All photos: Pablo Jimenez

It's not easy for Mataveri to break and it's not easy to surf it either, but once it does, turning your back on it is impossible (at least if you're one of the surfers on this list).

Nico Vargas arrived from the continent with Nano Zeggers and Uti Araki received them after telling them that they should travel to the islands, the prognosis looked very encouraging.

The day marked long and tubular four-meter left breaks with perfect conditions at the Mataveri point.

They went for the water and the result was magical.

As Nico Vargas himself described it: “I am very happy to have made that trip. It happened overnight, Nano called me on a Saturday night to tell me about the possibility of going, that he couldn't find a ticket for Sunday and that we were leaving on Monday morning.

It was the first time I was going to race Mataveri, the two previous times I had gone to Rapa Nui I had never been lucky enough to have a breaking wave.

The only bad thing was that we arrived on Monday night, super late, we slept little and the next day was the peak of the swell and the waves were a solid four meters and obviously I was a little scared because I had never gone in and with long boards.

I was using a Doc Lausch that I had bought two days before the trip and it worked perfectly. The next day when the sea went down a bit I went down with a 7.

The experience was incredible, the wave is amazing, the place, the energy, everything is incredible in Rapa Nui. It is very different from many other places.

In addition to the good vibes of the people, I have many friends there and my dad too and he is very well-liked. So the people there are always giving you good vibes.

Thanks to Uti too, who helped us out and gave us the report to go.

I am super happy to have gone and to have managed to get a couple of incredible photos, a good surf video with the Stoked team, and the experience will last forever and we will hope that it can be repeated sometime.”

This is how Nano Zeggers, the organizer of the trip, described his experience: "We got up early, we met up with the Uti who had the whole system, the rescue motorcycles and everything coordinated with Fibra who is one of the best rescuers and handles the motorcycle well, knows the place well, and just as he said, as we were heading towards the wave, we saw the giant sea and good wind.

We arrived and it was a good one, three meters solid, with a lot of water, a thick wave with a lot of force. It breaks very close to a cliff of stones. To get in you jump off a cliff of about four meters, The exit is right there, you have to climb that cliff but when the wave passes the height varies by about three meters so when the wave passes you are left hanging, the exit is quite strict, you have to do it quickly.

That day we were in the water almost all day. The wave depends a lot on the wind, which is very variable. There were times when the wind was better and times when it was a bit weaker, but it was constantly changing. Uti and Nico went for it, as did the locals, Hina, Mana, Hete, Lenti and Papo."

For his part, one of the best underwater photographers in the world, Pablo Jiménez, had the following to say about the trip: "The swim in Mataveri isn't that complex in itself, but there's a lot of moving water so it kind of takes you out of the impact zone. This is good because it's hard for a closed wave to fall on you because it can handle almost anything you throw at it, but it's bad because you'd like to get a little closer. But since there's so much moving water, it makes it difficult to stay in the tube as can happen in another wave.

Anyway, the water is exquisite so you float there and everything is fine. The fact that we had rescuers on jet skis is also good because it gives you confidence to push it a bit further. It also helps for entry and exit because you have to jump off a cliff to get in and then climb it to get out and hope that the series doesn't come in when you're climbing.

I went with only very experienced people in the tubes. I had been with Uti a few years ago on the island and I had seen how people know the wave and go headfirst. And Nico, I think it was the first time he had Mataveri and he did quite well, he got some really deep tubes. Not all the tubes were accessible, the conditions were a bit difficult in that sense, you had to choose well.

Nano has been surfing for many years and he got some really good tubes but I couldn't capture the best ones in photos, the best ones opened up below.

Finally, regarding the rainbow photo, it was the last day, we were kind of tired of so many sessions and we went to look at the waves and suddenly it started to rain hard and it got cold and we went to the car to have some mate and when the cloud passed, the rain stopped and left the rainbow. At that moment I told the guys to take the photos, some wild horses came, the series came out, it was like everything aligned."