For years there have been rumors running around about how the surf industry had squashed releasing Sea of Darkness, Michael Oblowitz’s documentary on the founding of G-Land—the story of Mike Boyum, and the radical drug smuggling culture that more or less built the surf industry, and perpetuated countless discovery missions throughout Indonesia in the ’70s and ’80s, and launched the career of Captain Martin Daly of the famous Indies Trader.
Sea of Darkness won awards at pretty much every festival it was submitted, earned a Surfer Poll Best Documentary, and then swiftly vanished from public view, early screeners left to circulate on the parking lot black market. Many thought major players in the surf industry—some of the major brand’s founders and CEOs, who were involved in the film’s narrative to varying degrees of incrimination—had shut the film down, bought up the whole project and buried it.
