WELCOME ON SURFARI!

This interview almost never happened. At the end of August, Shannon Payne-McIntyre sent out a MySpace bulletin from Indonesia, pointing her friends towards her blog. She wrote about being three months pregnant, teaching surfing to a group of Afulu village girls, and learning to build cement platforms around wells so that local women could fetch water more easily. She closed by musing on the beauty of the Hinako Islands, the great waves she was scoring, and her “Great times with good, new friends and epic memories!” And then she disappeared.
After weeks of unreturned MySpace messages, posts, e-mails, and phone calls, I got word from Shannon. She had been on the outer Indonesian islands on a boat trip, and was back on Bali. Then she disappeared again. Days later, she resurfaced. Foam was rushing to press when Shannon called from San Diego. She was jet-lagged and exhausted, yet ready to shed light on her Indonesian adventures.

Shannon Payne-McIntyre is a 33-year-old artist, surfer, vagabond, and mama. She grew up in Santee, an inland town in San Diego County. An area, she describes, as having been full of “Monster trucks and tumbleweeds.” At 16, she began to surf and landed a job at Sea World so that she would have an excuse to make the 40-minute drive to the beach.

At 18, she moved to San Diego to attend Point Loma University where she majored in art and scored great waves. She also met Shayne McIntyre at a surfers’ bible study. “He was a La Jolla guy,” Shannon said. “One night they had a band, a disco band. People were slam-dancing. He claims that I knocked him over but I don’t remember that. I remember seeing him there and thinking he was kind of intimidating. I thought, ‘That guy’s kind of cute, but he looks kind of scary at the same time.’ He was with a football-player guy that shoved one of my friends.” Their paths crossed again a few months later at a rave and they reconnected. “On our first date we surfed Wind ’n’ Sea and just became best friends after that,” Shannon said.

Soon after, Shayne taught Shannon how to shape boards. And as her senior art project, she painted some of her creations, and orders started pouring in! The gig was successful, but hard work, and didn’t allow for as much travel or surfing as she would have liked. Four or five years passed, she and Shayne were married, and she was struggling to get ahead.

Shayne’s mom was a flight attendant, and so she hooked Shannon up with an interview at American Airlines and Shannon was hired as a flight attendant. It was the perfect job for a surfer, and she and Shayne were able to fly around the world for free, but everything changed when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Shortly thereafter, the airlines didn’t need as many flight attendants, so Shannon took a two-year leave of absence but retained her travel benefits. This allowed her to focus on her art and also take surf trips with Shayne.

American Airlines flies all over the world—and so did Shayne and Shannon. From India to Russia to Oman, they were jet-setters of the surf set. Shayne had a video camera, so they began to film their travels and pretend they had their own surf/travel TV show. They would film each other surfing and then run up to the camera saying, “Welcome on Surfari!” When they came home, Shayne made a trailer and sold the series to Fuel TV. Fuel TV then licensed the show to National Geographic International and as a result, the couple was recognized all over the world by fans of the show. “At about the time my leave of absence was up, I became pregnant and then milked my maternity leave,” Shannon said. After that, she never went back.

The McIntyres have produced three years of On Surfari. “Shayne is more business-oriented and organized, and I am more artistic and go with the flow,” Shannon said. “I kind of think of myself as creative director/coproducer, picking out music—created by Chad Farran—and making sure we get the cultural shots. Surfing is a thread throughout the show but we try to make it appeal to non-surfers as well. We include a lot of cultural things about each country we go to.” After each trip, Shayne gets home and hits the edit bay, taking two to three weeks to complete post-production before handing in the episode to be aired.

Not surprisingly, they found a new place to call home, through their travels. After 15 years of living in a killer ocean-view studio in Point Loma, they decided to base themselves abroad. “Southern California is not the cheapest place to live,” Shannon said. “I was about to turn 30, I was pregnant, and I wanted to own a house somewhere. We had a job where we filmed for National Geographic International. I hadn’t heard much about Puerto Rico. So we went there and just fell in love with the place and the people. It’s a U.S. territory, so you don’t need a passport. Homes by the beach are really affordable, and the waves are really good too. Plus we like the tropics.”

