Gold Coast, Australia

Just south of the aptly named city of "Surfers Paradise" is the traditional first stop of pro surfing's top tour. The booming east coast of Australia has filled up with apartment buildings in recent decades, but it's still home to some of the best surf beaches on the bottom side of the world. In the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are reversed, March is late summer. On the sands south of Brisbane, it's "slip-slap-slop" time: slip on a shirt, slap on a hat and slop on some sunscreen. The opening event of the world tour has been held in a variety of Gold Coast spots, from Kirra to Coolangatta. But when the rest of the coast is flat, the surfers head down to Snapper Rocks, where a bend in the beach and a jetty form a perfect wave-making machine when they're a foot higher than anywhere else for miles around. Along with surfing, summer brings the famous Australian lifesaving games, with long-distance swimming and the crazy crashing of dory boats making their way through the waves. The area is a popular summer vacation spot, with many high-rise condos for rent, along with a slew of hotels, motels and cheap seafood

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	Clark admits to a healthy fear of the voyage, but every time she weighs anchor, she overcomes one of the main obstacles to making big dreams come true: the flotsam and jetsam in your own head.
	Their route continues from Panama to the Galápagos Islands, across the Pacific Ocean to the Tuamotu Islands and Tahiti, on to New Zealand, through the Coral Sea, along the southern edge of Java and Sumatra to Madagascar, and around the Cape of Good Hope.
	He had a similar dream—and a boat—but at 83 was looking to sail vicariously through a younger adventurer. He became her chief sponsor. Clark's dad chipped in as well, and she suddenly found herself captain of a 40-foot (12-meter) sloop, Swell.
	On January 30, 2006, Clark, accompanied by friend and photographer Switzer, embarked for points known and unknown.
	For six months she crewed on a mega-yacht, then a sailboat, cruising the waters off Mexico and Central America. Then, while mixing drinks at a dock party in Santa Barbara she met Barry Schuyler, a founder of the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum and UCSB's environmental studies program.
	Since the fifth grade, Clark has been sticking pins in a world map to mark ports of call for an epic global voyage. Her father, Russell, a lawyer and sailing enthusiast, raised his three kids aboard the family's ocean RV, Endless Summer, a Gulfstar 50. While a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she had the boat to herself and used it to ferry friends to breaks off the Channel Islands.
	Honing her own board skills on these safaris inspired her with a new purpose: to circumnavigate the globe in search of the world's best breaks. "By land, surfers have scoured a good portion of the world's coastlines, but by boat there are still so many waves to be found," she wrote to me later via e-mail from her onboard laptop. Clark trained seriously for the mission.
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