This is a story about a man and woman with a motorcycle and surfboard, who together took an extraordinary surf trip around half of the world. This story is about how to make dreams come true.
For five years, Gary Conley had been daydreaming of a surf trip that would take him back to Africa. The empty lineups and draw of adventure never stopped tugging at him after two previous trips to the continent. At age 37, he was in the honeymoon stage of a new relationship and worked a good job in Santa Cruz. Yet he saw that if he kept going in these directions, he may never fulfill his dream. While his friends were building careers and families, Conley decided to leave it all because he felt he had to.
“Planning is fun, but you can do it forever,” Conley said. “The hardest part is leaving. But the odds are, you’re not going to regret it.”
When his new girlfriend, Jamie Riggs-Nagy, asked one night where he would go if he could be anywhere, Conley modestly replied that he dreamed of driving the west coast of Africa on a motorcycle with his surfboard. A half hour later, it came out that he had actually already booked his ticket. Riggs-Nagy immediately thought it sounded like a great opportunity to travel, and the two began scheming.
For 10 months, Conley would ride his Suzuki DR 650 — dubbed Dyna Rae — down the entire west coast of Africa and surf. He found some of the most fantastic waves in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gabon and Angola. In those countries, he encountered about 15 surfers, total. He also learned how many ways his surfboard rack could break.
“No amount of testing can tell you how thousands of miles on rough tracks will keep your board on. Eventually, I broke every part of the rack. The board survived.”
The board was a custom-made, 5-foot, 11-inch, high-volume creation by local shaper Ward Coffey.
“I needed something short enough to fit on the motorcycle, but higher buoyancy to handle bigger waves,” Conley said.
The name of Conley’s travel blog, bugsonmyboard.org, comes from the paste of insects that would collect on his stick while it rode in open air.
Daydreaming conjures up the most glorious settings we can imagine ourselves in, like scoring peeling barrels for days and seeing the world from a motorcycle. Conley had those dreams and, ultimately, fulfilled them. He quickly found that the most unexpected yet incredible part of the journey was the connection he made with people along the way. From welding his bike, to feeding him, to warning him off of camping in the nighttime path of wild camels, Conley and Riggs-Nagy were blown away by the kindness of strangers.
“The thing that stood out the most, was how immediately kind and helpful everyone was when we found ourselves in a tight spot,” said Conley.
One of the greatest challenges to the trip was figuring out how to get a visa to cross the next border. Many countries in Africa require that U.S. citizens obtain their visa in the U.S., but they are only issued for short periods of time. Even if he had gotten them all before Conley left home, they would have expired before he needed them. A lot of luck meeting the right people ultimately made the trip continue on.
Once Riggs-Nagy joined him, they continued together on Dyna Rae up the east coast of Africa, back into Europe, through Siberia and Mongolia into China and finally to Southeast Asia for the next year and a half. Though they ditched the surfboard, they continued to search for waves and made fast friends when they came to a surf break to borrow gear. They surfed in the Arctic Circle of Norway, the Mediterranean in Israel and the South China Sea.
“Everybody asks how we do it,” Riggs-Nagy said about taking a trip of that length. Conley’s answer to that is simple: compromises.
“We wanted to do it more than anything else,” Conley said. “More than having a house, more than building a career, so there were some unhealthy years of obsessively saving.”
Riggs-Nagy explained that travel on a motorcycle is a cheap way to go, and the couple cooked a lot of beans and rice and camped whenever they could.
“I think people have a lot of reasons (why they don’t pursue trips like this) but I think it boils down to fear of the unknown,” Riggs-Nagy said. “But most (foreign) people are just like us. They’re curious about anybody different.”
A couple months after returning home, Conley got word that his old job would be open again and they wanted him back. As luck would have it, he stepped right back in where he had left off two years earlier.
“You have to be willing to trade that uncertainty of not having a job when you get back,” Conley said. “The risk of not going felt bigger than the risk of going.”
Haven Livingston, an avid whitewater kayaker and surfer, writes a monthly column on water sports for the Sentinel. Send feedback and story ideas to her at: sports@santacruzsentinel.com
