Like a penguin, Sandi Slamet dove under the three-storey-high wave. He vanished for a moment, then surfaced again, his body arched. The wave rose up under his board, forming the curled-over crest known as a barrel. He rode in this tunnel for eight seconds. "Yeeees, I defeated it (the wave)," he called out in his uniquely accented Balinese-Sundanese English.

Sandi's feat drew a round of applause from other surfers sitting astride their boards in the o