We’ve been driving for 14 hours straight. Just as we’re about to give up on surfing for the day, Whitehead spots the fluorescent lines of whitewater squiggling into a bay. Ouhilal stops the car on the roadside.

“Yeah, that’s surfable,” he says. Whitehead jumps into the backseat and rustles through the nest of wetsuits. Minutes later, he vanishes into a thicket of thorny bushes and bounds down the snow-and-moss-covered rocks that lead to the beach.

By the time Ouhilal and I make it to the clearing, ten minutes later, Whitehead is paddling for his first wave, a neck-high point break that lazily arches its back along an exposed black-rock reef and then catapults him down a wall of glassy water. I watch as he rides a few feet in front of me, the wave’s face reflecting the crescent moon before it shoots him into inky blackness.

For this session there are no cameras, no poses, nothing to prove. We’re just three people floating in the Arctic Ocean, surfing a wave that’s been breaking alone for tens of thousands of years. We’re the first to feel its shape, trace its movements, be a part of this big, marvelous, living thing. An hour later, as we pull ourselves from the water and retrace our steps back to the van, everyone is smiling. Whitehead names the break Broken Hearts, after a local Ballstad girl who shirked his advances last week. “To me, that makes it all worth it,” says Ouhilal. “To do this—it’s a very special thing.”

Below are some pictures taken by Yassine Ouhilal as well as a movie he produced about the expedition. Well worth it to watch.

Sources: News.com and Outside Online