing the atoll over the deeper waters, which tends to run to around 70 or 80 metres deep. This must, surely, be fishing heaven? Carlos tells us about the fish they caught on a previous trip. We break out the rods and the lures and begin trolling. But nothing. Again. We see strips of white like lines of surf, which induces a momentarily burst of excitement. They are mirages – sandbars shining in the hot tropical sun. And the surf? Needless to say we have surfed every day for the last six days.