The McIntyres may call Puerto Rico home, but they roam the world when adventure calls, typically traveling four to six months each year. Their latest trip to Indonesia was a grand adventure. They were there filming On Surfari and helping out with several different organizations. For the first two weeks, they were in the Hinako Islands on the Indo Jiwa boat with Christian Surfers, filming for a DVD that will accompany The Surfer’s Bible. The tour with the boat is called Holidays With Purpose. The group toured and surfed the outer islands of Nias, and in the days between surfing, worked with local villages.

“My favorite day was teaching surfing to kids who were traumatized by the tsunami,” Shannon said. “All the kids from those villages had experienced the tsunami, so a lot of them were afraid of the ocean. The boat captain said he hadn’t seen many of those kids smiling and having fun in a long time, so it was really rewarding in that way.”

Holidays With Purpose and LEAP (Local Empowerment Assistance Project) were created by Australians Ruby and Channa Senaratne. Profits from the Holidays With Purpose boat trips are funneled back into the local community, and the boat trip is less expensive than most. “It was really one of the coolest trips I’ve been on,” Shannon said. “For anybody that wants to go on a boat trip in Indonesia, it’s so rewarding. Some days the surf isn’t totally epic, and then what are you gonna do—just sit on the boat and hang out? Instead of doing that, you get to interact with the villages and hang out on land and help the people.”

After two weeks on the boat, she met up with her parents in Bali before heading out to Sumba. “Sumba is an amazing place that puts you back in time,” Shannon said. “There is an organization there called the Sumba Foundation that is dedicated to both stopping malaria and bettering the health and lives of the local people. We visited several clinics and villages, watched exciting traditional events, and enjoyed the surf everywhere we went.”

Shannon said that the Sumba Foundation runs three to four clinics that take blood samples from people, study the blood under a microscope, and can determine in one hour if a tested person has malaria. She learned that, for 20 cents (10 cents for children), a person can be administered a Chinese herb that makes them feel better within 24 hours. Yet people are dying of malaria in Indonesia due to lack of money and access to such treatment. The Sumba Foundation aims to eradicate malaria, known in the area as the “poor man’s disease.”

Being three months pregnant with a three-year-old in tow while surfing reefs off Indonesian islands is pretty hardcore, but Shannon is an adventurous soul. Further, it was also not the first time she had been to the Hinako Islands. Before Shayne and Shannon were married, they were already surf nomads and, coincidentally enough, it was on a nomadic trip to the Hinako Islands that their future as husband and wife was sealed.

“This past trip was the first time I’ve been back to the Hinako Islands since he proposed to me there,” Shannon said. “He carved me a little wooden coconut shell ring. We were in a secluded lagoon area, and he said, ‘I have something for you.’ There was a small blue piece of coral and I lifted it up, and underneath was the little coconut shell that he had carved. It was cool ’cause we were the only two on the island—everyone else had gone to another island for church or something. So it was a really big deal.” But just days before the proposal, the couple had become stranded at sea for three days on a small fishing boat/surf charter. A sail and mast were eventually constructed out of a rain tarp and a floorboard, and the boat and its occupants found their way back to Nias.

“Some days the surf isn’t totally epic, and then what are you gonna do—just sit on the boat and hang out?”

Just before Indo, Shannon and Shayne had a wedding to attend in Washington state. Being true to their nomadic nature, they went all-Kerouac style and hit the road, stopping at surf shops up and down the coast, opening new accounts for Shannon’s art, and meeting new people. They enjoyed discovering hidden beach towns through California up into Oregon and ending in Washington, all while promoting Shannon’s 11” x 14” prints of colorful, playful, travel- and surf-oriented originals, which are sold to shops at affordable prices and are carried in over 120 locations.

Shannon’s lifestyle may seem like a dream to some, but she encourages other girls to get out there and see the world. “Before Shayne and I had sponsors or jobs traveling, he was a busboy and I worked at a flower shop, yet we still traveled a lot,” Shannon said. “We would work consistently for three or four months and then save every penny towards traveling.” Her advice is to save your money, go where the dollar is strong, and have no fear. “There are beautiful people everywhere you go,” Shannon said. She feels it is important to follow your dreams, wherever they come from and wherever they may lead…

- words by Kristie Griffith