VANUATU ISLAND

Vanuatu is a Melanesian island nation, which occupies the islands of New Hebrides. It has maritime borders with the Solomon Islands in the north of the French territory of New Caledonia, and the Fiji Islands to the east. The capital is Port Vila.

The first island in the Vanuatu group to be discovered was the "Island of the Holy Spirit" in 1606 when the Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, saw it and thought it was a southern continent. The Europeans did not return the islands until 1768, when the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville rediscovered the islands.

In 1744, Captain Cook named the islands the New Hebrides, a name that lasted until independence of the archipelago. It was in the nineteenth century that both Catholics and Protestant missionaries arrived in the islands. Settlers have also arrived in search of land for cotton plantations. When international cotton prices collapsed, the plantations were replaced by coffee, cocoa, bananas, and most successfully the coconuts.

HISTORY OF SURF

It is not known exactly when surf was born , but it is known this practice of gliding over the waves has long been practiced by the Polynesians, who settled them practically all the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the Americas Pacific coast.

Early reports say that surfing was introduced by the Polynesian Tahiti King in Hawaii. Other reports indicate that long before the Hawaiians, ancient Peruvian peoples used already a kind of canoe, made of reeds, to glide over the waves. The first report about this sport was made by the navigator James Cook, who discovered the islands of Hawaii and saw the first surfers in action.

They used originally wooden planks to slide on the waves. The boards were manufactured by the users who believed that to make your own board gave them all the positive energies, and to practice the sport freed themselves from negative energies. However, the early practitioners of this sport believed that their practice was in fact a cult of the spirit of the sea in their original culture.