The Story of Island X and Scoring Alaska's Best-Kept Secret.
A crew of intrepid explorers discover coldwater perfection along the inhospitable Bering Sea
Photos and words by Mark McInnis
The story of Island X is one of those stories that is still hard to believe. Ben Weiland and I had been friends and colleagues for a long time and had always dreamed of doing a trip to somewhere truly undocumented in the surf realm. We had a few ideas and would randomly talk about this spot or that spot, but we never teamed up on a trip until Ben received a handful of images from Jeremy Sterling, a Washington-based scientist, of a small island in one of the world’s most inhospitable locations: The Bering Sea.
The photos were beautiful and the waves seemed legit. But anybody that’s been around the block in the world of surf knows that a photo can tell a thousand lies. What looks like a perfect wall could just be a peeling closeout. That said, all the other variables were there so we decided to go check it out.
When we were deciding who to invite on the trip, Ben and I agreed that this trip should be about friendship, travel, and being somewhere none of us had ever been. We just wanted to be with our buds in a really obscure location. So, we invited three surfers we knew could handle pumping surf (or, if things didn't pan out for us, three weeks of getting skunked): Josh Mulcoy, Noah Wegrich, and Pete Devries. We had all traveled together at length before the Island X excursions and felt comfortable being together no matter what the Bering threw at us.
In October 2019, we all met in Anchorage and took a three-hour flight in a prop plane to a small little island in the middle of nowhere. When we landed, onlookers were confused. We had so many surfboards and did a massive shop in Anchorage, so we had an obscene amount of food to keep our bellies full for three weeks. It was quite the scene, but at least we were prepared.
That trip laid the foundation of our knowledge about Island X. We scored a fun left point and had a couple of good, albeit small, beachbreak days. But we didn’t get the types of waves we had seen in Jeremy’s photos. When we got home, we immediately knew we had to go back.
We finally returned in December of 2021, during the dead of winter–not exactly a friendly time to fly from Anchorage to the Bering. Two of our flights were cancelled, and one flight we were able to board had to turn around as ice was accumulating on the pilot’s windshield. We were stranded in Anchorage and stressed to the max as we thought the trip was a total loss.
Ben and I stayed at the airport for hours trying to figure out a solution. Our only option was to charter a flight the next day, the only day that had a good weather window. After we secured a plane, we landed on a snow-covered Island X the next day.
The Island looked so different covered in a fresh blanket of white snow. We unpacked and got situated, not knowing what was in store for this trip, but I think the images speak for themselves. We scored. We got the left bigger and better than ever, the beachbreaks were pumping, and we stumbled upon one of the craziest setups I’ve ever seen: a perfect barreling right slab on the low tide that turned into a running left tube on the high tide. I’ve never seen anything like that wave, and I don’t think any of the guys had either.
