It is five in the morning when Allan arrives at the beach. No coffee, no particular warm-up. He sits on his upturned board and watches the sea for twenty minutes before even touching it.
“I watch the sets. I count the waves. I see how the water moves across the bank.” He says it simply, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Allan has been surfing at Siargao since the age of eight. He is now thirty-two. In twenty-four years, he has seen the island transform — the resorts, the influencers, the direct flights from Manila. He has seen Cloud 9 go from a local spot to an international destination. He has seen people he doesn’t know explain to him how to surf waves he knows better than they do.
What remains
What hasn’t changed is the water. “Water doesn’t lie,” he says. “People change, prices change, tourists change. The wave stays the same.”
His technique is hard to describe because it isn’t spectacular. No aerial manoeuvres, no rotations. He surfs close to the wave, inside it rather than on top of it. He finds the place where the swell has the most energy and stays there, for as long as possible, with an economy of movement that looks like laziness and is actually something else.
“My father taught me never to fight the water. Work with it, not against it. That applies to surfing, and it applies to everything else.”
Transmission
Allan began teaching a few years ago — not in a surf school, not with a certified programme. Friends, at first. People who came to Siargao and wanted to learn differently.
What he transmits is not a style or a technique. It is a way of being in the water. Patience. Observation. Humility before something greater than oneself.
“I can’t teach you to surf in a week. But I can teach you to look at a wave. And if you really know how to look at it, you start to understand.”
The sea is now full of light. Allan picks up his board, walks into the water without looking back, and disappears into the golden reflections of the Pacific.